Pronghorn Antelope Hunting

Now this story was handed down to me from my grandfather by way of my uncle.

When my grandfather was younger, one of his jobs was to get meat for the haying crew that stayed at the ranch during the peak time of harvesting the summer hay.

When he was nine he would go out and flag those antelope in so close that he could shoot them in the head with a 22 short cartridge. How he did this was neat in its own way. He would get around the horses and when one of them was peeing he would catch the urine in a jar. He would take this with him when he went out looking for meat in the fields.

When he found the antelope, he would find a patch of bunch grass and pour the jar out on the ground in a circle around the bunch grass and sit down in the circle. He then would wave his hat in the air, about every five or ten minutes, until they were in range.

A few years back I drew an archery antelope tag for a unit close to my home in Eastern Oregon.

The year before I harvested one with a rifle, so I thought, what the heck, let's give it a try. Now this was the most challenging hunt that I have ever taken part in.

I hunted 15 days of an 18 day season and never launched an arrow. I tried everything that anyone thought might work and the one thing I came up with is this; anything that you try to do, you need to double it.

If you spot and stalk, go twice as slow.

If you sit in a blind, sit twice as long.

So for my first plan, my father and I set up a blind beside water and waited for them to come in. As I was scouting one waterhole I turned around just in time, to see my father peeing on a corner of the water tank. He looked at me and said "what". I said "well you just eliminated this spot".

At the next waterhole, I dug a ground blind and was waiting for my prey the next morning. I didn't take anything with me, no water,no food, not even a book to read to pass the time. So, around 1:30pm, I couldn't take it any longer and headed out. When I was back at the ATV I looked back and to my dismay, the antelope were almost at the same place where I was at twenty minutes ago.

The next time I went out with my father and my nephew scouting for more antelope we found a big buck, I mean a really big buck.

So I made my plan and the next morning at 4:00am, I was heading to that spot. My plan was to set up a blind in a wash.

Up wind of the blind I put up a decoy that I had made, and in front of the decoy I put a flag. Trying to make a scene that looked like another buck was checking out the other big bucks territory.

The first thing that I learned is that there was no reason for me to get up so early, because those antelope were not up then either. I looked and looked for that buck and finally around 9:30 am I saw him looking at my set-up from a distance.

Ten minutes later he started coming in. Now I had to get him within 70 yards and I had a bush that he needed to pass to be in my killing zone. I started to get a crossing wind. Everything was going my way I thought...Now that wind started to wave the flag, and at the same time it gave movement to my decoy and the buck started coming faster.

Then for no reason , the buck stopped so fast that you could see the dust boil up from under his feet. He stopped too far for me to shoot. He shook his head a turned around and bolted, he was gone.

I sat back and tried to figure out what could have went wrong. I looked at my decoy and found the answer. When the wind added movement to it the movement caused the head to fall off of my decoy.

We never saw that big buck again.