Mule Deer Hunt

This was a hunt for mule deer on the McGregor military gunnery range south of Alamogordo, New Mexico in October of 2001. Just my brother-in-law and I went on this hunt, him escorting me since you need a military I.D. to get onto the range. For this hunt I was carrying my Browning Model 78 falling block rifle. It is chambered for the sweet .300 H&H Magnum cartridge (this was when I was in my hyper-speed phase). I was shooting a 180 grain X-Bullet at real close to factory .300 Weatherby Magnum velocities. This required pretty much full charges in the cases (which I don't recommend that anyone ever try). This was possible only after a quite a bit of load development and due to the massive strength inherent in the falling block action. Again, don't try this at home.

The hunt was a normal New Mexico hunt. We used my brother-in-law's vehicle (affectionately known as the "Snow Shark", but that's another story) to move from one likely area to another. Once at a prospective area, we would work through it on foot. The hunting was hot and dry with absolutely no deer in sight. As a side note, whenever my brother-in-law says he "knows where the deer are", which he did, you might as well hang up your rifle. So anyway, lots of driving and lots of walking.

Some of the roads that we intended to use looked really good on the map. In reality nobody had driven on some of them for about a gazillion years and they continually disappeared in the brush and the tumbleweed. So in order to get to our destinations, a lot of the time we would have to get out and do some walking to find the road tracks. Since most of these spots looked to be fairly unproductive, deer wise, we left our rifles in the Snow Shark as we walked. As we were doing this later on in the day, I commented to him the it probably wasn't a good idea to leave the rifles in the vehicle as that upped our chances of seeing a deer immeasurably (while without them that is).

As these words were coming out of my mouth we topped a little rise and sure enough stand about 200 yards in front of us were three young bucks. I don't remember who saw them first, but we both froze at the same time. I'm not sure who was more surprised, us or the deer. We then did a very slow back-pedal out of there to retrieve our rifles from the Snow Shark. Luckily for us they were not only young bucks, but also not incredibly smart ones as they stayed put even though they had seen us.

Once we had retrieved the weapons we snuck back up to were we had previously seen the deer. As I have said, we were lucky because they hadn't moved at all while we had been gone. As a matter of fact, they were so unconcerned that we were able to confer as to who was going to shoot which one. That decided I settled down to try to get a good rest, unsuccessfully. With the scrub and brush in the way the best I could do was a kneeling position that left a bit of wobble in the cross hairs. My brother-in-law and I had decided to shoot at the same time. When he had finished his count down luckily my crosshairs were passing through the critter so I fired.

All I can say is that my deer absolutely crumpled. My brother-in-law's only took a step or two. The terrain was a little rough, but by pacing the distance off it appeared the range to the deer was right at two hundred yards. I was glad that it was a clean and quick kill. The Barnes X-Bullets did a wonderful job. For those who aren't familiar with them, they are a solid copper bullet with a small "X" shaped channel inside the nose of the bullet. On impact the nose separates into four "pedals" that curl backwards with fairly sharp edges. I have recovered numerous of these bullets that have hit clay backstops and without exception they expand to around double the original calibre while maintaining 92% - 95% of their original weight. Not bad performance in anybody's book.

Overall a fun but tiring hunt that was successful (or at least shortened) by three young inexperienced deer. The third one will probably be a little more careful next time!