We were hunting the legendary Lodge and Ranch at Chama in far northern New Mexico on that cool autumn evening, and when we hit Cañones Creek, we bore north. We reached the base of Cerro Venado Macho, or “Big Buck Hill,” and commenced climbing its steeply ascending ridgeline as the sun began nearing the far western horizon.
The aspens were only now beginning to change color, but the oaks were already in their full autumn glory as I spotted a pair of young mule deer in the thick brush 60 yards below.
But two deer soon became four, then five and six and eight, until that one big buck suddenly appeared and appropriated all the oxygen.
Watching through my camera, I shot one quick photo of him and his askari before bringing my rifle to bear. But the angle was entirely wrong, and I had no reasonable shot, and he took the whole herd with him down the mountain into the dense oak thicket below.
And so, we circled south and then east, my friend Frank Simms and me, back down the trail we had just climbed, then bore north around the base of the ridge. We caught the whole herd emerging from the lower edge of the oaks 170 yards above us, with the big buck appearing last as the clear evening sky began turning gold.
I dropped to my knees and eased the rifle into the forks of my homemade bamboo shooting sticks, the crosshairs centered on the back of the old buck’s ribs as I visualized the forward track the bullet would take through his heart and lungs.
The shot was good, but for one critical second I lost him in the fiery, low-light muzzle flash as 200 grains of perfectly partitioned .30-caliber copper and lead flew across the mountain and slammed into the back of his chest, angling sharply forward to the point of his opposite shoulder.
The herd tore down the mountain in the fading light as the bounding echoes of the shot ricocheted from ridge to ridge, me searching without success for that grand set of finely polished antlers as they fled. Only then did Frank speak.
“You hit him hard!” he exclaimed. “He dove back up into the oak brush!”
But I hadn’t seen him. And so, leaving my shooting sticks and camera where they fell, we started across the face of the mountain.
Frank wasn’t sure where he’d seen the buck enter the thicket, and for 45 minutes we searched. We searched high. We searched low. We searched each open lead in the thick tangled oaks without any sign of him whatsoever, until Frank finally turned back down the canyon to fetch our old friend Crockett as I continued searching.
Crockett was Frank’s big Australian shepherd, more dog than human, though not by much. We’d been pals since he was a pup learning to nick cheese crackers from me and then climbing into my lap for a good head-scratch. And though my lap had become progressively smaller as he’d grown larger, he still knew what it was for.
There were many things that Crockett knew.
But what he knew best was trailing lost game.
Likewise, there were a few things that I now knew as well: that my rifle had been tuned to perfection and the shot had been steady and unhurried; that my ammo had been handloaded as precisely as humanly possible, and that the time-proven Nosler Partition bullet would have performed flawlessly—and that we were obviously looking in the wrong place for this grand lost deer.
And that if there was one thing I could count on here on this cool autumn evening, it was Crockett.
I had always been able to count on Crockett.
But now, the withering light was fading fast, and I could hear the old dog somewhere on the slopes above. And just as the evening breezes began drifting upward from the canyon below, I heard it—something sizeable barreling down the mountain in my direction. But even if it were our lost buck, there was no way I was going to risk a shot. For Crockett was somewhere up there unseen, and I had absolutely no idea where Frank might be.
And then it was there—not Frank, not the deer, but Crockett himself, and he lightly grazed my leg as he raced past, as if to say, “Follow Meeee!”
And then he was gone. And so too, nearly, was the light.
But still I followed.
When I finally spotted him, he was down on his side 70 yards below at the edge of the oaks, and when I called his name, he looked up at me with a desperate and pleading countenance that haunts me to this day.
But he did not rise.
Again I called, and this time Frank answered from somewhere below as he stepped from the oaks. But Crockett still lay unmoving, his beckoning expression and those yearning eyes begging us to his side.
Clearly, we had asked too much of our old friend.
Frank scrambled to him and dropped to one knee, and as he leaned forward to touch him, he suddenly froze and rocked backward, then stood and looked up the mountain to me and called, “Hey ol’ buddy, here’s your deer!”
The shot had been spot-on, and the buck had gone no more than 20 yards after the bullet struck, his final act to plunge as deeply into the edge of the thick oaks as he could manage, where, without Crockett, he would surely have been lost that night to the coyotes.
He was stone cold dead, a big beautiful blessing of a deer, buried in the thick oak brush with Crockett nestled tight up against him and wearing a smug, self-congratulatory smirk on his big furry face that seemed to say, What took you boys so long?
And as Frank and I eased the deer out into the open, the old dog romped around us in victory, and for a moment we were all pups again.
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