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Home > Library > My Remington Country > Posting
MyRemington Country
Buck of a Lifetime
Submitted: Oct 26, 2009
October 2009 Eastern Oregon controlled buck season 2009 produced the biggest buck I’ll probably ever see in my lifetime. He measured 30 inches across his main beams, not including the stickers, was a 5 x 6, not including his brow tines. We have not had him officially measured yet but plan to. He is definitely going on the wall. I shot him with a Remington model 700 7mm magnum given to me by my father-in-law Bill. We hunt as a family with four or five of us. We can only get Eastern Oregon buck tags about every other year as it’s a lottery hunt. We had been discouraged with our area and had moved away due to private land holders locking up most of our access to the public land we hunt on. We just won’t pay to hunt on private property. I don’t believe that these canned hunts you see on TV are really hunting. You pay a fortune, at least it would be for me, and go sit in a blind overlooking a food source and wait for the buck they have picked out for you. That’s harvesting, not hunting. We hunt fair chase on private land. As such, we rarely see big bucks like the one I got this year. This year I told my father-in-law I wanted to go back to this unit and look at some new areas. I had purchased a Garmin eTrex Legend for Christmas last year and had been doing some major searching and plotting with my GPS and using Google maps and aerial photography in the area and had found some new ways to get onto public land. I was jazzed up pretty good. So the season finally gets here and away we go. The problem with hunting in Eastern Oregon is the dirt and dust. When it gets wet, it turns to the slimiest, slipperiest, snottiest goo you can imagine. It’s like trying to drive on grease. And we had rain and snow for the first two days of season which made getting to any of the spots I wanted to hunt impossible. Our second day of hunting we spent most of in camp trying to figure out where we were going to go. We have a saying in our camp. Tuesday is killing day. Hunting seasons in Oregon always start on Saturday. Our track record of hunting on the east side is that someone in camp always kills a deer on Tuesday, the fourth day of season. Some years it’s the first buck and some years it’s the last buck but we almost always kill a deer on Tuesday. After two days of rain and snow and three days of not seeing any antlers that were not hanging in a tree at someone else’s camp, we were at Tuesday’s hunt and we were finally going to some territory I had researched and wanted to get into. At first light we were on the trail in a Polaris Ranger side by side. A much more comfortable ride on these trails than my Ford Bronco. I spotted a group of deer on a hillside about 500 yards from the trail. I glassed them and saw a small fork horned buck. We stalked up the hillside and my father-in-law was able to make the shot. After about an hour we had him in the back of the Ranger. We took off down the trail thinking we might spot another small buck and then we would be done for the day. Everyone who hunts knows, when the shooting stops, the work begins. We hadn’t gone even a mile and this big buck just runs up out of a draw and crosses the road in front of us. My father-in-law was yelling “Buck-shoot-buck-shoot-shoot-buck-shoot” I was looking all over the place to find him, except right in front of us. Finally I made the connection and ran to a small burned snag for a rest. I made a long shot of about 400 yards with my 7mm magnum and hobbled this guy through the leg and abdomen. This made him turn down hill and back towards us. He ran into a draw that paralleled the road so I ran down the road and into the draw to see if I could catch up to him if he stopped. My father-in-law had moved ahead and spotted him sitting under a couple of trees and guided me to him where I made a clean kill shot from about 40 yards. As I walked up to him I thought to myself, his head must be laying on a branch or something. Then I got closer and realized that dead snag of a branch was his antlers. I thought to myself, “Wow, he’s a good sized deer”. As I got right up to him, all I could say was “Oh my God!; Bill, Oh my God; Bill, Oh my God” I repeated my statement several times as my father-in-law, Bill, made his way down to me and the buck. He asked me once, “What? Is he big?” “Oh my God” is all I could muster. I had only seen bucks this size on TV taken at ranches where they are left to grow this big before they are harvested. I never in all my life expected to find a monster this big on public land during hunting season in daylight hours. As Bill reached me and the buck, all he could muster is “Holy crap!” It took everything we had to get this guy into the back of the Ranger as we didn’t have a winch on it. We guessed it dressed out about 250 lbs. We looked like the keystone cops trying to get that big guy into the bed of the four wheeler, me trying to lift the body while Bill ran back and forth lifting the head and then the rump while we tried to get him high enough to roll him into the bed. Unfortunately, we had been hunting out of my Bronco for the first three days, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s where my camera was. We didn’t get any pictures in the field and I didn’t think about it when we got back to camp as we had a lot of spectators. The picture I submitted is on my way back home to cut him up and he’s in the back of my Bronco. That is the best picture I have of him so far. The next day I took my brother-in-law out to the same area where we saw another 5 bucks that morning. My brother-in-law is still trying to work through a bad case of buck fever so he missed the big one we saw that next morning, but he did get another little buck. I did want to note that I figured out a bit later that something had happened to my gun between the time I sighted it in the week before and hunting season because it was shooting a bit off. I am going to claim that’s why I didn’t drop him with the first shot. With the exception of one deer and one elk, everything I have shot at with my 7mm magnum has dropped dead in its tracks. It’s been my best hunting partner of all time. Thanks for the opportunity to share my story. I will probably never get another story like this one. Of course, one can always hope. Doug Barnett


   

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