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Opening day excitement builds

by Warren Illi
| October 24, 2024 12:00 AM

This Saturday is the opening day for the general rifle season for deer and elk hunting in Montana. This is the grandaddy of all opening days for the fall of 2024 hunting seasons. This is the day that probably over 100,000 Montana hunters will head to the forests, mountains and prairies of Montana to hunt for deer and elk.  

Hunting has lots of opening days for archery hunting, grouse season, mountain goats, duck season and many other opening days for a wide variety of game species. For the hunter of those species, there is anticipation and excitement. But nothing beats the excitement and anticipation of the general rifle season for deer and elk. For many hunters, it is like Christmas, birthdays, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving all rolled into one great day. This is the day that hunters can go forth and harvest a big game animal, perhaps put a trophy set of antlers on the wall and put many pounds of good meat in the freezer. How great is that? 

My first opening day occurred exactly 70 years ago this fall. When I was a young lad, I remember sitting in my dad’s garage when he and his hunting partners met to discuss the coming deer season in Minnesota. My dad was a house painter and always had a big stack of drop cloths in the corner of his garage. I would curl up on that stack of drop cloths, with the warmth of his wood stove providing the heat for those cool October or November days and listen to the hunters. There was very little planning done at those planning meetings, mostly just a retelling of hunting success stories from past seasons. I listened with great anticipation of when I would be old enough to join the deer hunt. 

Then I turned 16 and became old enough to buy a deer license in my home state of Minnesota. My dad took me deer hunting with a family of hunters that had a lake cabin 150 miles north of our home in St. Paul. That cabin became my hunting headquarters for the first two years of my deer hunting career. On the first day of that deer season, my dad and I combined to shoot a dandy mature whitetail buck. My dad wounded the buck, and it came running past me. I was shooting my dad’s old .348 Winchester lever action rifle. I had shot many grouse and squirrels with my .22, but was brand new to large caliber rifles and deer hunting.  

As the big buck ran past me, I fired a shot and the deer went down. I’d like to say I made a clean killing shot, but that would not be true. My shot was way off the normal heart-lung target area. Instead, my shot was high and too far forward. My shot knocked off both of the deer’s antlers. The deer went down. I think my shot essentially knocked the deer out. When my dad came running over to me, he asked if the downed deer was the big buck he shot at. I said no, the downed deer looked like big doe. We could see the downed deer and it had no antlers. When we walked down to the deer, we could see that it was a buck, but with only the stubs of the antlers showing. We searched the kill area, but could only find one of the antlers. That first day hunting success only added to my desire to be a hunter.     

Today and tomorrow, thousands of local hunters will head west on U.S. 2 to the millions of acres of public and corporate timber lands available for public hunting and to set up to their hunting camps. Other hunters will drive south and east into the Swan River and Seely Lake country to set up camp and hunt. Other groups of hunters will head east on U.S. 2 over Marias Pass to Eastern Montana for combined deer, antelope and/or elk hunts. The modern deer and elk camp will range from traditional cloth tents to $500,000 motorhomes with hot and cold running water, indoor toilet, hot shower and satellite TV.  

My hunting camps have ranged from camping in small nylon backpack type tents on the Alaskan tundra when caribou hunting or mountain goat hunting in the Swan Mountains, to the luxury of a motorhome on the prairies of Eastern Montana. Let me assure you that crawling into a small tent at dusk, soaking wet from head to toe, with no heat or campfire is not an overly pleasant experience. My current hunting headquarters is a like-new farmhouse on my Malta area farm with central heat, hot showers and satellite TV to watch and Cat-Griz football game.  

If you are camped out in Western Montana, don’t forget the rules for hanging deer or elk quarters in grizzly bear country. Game meat must be hung a minimum of 10 feet off the ground and four feet from any tree or wood pole a black bear could climb. Almost all tradition hunter campsites in Western Montana have old “meat poles” for hanging game, most of which don’t meet those meat storage standards.   

So hunters, enjoy the fantastic hunting opportunities we have in Montana. Continue the hunting traditions we humans have been doing and enjoying since the beginning of human history.