THE KIMBER OPEN COUNTRY
We’d spent the morning making a concerted effort to cross a creek—swollen with the recent rains—to no avail. Although we sat on the near bank, glassing a mule deer buck and his trio of does on the far hillside, they might as well have been on another planet.
My pal, Mike Mattly, and I decided to pull up stakes and try another location: a deep series of gorges that just seemed to appear in the South Dakota terrain … the ones those mule deer like to haunt. As the old saying goes, I’d rather be lucky than good.
We’d barely stopped the truck—in fact, it wasn’t in “park” yet—when two bucks bounded from their beds. Mattly gave what amounted to an order.
“Run!”
And run we did. With a near-cliff in front of them, the deer had to break either left or right, and we took a gamble to head left. It paid off, because the larger of two deer, a big-bodied 3x4, had slowed down just long enough to allow me to send a 140-grain Hornady ELDX into his vitals.
