The big ones are still out there

by R. Thomas Funk
| March 31, 2016 7:00 AM

It was the night before the first day of school, and as per usual, I was still at school in the wee hours. Last minute preparations and changes had kept me there until 3:30 a.m. Finally, I couldn’t find anything else to do, so I shut off the lights, locked up the building and climbed into my car to drive home.

At the bottom of the school’s driveway, my headlights spilled over the road and out into the field beyond. There, momentarily blinded, stood three whitetail bucks. One was a fork-horn, one was five point, and the last one was a four point.

I braked to a stop, not believing what I was seeing. The fork-horn was just a typical fork-horn. The five point was rather light in mass, but sported unusually tall tines. The four point was a heart stopper. He had extremely tall tines, a wide spread and a heavy mass. Here was a deer for the record books.

I sat there for a while admiring the two larger deer, and then drove home.

A year later, I was still teaching at the country school, but now I lived just down the road. One September afternoon I mentioned to my son that I was going to change clothes, gather my bow, and cross the road into the Water Fowl Production Area below my house. There was an old crab-apple tree there that was an attraction to every four-footed wild ungulate in the area. My son went outside.

A few moments later he knocked on my bedroom door and announced that there was already a deer feeding under the tree. I finished changing and grabbed my binoculars.

Standing beside my car, I focused on the apple tree 300 yards distant.

There was a deer there. It appeared to have a large body. My waiting paid off when the deer raised its head. It was a five point, with unusually long tines. I watched him for a few minutes then began to study how to get close to him.

The first obstacle was the school track. I gathered my bow, and crept down to the dirt oval. From here on, there was no cover and I had to low crawl. It took just slightly longer than the last ice age to reach the far side of the track. I used the rail fence to obscure my approach to the road.

Once at the road, I had to stop and watch two directions for oncoming traffic and the deer in the field beyond. Timing was everything, because there was heavy truck traffic due to a logging operation going on and the deer would raise his head frequently and without warning. I did not want to find myself the main course in a road kill feast.

I finally slid into the barrow pit on the far side and crawled to the fence marking the boundary of the Production Area. Here I was stopped. I have to admit that whoever built that fence did a terrific job. The barbed wire was so tight, I could not crawl under or through it, and going over it was out of the question.

I followed the fence and got as near as I could to the tree and the deer. When he put his head down to feed, I stood up, drew the arrow back and placed the 40-yard pin dead center behind the shoulder. On the release, everything looked good. The arrow was flying true, and it appeared to be headed right where I wanted it to go; but I had misjudged the distance, and the arrow flew just below the buck’s brisket.

When the arrow rattled into the grass and rocks, the buck launched into the air, turned and disappeared into the tall grass. I never saw him alive again.

A few weeks later, one of my co-workers related how she and her husband were driving home after dark in a drizzling rain the night before. They were driving next to the track in front of my house when a large buck jumped the fence and landed on the roadway just in front of them. They stomped on the brakes, slowed but still hit the deer, knocking it down. It slid a short way on the wet pavement, jumped to its feet, over the fence and leapt into the darkness. My co-worker remarked on how big the deer’s rack was.

Two weeks later, my neighbor and I went to investigate an odor wafting up over the roadway and track. What we found was the buck.

With permission from FWP to salvage the horns and my youngest daughter Teri’s help, I brought the horns to the Fish, Wildlife and Parks headquarters. The buck had grown from the first time I saw it. It was now a 5x6. The brow tines were 8 ½” x 9.” The G2s were 13 inches tall.

I asked the warden, who graciously took my photo with the horns, if they would be auctioned off. He said he didn’t think so. They would probably find a home atop the agency’s mechanical deer. It was the sort of trophy any poacher would certainly be tempted by.

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Big deer, and big fish are still out there. As summer approaches and fishing season gets underway, get out and try your luck.

The lake trout fishing contest will be starting soon on Flathead Lake, and Bitterroot Lake has an unwanted smallmouth bass fishery. The limit on smallmouth there is all you can catch plus one.

R. Thomas Funk is a resident of Kalispell who frequently writes about hunting and fishing for the Inter Lake.