For 2022, I drew an early November tag for a southern AZ unit as my fifth choice. I’ve hunted this unit several times previously with tags I’ve picked up on the leftover draw, so I know of a couple areas that hold bucks, but numbers are usually low and good bucks are few and far between. Nevertheless, I was happy for the opportunity and excited to have a week off of work to do some glassing and, hopefully, find some bucks.
Day one was pretty slow, hiking about a mile in and only seeing a few does and a small fork. Interestingly, this small buck was noticeable bigger than the two deer he was with. At first, I thought it was a doe with two fawns until I made out the antlers. I assume the fawns mother was killed (saw some lion sign in the area) and the fawns hooked up with the small buck.
Day two started off slow, only seeing one doe before kicking up four deer out of the bottom of an area we had been glassing all morning. Should have climbed a little higher, so we could see the bottom of the hill we were on. The first two were small bucks, but I couldn’t ID the last two.
That afternoon, we decided to try out a new area that I had wanted to check out for years. For the first couple of hours, we only found one doe and fawn, but just before dark, we found 3 bucks. One looked like a pretty good 3 point, with a smaller 3 and a fork horn. The bucks were too far for a shot and with light fading fast, we decided to wait until morning to go after them.
Sunday morning started off with a half mile hike to get in to position to try to find the bucks from the previous night. It only took a few minutes to locate the deer, but they were still about 900 yds away. After crossing a small drainage, I was able to cut the distance to 600yds, but could not immediately relocate the bucks. I slowed down my glassing and started picking apart the likely bedding areas. I was confident they were still there because I had a good wind and felt I would have seen the deer if they had moved off of the hillside.
After about 30 minutes, I was able to find a buck bedded behind a yucca cactus. I ranged him at 468 yds and decided to take the shot. The 140 gr Accubond from my 26 Nosler X-Bolt found it’s mark and the buck never stood up.
It was a long, difficult pack out and we didn’t get back to the truck until after dark. We returned to camp to find it had been ransacked by a bear. It destroyed my brother-in-laws truck tent and got in to most of our coolers and food boxes. The bear returned that night and left a pretty good paw print on my truck window, but I never got to see it. FYI, bears prefer teriyaki beef jerky over regular, apples over bananas and Coke Zero over Diet Pepsi.
