Post by zeus on Oct 9, 2013 16:57:29 GMT -5
In the spring of 1995, I was a senior in high school and I was sitting with my friend and his father discussing hunting. My friend’s dad has hunted all over the world but one of his first trips was a trip out west for antelope in Wyoming. I was telling him that I had been thinking really hard about trying to set up a trip but with the dates of the season and school, it wasn’t looking good. The three of us decided that afternoon that as soon as we were done with college a few years later, we would start applying for tags to make the trip. The start of my desire to chase the antelope began when I read a book written by Mr. Lee Jurras and Major George Nonte. There was a chapter in there that had a picture of Mr. Lee holding a 357 automag and an antelope that he shot at over 200 yards. That picture really lit a fire for handgunning an antelope and it eventually led to the conversation that I mentioned earlier with my friends. To make a long story short, I shot my handguns extensively while in college and began my handgun hunting at that time on the whitetail deer there in Mississippi. I knew that as soon as I finished with school, I was headed to Wyoming. Well, that was just one of many things that I have thought I “knew” over the years that eventually didn’t pan out as I planned. We finished school and applied several times for the area that we wanted to hunt and never were successful in drawing a tag. Then life took over and my company that I started in my spare time started taking as much time as my full time job and I just never did make it out to Wyoming. In the summer of 2007, I had the opportunity to meet my handgunning mentor Lee Jurras. It was during a trip to Kansas for a job interview. I had been talking with Mr. Lee and he invited me to visit he and his wife. I thought I looked at the map before I left KC but I probably didn’t because I “knew” it was just over by St. Louis….well, St. Louis was technically on the way and about halfway there. I had a great trip, they welcomed me into their home like they had known me for years and I just had a blast. It was incredible to see the photo album that had all of the original pictures from the first Outstanding American Handgunner awards banquet. To see all the guys you’ve read about in one picture sitting around talking in a hotel room was just really cool. I took my Handgun Hunting book with me and Mr. Lee signed it and when he opened the book, the picture that I had printed of his antelope that had been hanging by my loading bench for years fell out of the book and he looked it over, smiled and signed the back of it. That picture resides in my office now. But we talked about antelope hunting and such and discussed the possibility of a future antelope hunt out west in NM. That would have been a hoot and I even have ammo from SuperVel stored away if we were ever able to make the trip a reality. Shortly after that visit, I moved to Kansas and right away started putting in for an antelope tag. Every year, it was the same depressing envelope containing my refund minus a preference point charge. Until this year! I finally drew my VERY long awaited tag. They only issue 16 tags for this unit as it does not have lots of antelope. In fact, there are only an estimated 2,000 antelope in the entire state the last time I saw discussion of it from the Wildlife Department. In all the time I’ve spent in western KS over the past 10 years or so, I can only remember seeing antelope a couple of times. So, I knew that I wouldn’t go out and find a trophy and I was good with that because I was finally getting to go and chase the antelope.
The day finally rolled around last Thursday to make the trip out. The season last four days. Friday morning, Scott Ambler met me at my buddy’s house and we proceeded to go search for some goats. We had great luck if we were trying avoid finding antelope. There was a strange front roll in that morning and then the major front that evening so I think the weather just had things a little messed up. Over the course of the day, I covered around 325 miles in circles glassing different pieces of property and never saw a goat. Just about an hour before dark, we found 6 goats. There were 5 does and a buck but he wasn’t all that impressive. I had my trusty 309 JDJ and a 6.5 JDJ contender with me as well as my Model 29 4” gun that my friend’s had given me last spring carried in my Barranti floral carved shuck that accompanied the gun. What I found out that afternoon was that my buddy had been correct on all accounts when we had talked about handgun hunting in western Kansas. The antelope were all at 600 yards or farther and there is no good way to close the distance. If you’ve never hunted western Kansas, you will not understand but I will add a few pictures to help illustrate my point. What I have found over the last 7 years of deer hunting here is that hunting out west is very tough. It’s tough with a rifle and you are downright lucky if you connect with a handgun on most days. Due to some folks shooting from the road as they drive around, the animals out west are scared of anything with four wheels or two legs and are usually kicking up dust when you spot one. The terrain is flat as a pancake with no tall grass to slip through or ravines, rock ledges or formations or depressions/hills to cover your approach. When you get a shot in normal conditions, it will be stretched out and then to add insult to injury, the wind NEVER stops blowing. It is absolutely some of the toughest terrain that you will ever hunt which is really surprising since it is so flat but that is a major reason of the difficulty. There are never really good rest and the shots are typically very fast and unforgiving. I’ve been fortunate enough to connect most trips out but there were a few trips that I just was left to watch the deer and be happy with that. Most recently about 2 years ago when I watched a 190-200 class whitetail eat some brush for the better part of an hour before I just had to leave. He was about 200 yards out of my comfortable range and there was no good way to close the distance. He had the “high” ground and he didn’t get that big in that part of the country by being stupid so I just soaked up the view and called it a successful outing anyway. It’s not every day that you get to watch a deer of that size for that long.
Saturday, I changed my game plan and pulled out the rifle but kept my handguns with me just in case the situation presented itself in which I could employ a shortgun. It did come but unfortunately, I forgot I had the sixgun with me until about 25 minutes AFTER it was over. We spotted a really impressive antelope. From a mile out, you could see the size of his horns and it was easy to spot his horns with your bare eyes from 800 yards out. This was a massive horned antelope. The mass was so impressive it looked like they were 8” thick when he would turn to the side, his prongs were very impressive and his horns had a huge spread which really gave him a cool look. He was on a piece of property that is about 4 square miles of property that has no roads in or out, no two tracks, nothing but crops and a few fence lines. We walked for about 2 hours trying to close the distance, slowly but surely getting closer. What’s amazing is that even when you glass them at a mile, they are ALREADY watching you when you look through the glass. I closed the gap to 490 yards and they were getting really spooky and he began galloping back and forth herding the does up each time they would try to split off. I dialed in the 14 minutes of elevation I needed for this load and lined up for the shot on my sticks while sitting in the grass. The grass out there is really tall this year due to late rains but is still below your knees a few inches. I’m not that tall so that equates to short grass! When the crosshairs were nice and still, I eased into the Jewell trigger and felt the recoil. To my horror, I saw the shot go high a few inches over his back. I bolted the gun and rather than him run away from me, he ran straight to me. I watched him get closer and closer the entire time and could hear my buddy calling out the range as he was able to get readings. The last reading he called out was 97 yards and the goat came to a broadside halt. I squeezed the trigger and the gun clicked, I bolted, it clicked again, and then again a third time as he bolted off again. He passed me at about 80 yards as I was digging through dirt trying to find ammo to try again! At this time is when my brain had quit working. I never thought about the 44 sitting on my hip. It was a dream shot, under 100 yards with a broadside view! I was devastated, the gun ended up in the dirt to save the stock. I walked around for a few minutes trying to figure out what had just happened. I had waited 20 years to have a world class pronghorn in my scope at 100 yards only to have my equipment fail me in the only time I ever truly needed it to work! I had a random primer not pop at the range two days prior but thought it was possibly the bolt needing cleaned. We cleaned the bolt and the next trip to the range which was the day of this hunt and it worked perfectly. I felt that we fixed the problem and stupidly trusted it again. I chased that goat for the remainder of the day and never closed the gap again obviously. This antelope, I had no doubt would take the #1 spot for antelope in the state of KS which is 84” and change. This particular one would easily bump him for the spot. I crawled, walked, and ran about 6-8 miles that day trying to figure out how to close the distance. At dark, his group joined up with another group and I watched them from 700-900 yards out until it was too dark to see but just before dark, I saw our big goat split from the band and head off on his own. That made me nervous that I would not be able to see him the next morning.
We got there the next morning after I finished sighting in Warren’s 270 for my eyes and checking the adjustments for tracking and setting the baseline zero for the load we were using. We spotted him within 10 minutes of arrival. He was 300 yards from where we had last seen him. We crawled for about 2.5-3 hours through the grass and thorns and sand burrs only to ease up and see that he was farther away than when we started. I was exhausted and defeated and at that point wished I had shot the one I saw with 3 horns that was with the group that I had a chance at during the crawl. I told my buddy that it just wasn’t meant to be and that I wanted to leave him alone. I laughed and told Warren that I was now giving up on the winner and would settle for “the 2nd runner up in the 4H pageant” which was a line from a Toby Keith song that we heard on the way over that morning. So we made our way back to the truck and headed out to glass some more areas. In the process of this, we found some does that were not spooky, we drove to a nearby gas well and were able to just watch them at about 400 yards, that was fun but we moved on. We found another small band of about 12 goats with one buck in the group. We stopped just to look and they ran away before I could really get a decent look. I figure the last truck they saw probably popped off shots from the road, who knows. The antelope are not popular with the farmers as they are believed to spread bindweed in the fields which squeezes out crops so I imagine plenty of them are shot at year round which does not help their spookiness. When they ran off, I laughed and told Warren to go back to the doe field and I’d fill my tag on a doe because he and his family really like antelope and I figured we could at least put some meat in a cooler for them.
On the way over, I spotted a lone antelope at a mile standing in a wheat field. At that distance, we could easily see he was a buck without binoculars. I told Warren to go one down the road as I didn’t think we could get close enough. He is more stubborn that I am some days so he made the executive decision that we would try one last time. He really wanted a buck in the truck! To make a long story shorter, we closed the distance to about 470 yards, I dialed the scope in for 475 yards and adjusted for wind. The wind was supposed to be better that day but it was holding pretty steady at 30-35 mph with some really impressive gusts that were much worse. I was trying to get the wind to my back which is not ideal obviously for scent reasons but I was hopeful that he wouldn’t spook and the less full crosswind I had to contend with the better at that distance. I had a good hold and the scope was steady so I waited for a lull in the wind, it didn’t come so I started easing into the trigger. At the shot, he trotted and with the angle of the field and grass between us, we lost sight. I was devastated as the hold and shot were right, I was certain. As we closed the distance to 225 yards, I could see his horns, he had made about 6 steps and laid down. I shot one more shot at 225 angling in front of the right hindquarter through the front and it came to rest under the hide in the front of his neck. He was down, we had finally connected and outlasted the HUGE list of errors that happened along the way. The first shot was about an inch lower than the centerline of the shoulder and had moved about 2.5-3 inches further back that I had adjusted for. The wind was at a little more of an angle that I had estimated in the hurried calculations for the shot.
He was a great antelope, he actually looked larger as we got closer which was a nice change from the typical “ground shrinkage” that we all know that can happen. Even as we got closer, he is still a good bit smaller than the one we really wanted but he’s a great 2nd runner up!
I will have the official score done before too long, it has the usual wait times but he’s right at the 80 mark. Maybe a little more or a little less but it will be very close. He definitely beats the 70 minimum that is required for the KS trophy book which is why they scheduled an official measurement in 60 days when I dropped him off at the taxidermist. That’s cool as it turned out but not what I was expecting. As my first antelope, I don’t care what it comes out to be because I worked hard for this little guy. It was a long time to wait but it was well worth it. I would have loved to have connected on the other one but it just wasn’t meant to be I guess
Below are a few pics of the antelope and the terrain to show what I’m talking about. In the pic with the old farmhouse, the house is just over a mile out and the big antelope is to the right of the house in the edge of the field watching me as I took the picture. They are below the tree in the middle of the other picture. The elevator that you see in the picture off to the right is just over 6 miles off. The ammo is the ammo that failed that day. You can see on a couple of them that I tried to fire 2 or 3 times. I have since bought several thousand Federal primers on Monday to get away from the CCI stuff in this rifle…..So in the end, I will not have made Mr. Lee happy taking the antelope with a rifle but considering the conditions, I’ll take it
Hope he isn’t too disappointed!
The only pronghorn I had seen at the time on Friday when we were cutting some corn at lunchtime. We had to run a couple of trucks to the elevator between hunts..
The day finally rolled around last Thursday to make the trip out. The season last four days. Friday morning, Scott Ambler met me at my buddy’s house and we proceeded to go search for some goats. We had great luck if we were trying avoid finding antelope. There was a strange front roll in that morning and then the major front that evening so I think the weather just had things a little messed up. Over the course of the day, I covered around 325 miles in circles glassing different pieces of property and never saw a goat. Just about an hour before dark, we found 6 goats. There were 5 does and a buck but he wasn’t all that impressive. I had my trusty 309 JDJ and a 6.5 JDJ contender with me as well as my Model 29 4” gun that my friend’s had given me last spring carried in my Barranti floral carved shuck that accompanied the gun. What I found out that afternoon was that my buddy had been correct on all accounts when we had talked about handgun hunting in western Kansas. The antelope were all at 600 yards or farther and there is no good way to close the distance. If you’ve never hunted western Kansas, you will not understand but I will add a few pictures to help illustrate my point. What I have found over the last 7 years of deer hunting here is that hunting out west is very tough. It’s tough with a rifle and you are downright lucky if you connect with a handgun on most days. Due to some folks shooting from the road as they drive around, the animals out west are scared of anything with four wheels or two legs and are usually kicking up dust when you spot one. The terrain is flat as a pancake with no tall grass to slip through or ravines, rock ledges or formations or depressions/hills to cover your approach. When you get a shot in normal conditions, it will be stretched out and then to add insult to injury, the wind NEVER stops blowing. It is absolutely some of the toughest terrain that you will ever hunt which is really surprising since it is so flat but that is a major reason of the difficulty. There are never really good rest and the shots are typically very fast and unforgiving. I’ve been fortunate enough to connect most trips out but there were a few trips that I just was left to watch the deer and be happy with that. Most recently about 2 years ago when I watched a 190-200 class whitetail eat some brush for the better part of an hour before I just had to leave. He was about 200 yards out of my comfortable range and there was no good way to close the distance. He had the “high” ground and he didn’t get that big in that part of the country by being stupid so I just soaked up the view and called it a successful outing anyway. It’s not every day that you get to watch a deer of that size for that long.
Saturday, I changed my game plan and pulled out the rifle but kept my handguns with me just in case the situation presented itself in which I could employ a shortgun. It did come but unfortunately, I forgot I had the sixgun with me until about 25 minutes AFTER it was over. We spotted a really impressive antelope. From a mile out, you could see the size of his horns and it was easy to spot his horns with your bare eyes from 800 yards out. This was a massive horned antelope. The mass was so impressive it looked like they were 8” thick when he would turn to the side, his prongs were very impressive and his horns had a huge spread which really gave him a cool look. He was on a piece of property that is about 4 square miles of property that has no roads in or out, no two tracks, nothing but crops and a few fence lines. We walked for about 2 hours trying to close the distance, slowly but surely getting closer. What’s amazing is that even when you glass them at a mile, they are ALREADY watching you when you look through the glass. I closed the gap to 490 yards and they were getting really spooky and he began galloping back and forth herding the does up each time they would try to split off. I dialed in the 14 minutes of elevation I needed for this load and lined up for the shot on my sticks while sitting in the grass. The grass out there is really tall this year due to late rains but is still below your knees a few inches. I’m not that tall so that equates to short grass! When the crosshairs were nice and still, I eased into the Jewell trigger and felt the recoil. To my horror, I saw the shot go high a few inches over his back. I bolted the gun and rather than him run away from me, he ran straight to me. I watched him get closer and closer the entire time and could hear my buddy calling out the range as he was able to get readings. The last reading he called out was 97 yards and the goat came to a broadside halt. I squeezed the trigger and the gun clicked, I bolted, it clicked again, and then again a third time as he bolted off again. He passed me at about 80 yards as I was digging through dirt trying to find ammo to try again! At this time is when my brain had quit working. I never thought about the 44 sitting on my hip. It was a dream shot, under 100 yards with a broadside view! I was devastated, the gun ended up in the dirt to save the stock. I walked around for a few minutes trying to figure out what had just happened. I had waited 20 years to have a world class pronghorn in my scope at 100 yards only to have my equipment fail me in the only time I ever truly needed it to work! I had a random primer not pop at the range two days prior but thought it was possibly the bolt needing cleaned. We cleaned the bolt and the next trip to the range which was the day of this hunt and it worked perfectly. I felt that we fixed the problem and stupidly trusted it again. I chased that goat for the remainder of the day and never closed the gap again obviously. This antelope, I had no doubt would take the #1 spot for antelope in the state of KS which is 84” and change. This particular one would easily bump him for the spot. I crawled, walked, and ran about 6-8 miles that day trying to figure out how to close the distance. At dark, his group joined up with another group and I watched them from 700-900 yards out until it was too dark to see but just before dark, I saw our big goat split from the band and head off on his own. That made me nervous that I would not be able to see him the next morning.
We got there the next morning after I finished sighting in Warren’s 270 for my eyes and checking the adjustments for tracking and setting the baseline zero for the load we were using. We spotted him within 10 minutes of arrival. He was 300 yards from where we had last seen him. We crawled for about 2.5-3 hours through the grass and thorns and sand burrs only to ease up and see that he was farther away than when we started. I was exhausted and defeated and at that point wished I had shot the one I saw with 3 horns that was with the group that I had a chance at during the crawl. I told my buddy that it just wasn’t meant to be and that I wanted to leave him alone. I laughed and told Warren that I was now giving up on the winner and would settle for “the 2nd runner up in the 4H pageant” which was a line from a Toby Keith song that we heard on the way over that morning. So we made our way back to the truck and headed out to glass some more areas. In the process of this, we found some does that were not spooky, we drove to a nearby gas well and were able to just watch them at about 400 yards, that was fun but we moved on. We found another small band of about 12 goats with one buck in the group. We stopped just to look and they ran away before I could really get a decent look. I figure the last truck they saw probably popped off shots from the road, who knows. The antelope are not popular with the farmers as they are believed to spread bindweed in the fields which squeezes out crops so I imagine plenty of them are shot at year round which does not help their spookiness. When they ran off, I laughed and told Warren to go back to the doe field and I’d fill my tag on a doe because he and his family really like antelope and I figured we could at least put some meat in a cooler for them.
On the way over, I spotted a lone antelope at a mile standing in a wheat field. At that distance, we could easily see he was a buck without binoculars. I told Warren to go one down the road as I didn’t think we could get close enough. He is more stubborn that I am some days so he made the executive decision that we would try one last time. He really wanted a buck in the truck! To make a long story shorter, we closed the distance to about 470 yards, I dialed the scope in for 475 yards and adjusted for wind. The wind was supposed to be better that day but it was holding pretty steady at 30-35 mph with some really impressive gusts that were much worse. I was trying to get the wind to my back which is not ideal obviously for scent reasons but I was hopeful that he wouldn’t spook and the less full crosswind I had to contend with the better at that distance. I had a good hold and the scope was steady so I waited for a lull in the wind, it didn’t come so I started easing into the trigger. At the shot, he trotted and with the angle of the field and grass between us, we lost sight. I was devastated as the hold and shot were right, I was certain. As we closed the distance to 225 yards, I could see his horns, he had made about 6 steps and laid down. I shot one more shot at 225 angling in front of the right hindquarter through the front and it came to rest under the hide in the front of his neck. He was down, we had finally connected and outlasted the HUGE list of errors that happened along the way. The first shot was about an inch lower than the centerline of the shoulder and had moved about 2.5-3 inches further back that I had adjusted for. The wind was at a little more of an angle that I had estimated in the hurried calculations for the shot.
He was a great antelope, he actually looked larger as we got closer which was a nice change from the typical “ground shrinkage” that we all know that can happen. Even as we got closer, he is still a good bit smaller than the one we really wanted but he’s a great 2nd runner up!
I will have the official score done before too long, it has the usual wait times but he’s right at the 80 mark. Maybe a little more or a little less but it will be very close. He definitely beats the 70 minimum that is required for the KS trophy book which is why they scheduled an official measurement in 60 days when I dropped him off at the taxidermist. That’s cool as it turned out but not what I was expecting. As my first antelope, I don’t care what it comes out to be because I worked hard for this little guy. It was a long time to wait but it was well worth it. I would have loved to have connected on the other one but it just wasn’t meant to be I guess
Below are a few pics of the antelope and the terrain to show what I’m talking about. In the pic with the old farmhouse, the house is just over a mile out and the big antelope is to the right of the house in the edge of the field watching me as I took the picture. They are below the tree in the middle of the other picture. The elevator that you see in the picture off to the right is just over 6 miles off. The ammo is the ammo that failed that day. You can see on a couple of them that I tried to fire 2 or 3 times. I have since bought several thousand Federal primers on Monday to get away from the CCI stuff in this rifle…..So in the end, I will not have made Mr. Lee happy taking the antelope with a rifle but considering the conditions, I’ll take it
Hope he isn’t too disappointed!
The only pronghorn I had seen at the time on Friday when we were cutting some corn at lunchtime. We had to run a couple of trucks to the elevator between hunts..
