It’s good to have choices, especially when you are hunting a Texas property your outfitter has only recently acquired and the terrain and general movement of wildlife are yet to be really determined. My choices? Between a mature whitetail or mule deer buck.
“Mulie,” I told my guide, Jeremiah Bennett.
“Mulie it is,” Bennett answered.
“But what if I spot a big whitetail?” I asked.
“That’s up to you.”
I was hunting Trans-Pecos mulies to be exact. Unless I saw a whitetail buck I liked. Really, I was simply hunting and taking what nature and good fortune might bring my way.
Bennett and I spent the next three days prowling a 25,000-acre ranch south of Midland, Texas, the ranch sitting square on the Edwards Plateau. The plateau is a geologic uplift, stretching roughly from just west of Austin and skirting the northern reaches of the San Antonio area, then southwest to Del Rio and west to the Pecos River. Frequently hilly and generally dry, much of the Edwards Plateau is used for livestock grazing as crops have a tough time growing in these thin soils.
With cattle and other grazing inevitably comes good populations of deer.
What the ranch didn’t have? Wild hogs. I didn’t quite believe this, although I was told about the hog-less situation well before I arrived by Craig Archer, owner/operator of Double A Outfitting, which was running this particular hunt. I’d hunted with Archer and Double A many times, and the hunts were always successful. The Double A is definitely a class operation. So, when I received the hunt invite, I contacted Archer who told me, “Nope, zero hogs.”
A deer hunt in Texas and no hogs? That just didn’t seem right, as my previous (and many) Texas hunts of all varieties always included hogs as a hunt species possibility.
“But we have javelinas,” Archer told me. “Lots of them.”
Javelinas, I thought. But how to make that interesting?
I was here at the invitation of Trijicon to try out their new Credo HX 1-8x28 riflescope. The Credo HX is compact, features .25 MOA adjustments and an illuminated reticle. It is the perfect fit for a carbine, so I mounted it on the lightweight Ruger SFAR chambered in .308 Win. Matched with SIG Sauer Elite Hunter ammunition, my rig was handy and maneuverable, and easily capable of MOA and better accuracy.
With the javelina possibility, I also carried a new pistol.
That first morning was more or less a scouting expedition for Bennett and me—getting to know the ridgelines and gullies, understanding where the oak and juniper was the thickest to provide good bedding and cover areas for deer, and searching out watering holes.
The scouting was made harder by the banks of fog that kept rolling in and over the landscape, the otherwise hot Texas sun reduced to a barely lit ball of orange perched in the eastern sky. We certainly saw some deer, mulie does and a couple of small bucks, our pickup rounding a ranch road corner or popping up from a low spot and the deer dashing for thicker cover. No mature bucks, though.
At one point later in the morning as the fog appeared to be receding, we parked the truck on a slight rise, thinking we could glass the land below. Nope. Maybe 10 minutes after parking and more thick fog pushed in. We were suddenly surrounded by dusk.
Then the deer started moving, four-legged ghosts that seemed to glide over the ground, maybe a dozen in all. Some got to within 20 feet of the truck, looked us over, curious about the gray lump shrouded in fog, and then moved on.
But there were only mulie does and a pair of juvenile bucks, their tiny forked horns obscured by their big ears.
Meanwhile, Bennett told me stories of the mule deer hunts he guided every year in Mexico, a land of giant deer where a hunter didn’t pull the trigger on any mulie buck less than 180-class. He had photos on his cell phone, too. Hunters with sunburned faces and large smiles, posing with mulie bucks that had antlers spread out like eagle wings. “This one was a 195,” Bennett said, showing me the photo of yet another giant. “We chased this dude for three days solid before my hunter had a shot.”
I looked out my passenger side window and saw a young mulie buck cutting past us. He had a fork on one side of his head and a spear-looking antler on the other. I swore I heard the hunting gods snicker.
We didn’t see a mature buck that day. But Texas ranches being Texas ranches, we came across a group of old stone buildings that clearly went up in the last half of the 19th century, plus several old trucks and tractors. We also saw some amazing skylines and cloud formations. God knew what he was doing when he made Texas.
We came upon several groups of javelina, too, those smallish pig-looking things that actually are not pigs but collared peccaries. They were actually in season, too, but that would have to wait.
The fog lifted by early afternoon, and Bennett and I stopped at a number of higher spots to glass and consider, including at one point climbing up the steps and onto the catwalk of some large energy company oil tanks. The view from here was educational, and we devised the next day’s plan.
The next morning, we left the rustic ranch house predawn, driving rocky roads we now were familiar with, heading to locations on the ranch ID’d the day before.
Our first stop was a hunting blind we’d passed the previous day. It sat atop a small ridge, overlooking a feeder surrounded by mesquite. Another hunter in our group had sat there the evening before and saw a mature mulie buck, but hadn’t shot as it was day one and he was hoping for a bigger deer.
But this was the second day. My hunt was only slated for three days. It was time to take any buck that looked mature. Before the sun came up, though, more fog rolled in. I couldn’t even see the feeder.
I lasted until about 9 a.m. The fog was still heavy when Bennett and I got into the truck and drove. We found a few spots where the fog had opened up and a guy could see for a good way, and we stopped and glassed. But there was no movement of any kind, not even a bird.
We hunted that day until dark. All we saw were a handful of mulie does.
On the last day I felt anxious as Bennett and I headed out of camp in the predawn dark. At least there was no fog. A weather front had moved in during the night bringing clear skies and low humidity.
We drove and stopped, glassed and rattled. We crossed the county highway that cut through the ranch to try a new section of the property—and I was glad we did.
The land here was somewhat higher elevation, more open and drier, clumps of cedar dotting brown hillsides. We came to a ridgeline, got out of the truck and glassed, the land open below and the sun bright overhead. We walked and paused, glassed and hiked, following the line of the ridge. After about a half-hour of doing this, we spotted the doe.
It was a white-tailed doe. We watched as she dashed into a grassy, open spot, stopped and twisted her neck around to look behind her. Bennett and I immediately swung our binoculars to the wall of cedar the doe had emerged from and saw the shiny antler tips of a white-tailed buck. We crouched down behind a dead cedar. The doe’s tail cut the air behind her briskly, and as soon as the buck stepped from the cedar she began to head in the opposite direction.
We eased back off the ridge, got the high ground between us and the two deer and made for the end of the ridgeline, the direction the buck seemed intent on pushing the doe. Bennett got me set up on a grassy slope, facing where we hoped the deer would come through. My heart was already thumping, and it kicked into a higher gear a minute later when the doe appeared, trotting in and around clumps of cedar. Bennett whispered at me to get ready.
The buck appeared, nose down on the track of the doe. He had no clue we were in the area, his attention focused on the doe. He came alongside us at maybe 70 yards, and Bennett made a grunting noise that stopped him.
I fired, the Credo HX reticle set below the shoulder and slightly to the rear. The buck dropped immediately, but I kept the scope on him, ready for a second shot should he try to get up. No need. After a few kicks of his rear legs, the buck went very still.
He was a nice 8-pointer, no monster Mexico mulie but a mature white-tailed buck and I was damned glad to have taken him.
“Thought I was going to get skunked on this hunt,” I said to Bennett as we field-dressed the buck.
“You and me both,” he admitted.
“About that javelina,” I said.
My guide had his doubts. I’d told him I had brought a hog-killing handgun and I think he assumed I meant a large-frame revolver. Instead, I was now toting a PSD semi-automatic pistol made in Czechoslovakia by FK BRNO and chambered in the decidedly non-American 7.5 FK.
I had reviewed the PSD previously, though, and I knew it packed a real punch, the 95-grain bullet leaving the 5.3-inch barrel at a whopping 2000 fps. True, it looked a lot like something from a sci-fi movie—“Judge Dredd” came to mind the first time I saw the pistol—but it could shoot a sub-2-inch group at 50 yards. I’d mounted a Trijicon SRO red dot on the pistol, and optic and PSD were dead on. When it wasn’t in hand, Falco Holsters (falcoholsters.com) had provided a custom leather chest holster for the pistol, their Forester model.
Now, to find a javelina.
We parked the truck atop high spots overlooking feeders and glassed, and on our third stop we spotted a stout little guy circling a feeder fence, hungry but unable to leap the yard of mesh erected between him and the feed corn.
We exited the truck and made for the feeder. At maybe 150 yards away we realized we had a problem. The space between us and the circling javelina was wide open. He’d spot us and dash for the cover behind him. We waited until the javelina was on the other side of the feeder and fence and made a hunched-over dash for a clump of cedar to the left. We waited and made the same movement to cover on the right. We kept doing this zigzag stalk until we were within shooting distance.
Bennett set up tall shooting sticks next to some brush. I stood and leveled the PSD across the sticks’ V-notch.
The javelina must’ve heard something or maybe caught a whiff of strange air and decided to exit stage left. Unfortunately for him, that’s exactly what he did, departing on the left side of the fencing. He crossed in front of me just shy of 25 yards. I put the SRO’s reticle on his shoulder and the javelina paused for a second.
I fired and he dropped immediately.
Bennet let out a Texas “whoop!” and I had to smile. After two-and-a-half days of seeing nothing on my hunt list, it seemed that I had suddenly checked off two spots on my Texas dance card.
Amazing!
