billrquimby

Try Dixie Gun Works in Tennessee.

In my experience the weight of the projectile is more important than the caliber. Years ago I shot 20-25 whitetails in the Texas Hill Country (the limit was 4 per year) over seven or eight years with a .45-caliber half stock rifle I'd built from Dixie parts. My first few deer were shot with round balls with indifferent results. After having to chase one buck a country mile after hitting it I switched to hand-cast bullets. Although my barrel twist was made for roundballs, I had no problem dropping deer in their tracks up to 60 yards or so. I also borrowed from a friend an expensive English sporting rifle in .45-caliber that had been built by Alex Henry in the early 1800s and killed a bison in Colorado with one shot. I used a 500-grain paper-patched bullet at 1800-1900 fps, which is almost (but not quite) as powerful as my .458 Win Mag. I think you'll have fun with the .40, but if it were me I definately would choose the heaviest projectile you can. Forget roundballs. Bill

Holding tight is a common defensive tactic with all the whitetails races I've hunted, and a few individual mule deer. I can't remember how many times I've walked within a few steps of a whitetail, or jumped a buck I hadn't seen on my way to a buck I'd just shot. In my mind I've always compared whitetails with cottontails and mule deer with jackrabbits when it comes to holding tight . The late and great whitetail hunter John Doyle claimed that we should avoid eye contact at all costs when stalking a buck that thinks it hasn't been seen. Sometimes he even hummed and whistled softly when he approached a buck from an angle (never directly) that he'd glassed up. John knew what he talked about when it came to desert whitetails. Usually I don't see them until they jump up but I have walked up to within a few FEET of whitetails (and two different mule deer) that were laying flat with their chins on the ground. The minute I spotted them I could see panic in their eyes... they were up and away in an instant. Bill

Seems to me the Graham County Attorney is begging for someone or some group to sue the lady. It would be interesting if it were the Defenders of Wildlife to do so. Back in the 1980s DOW blocked a lot of roads in that area and didn't allow hunters access until its leadership changed. I don't know where today's roadblock is, but I assume it not only blocks the DOW property but it also denies access to the BLM's premiere hiking area. Bill

That's a beautiful buck! The deer I'm using with my signature also was a northeastern whitetail, but I shot it in Michigan. It completed my grand slam of North American whitetails. (The others were Coues from Arizona, northwestern from Wyoming, and Texas from Texas.) There was an even bigger buck in the area that I saw every evening just before it was too dark to see my nose. It also was a 4x4 (not counting eyeguards) but it stayed behind the trees about 200 yards off and never presented a good shot at its body. The night before I was scheduled to fly home I'd made up my mind to try to shoot it in the neck. I actually was watching the big buck when the one I shot stepped out into the open. It wasn't the four pointer I wanted, but it was OK. The outside spread measurement is 31 inches, which is identical to my best desert mule deer. Bill Quimby

Beautiful! I hope you draw a tag in that area. You've done your homework. After seeing your shots I know I'm going to put a trail camera outside my cabin! What type of equipment would I need to get shots that are magazine quality? Looking at all the trail-cam photos on this site it appears that I'd need to experiment with several lighting sources to get balanced lighting and color. Has anyone tried more than one flash for their trail cameras? Bill

Yes. I sold it to Petersen's Hunting. Other versions appeared in Safari Magazine (I was its editor/publisher) and the Tucson Citizen (I was its outdoor editor). That's the problem with us overage outdoor writers. We write about the same incidents over and over. Jack O'Connor (Outdoor Life's old gun editor for you who are too young to know who he was) must have shot the same desert rams in Sonora at least fifty times in print. I was lucky the West Phoenix hospital had a surgeon who hunted. He operated on me that night, installed a couple of steel plates, and sent me back to our camp in the Little Horns the next morning with a cast I could use as a rest for my rifle. I lost only a half day of hunting, hunted 12 more days and passed up several rams before taking mine. I've been reluctant to try using a high-lift bumper jack ever since! Compound fractures from dropping a truck on your arm are no fun. Bill

Hi Scott. I'm excited about my Argentina trip. I'll be hunting a brockett deer, a 45-pound animal that wears only little spikes, and a white-lipped peccary. It will be the 14th type of deer I've taken (if I do), but my main reason for going is to be able to say I've hunted on six continents before I got too old to do so. Hunting brocket deer and peccaries in Argentina isn't sporting in our sense of the word. They're hunted by driving around at night with a shotgun and a spotlight. As for a Unit 1 tag, the odds are vastly against me. It took me ten years to draw my last elk tag and it was in a unit that isn't well known for producing elk. (I took a nice bull totally by accident.) I've killed eight 6x6 bulls in Arizona, one in New Mexico and one in Mongolia over the past half century so it won't bother me if I don't get drawn. Bill

How many times have you applied for sheep, buff, bear and still counting or have you already got it.....etc I applied 39 consecutive years for a sheep tag before drawing it in the early 1990s. I broke my arm the second day of the hunt but shot a nice ram 12 days later while shooting my 7 mag with one arm. It completed my Big Ten of Arizona. I had nine of those ten before I was 30. Except for a mule deer tag I drew last year it's been three years since I drew any type of tag. bill quimby

I never counted but I think it was more than 20. My first deer at age 12 in 1948 was a mule deer, as were the next two or three. I then went a very long spell of hunting nothing but desert whitetails. My best buck's antlers scored 105 B&C net. I shot it in the Baboquivaris in about 1970. I really wasn't a trophy hunter, though. I'd shoot the first legal buck I saw. Five or six were good ones; but I'd have to say most were not. Like Bret, I like to eat deer.

Unit 1 bull elk (fat chance!). (I've trips to Argentina and Wyoming planned during the other hunts.)

One thing I forgot to mention: We used to cut off a whitetail's tail as a matter of course when we carried them the way I described. That way we didn't wave white flags precisely behind our heads. Back a hundred years ago when I was Bret's age, though, I used to simply stick a deer under each arm to balance the load and dance (the samba was my favorite but I also tried the tango a few times) all the way back to my truck. Bill Quimby

Years ago we didn't have pack frames. There were World War !! military surplus packboards that some people used but they weighed nearly as much as a deer. Mostly we carried our deer out without packframes. We would cut part way through a buck's knees, then strip down the sinew, leaving the front legs attached. We'd then make slits in the gambrels and run the front legs through them. If done right, the front legs formed "Ts" that "tied" the four legs together. We'd then stick our arms between the "straps" formed by the legs and stand up with the buck's tail in the air and its head down. If we did things right, all of the buck's weight was on our shoulders, cushioned by the meaty part of the deer's rear legs. As we walked out we would grab the deer's antlers to steady the load. We'd get bloody, of course, but it worked. Does anyone still do this? Bill Quimby

I have lots of rifles but I' only use two lately. One is a pre-1964 Model 70 featherweight in .30-06 that I bought new about 1960 after retiring a custom Mauser 98 in .270 Winchester (I shot the barrel out in two summers of siluteta metalicas shooting in Mexico. I now use the .30-06 when I think I'll need 220-grain bullets, such as for eland or wildebeest. (Both are big and tough beasts and I can't stand my .375's recoil.) My favorite rifle, though, is a Czech-made Mauser barrelled action in 7 Remington Magnum that I restocked myself years ago. I shoot Nosler tip bullets exclusively. For the 7 mag I alternate between 140 (ballistic tip) and 175 (partition) grain, depending upon what I'm hunting. It was interesting to see someone uses the 6.5 Remington Magnum. I picked up a like-new Remington 700 in that caliber six years ago for $100 because ammo wasn't available. I tried finding cases through Gun Week and when I couldn't I planned to buy a new barrel. I'm glad I didn't because Remington started making ammo again last year. I bought 100 unprimed cases and some dies last month and will test the 6.5 mag on coyotes near the Zuni Reservation in a couple of weeks. From what I can read in the reloading manuals this is a very impressive caliber when fired through a 24-inch barrel. It got a bad reputation because Remington mostly chambered it in its little 600 carbine. If I draw a deer tag this year it's what I'll use. All this is moot, of course. It's bullet placement and not caliber (within reason) that kills game cleanly, which is what we all want to do. I've shot deer with virtually every caliber from a .22-250 to a .338 Winchester Magnum, and everything in between. When I put a bullet where it was supposed to go the deer went down. There is only one degree of dead. Bill Quimby

BenBrown: Where in Namibia and Botswana will you be hunting? I've hunted Namibia twice and Bots once. Although these aren't my favorite countries, I fell hopelessly in love with that continent after my first trip to Zimbabwe in 1983. There's a saying that once you've tasted the waters of the Zambezi you must return. It must be true because I returned 21 times and hunted in five countries after that first trip. I'd be returning to taste the waters this year, too, if I weren't going to Argentina in August for a brocket deer. Bill Quimby

BenBrown: I'm seven years older than you, and I can tell you things don't improve with age. My knees are still OK, it's my feet. A one-mile walk makes them so painful it hurts with every step. Although I stopped smoking after my heart attack three years ago, fifty years of puffing obviously affected my lungs. Getting old isn't for wimps.

Amen.

Anybody notice how aerial photos flatten things out? I found my cabin and then went looking for the hills I've climbed and canyons I've crossed and couldn't understand why I struggled so much. Bill Quimby

I've always believed that Coues deer bucks had favorite bedding areas. However, if those places were invaded by humans, the bucks would run into the flats to escape them. When we still could buy tags at sporting goods stores and go hunting any deer species we wanted I used to see whitetails way out on the desert flats near what now are the pecan groves east of I-19 while hunting mule deer there. It was my impression that they had left the higher country because of hunting pressure. I could have been wrong, but I just couldn't see whitetails living year around there. I also saw a whitetail buck in mule deer country in the flats below the Chiricahuas near Rodeo N.M., as well as a whitetail doe in the Black Hills quail country northwest of Oracle. I seriously doubt that they stayed in those places very long. I also believe there are places (such as below certain rimrock cliffs and the heads of certain canyons on open hillsides) where the largest (oldest?) bucks hung out. Just like largemouth bass "honey holes", we used to go back year after year and find good bucks in exactly the same places. As far as I know, there have been no studies about Coues deer and their bedding areas. bill quimby

I used to do a lot of varmint calling and had pretty good succes with bobcats, coyotes, coatis, and foxes. If I were to go calling specifically to hunt a mountain lion I think I'd first try to figure where the lions might be just before daylight, and start calling a the first hint to light. Bobcats used to be very cautious and could take at least thirty minutes of calling from the same stand before they'd appear. "Appear" is the only way to describe how my bobcats came in. One minute they wouldn't be there, the next thing I knew one would be crouched almost flat next to cover, watching me. The lions I called weren't as secretive and didn't flatten out, but if I remember they both "appeared" about the same time I was getting ready to shut down and leave. Coyotes and coatis came running in. I presume nothing has changed. Anyway, congrats on your success with trail cameras. I'm going to try them at the Cabin in September, when the really big bulls show up in the meadow in front of my cabin at night.

That's an incredible story. In sixty years of hunting deer (and everything else) I've seen just six mountain lions, counting the one I shot over hounds and one that ran across the road near the old town of Tiger many, many years ago. Although it obviously was scarey to encounter a lion acting that way you can consider yourself fortunate to have seen a free-ranging lion up that close. bill quimby

Congratulations to whomever photographed those lions. 1. Have you tried using a varmint call in thick brush at the very first light there? I called in two lions over the past 50 years, so I know it works. (My problem with both was I was so shook up when I saw them I shot too quickly. Neither stuck around to give me another shot." 2. Is the quality of the photos typical for trail cameras? I've been thinking about buying one to put outside my cabin so I can photograph some of the elk bulls that walk past the house every night. bill quimby

I saw one 10 days ago crossing the road near Greer. It was a mature bear but not especially large.

Awesome!

We probably should look at some USFWS numbers, but it was my opinion that deer hunters made up the biggest percentage of the nation's 14 millon hunters, apparently because whitetail herds are exploding everywhere except in the Southwest.