So there I am. In the rapidly fading sunset roughly 85 miles southeast of a city in New Mexico that I’ve never been able to spell, straddling a six-foot sheep fence on wobbly legs and a cramping left foot with three strands of needle-sharp “bobbed” wire mere inches above the cowarding family rhinestones, trying to sneak up on, as it turned out, a horny pronghorn buck that I’ve lost sight of between two clumps of creosote bush and a half-dead wooly bear chola cactus in a little draw that I estimate is more or less between an easy field goal and four miles away.
Back out on the highway, some 400 yards behind my quivering tuccus, my hunting companions are watching and probably placing bets on just how much of himself this damned fool hillbilly is going to leave dangling on the fence for some raven’s breakfast entrée.
Through some miracle of levitation, however, I make it across the fence with only minimal loss of blood and dignity, but land in a patch of prickly pear, the vegetarian equivalent of the piranha. Visibly limping now with a butt-full of cactus spines, but trying to “man up” and deal with it in my best Dan’l Boone fashion, I advance on my still-not-visible prey for another couple hundred yards with Ol’ Betsy, my trusty flintlock – actually a thoroughly modern Remington 700 BDL crowned with a Minox riflescope.
I step around some kind of unidentifiable desert bush that rakes several square inches of skin off my left cheek with its claws and there, maybe three gridirons away, is a pronghorn doe being closely dogged by my buck. From the way he’s bouncing around all stiff-legged and slobbering, it’s easy to see that what’s on his mind at the moment is the same stuff that’s ruined many a fine male of every species starting with Adam. Or maybe before, if you count the snake.
I try to edge a little closer because making long shots at small animals has never been my forte, but the buck suddenly senses that’s something wrong, that the critter with the rifle is not Athena come to wish his love life well. I throw up the ol’ Kain-tuck and pop one off, but it raises a puff of dust somewhere in the back 40 and he starts to run. Without thinking I send two more rounds in his direction and on my third shot he staggers, but comes right back up, kicks in the after-burners and is quickly well out of range.
The object of his amorous advances, however, jogs a few steps and stops, looking as if the whole thing bores her, not unlike the yuppie wife who comments during whoopee that she thinks the bedroom ceiling would look better painted mauve.
The darned fool buck, in another zip code by now, skids to a halt when it dawns on him that his true love isn’t following. He wheels like some kind of white-butted Lilliputian cow pony and comes galloping back.
By now I’ve located a conveniently placed permanent shooting stick – a fencepost – and when our Romeo is within one more bounce of sagebrush nirvana, I send him to pronghorn paradise by letting one of the Noslers do its work. A good meaty ka-thump and he goes down so fast that it’s as if he never existed.
Which we soon become convinced he might not have.
The whole trip had begun with a vacuum-sealed package of Alaskan halibut, the single, solitary last chunk of halibut in my freezer to be exact.
Panicked lest I be reduced to dining on previously frozen tilapia farm-raised in a Vietnamese B-52 bomb crater or canned sardines originating in an Indonesian honey-ditch, I immediately rang up Chuck Wechsler, publisher and editor of this most fine periodical, and implored him to find me a fishing trip to Alaska, so I could restock my freezer with halibut and salmon. “Got nothing in the category right now,” he said, “but would you be interested in hunting antelope in New Mexico?”
A couple of halibut-less weeks later I was nervously watching the luggage carousel in the Alburquirkee . . . Albearturkey . . . Albuquerque airport, hoping my rifle had been on the same flight. Amazingly enough it had been. I was greeted by Matt Suuck, sport optics manager for Minox. That’s the company, you’ll recall, justly famous for those teeny little cameras easily concealed in a pack of cancer sticks and beloved of both movie spooks and actual, sure-nuff real spies. The company still makes them, but they’re digital now and, if captured, one has to eat the whole camera, not just the film.
Minox, which has been in the optics business for more than 75 years, is now promoting an extensive line of riflescopes, binoculars, spotting scopes and game cameras. Thus the reason for my having been invited to the Land of Enchantment for a try at hunting “goats,” as locals and others somewhat reverently call pronghorn antelope, which are, in fact neither goat nor antelope, but the lone surviving species of the Antilocapridae family that existed in the Pleistocene up until around 12,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries.
The fastest land mammal in North America (54 m.p.h.), the pronghorn is the second fastest in the world after only the cheetah (71 m.p.h.), which, thankfully for the pronghorn doesn’t exist in America. A racehorse, by comparison, can top out in the neighborhood of 45 m.p.h.
Unlike horses, pronghorns rarely jump, but they can skitter under a barbed wire fence without hardly breaking stride. My reference book also says they are excellent swimmers, although what they can find to swim in out there in the high desert escapes me.
After a monstrous and tasty meal of Mexican food in an airport restaurant – will wonders never cease? – Matt and I gathered up Oregonian Kipp Nelson, David Sams who writes for something called the Lone Star Outdoor News and Rich Sandstrom of Tacoma. After collecting our gear, we headed some 80 or so miles southeast to the town of Vaughn. Or what had been a thriving town once upon a time before Interstate 40 about 25 miles to the north pirated most of the east-west highway traffic.
With its population drying up and drifting away like so many New Mexico tumbleweeds, the little hamlet – population 438 and dropping as of the last count – is largely composed of closed restaurants, closed motels, closed gas stations, closed taco stands and forlorn-looking real estate offices – also closed. The Vaughn police department is, and this is no joke, located in a telephone booth that’s just barely big enough for the non-sworn constable and the official police dog. Any actual gendarmerie needed is handled by the county mounties.
A few businesses yet survive, primarily those who serve railroad maintenance workers of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the Union Pacific, both of which keep the local rails humming day and night with cheap Chinese merchandise going east and American money and scrap iron passing in the opposite direction.
We’d been booked into Vaughn’s newest motel, The Oak Tree Inn. Actually, it’s the only new motel or new anything else in Vaughn, but because of an agreement the inn has to give priority to railroad crews, we found ourselves shunted next door to a 1950s throwback called the Americano Motel, which lacks some – all – of the amenities of its upscale neighbor but more than makes up for it in “Route 66 style” nostalgia with pink and avocado-green toilet fixtures as well as “Hollywood” beds.
“Just look at this carpet,” enthused the owner, dropping to one knee and lovingly massaging an anemic-blue shag at least five inches deep. “Twenty-seven years old and still looks just like new!”
I couldn’t help thinking that the two ranches we were scheduled to hunt the next day probably didn’t contain as much wildlife as that rug, but far be it from me to contradict a good lady whose nearest Wal-Mart is nearly 90 miles away, bless her heart. However, I did keep my boots on, just in case something under the bed tried to bite me.
In his e-mails, Matt had specifically stated that this was to be a “gentleman’s” hunt with none of that getting up at four in the morning stuff, but there he was at four a.m. sharp, pounding on doors and rudely interrupting a sweaty dream I was having that involved “Wonder Woman” Lynda Carter who once made a movie in Vaughn. Where, I wondered, were the rug monsters when I really needed them to leap up and devour someone? Probably still asleep and dreaming about tasty tourists.
Now there are two opposite poles of thought on how to pursue the wily pronghorn. One is the easy, good-ol’-boyz way, meaning you drive up and down the roads in your pick-em-up (cooler full of longneck brews optional) until you see some animals, which you then proceed to shoot with both you and them as close to the truck as possible. This method is, of course, frowned upon by game officials, sportsmen and landowners, unless you happen to be the landowner. Landowners in general don’t care for the zippy little beasts, accusing them of breaking fences and eating stuff the cattle need, but no self-respecting cow would touch the sagebrush and brambles pronghorns prefer.
The other extreme is to hike to the top of a distant hill and spend several hours glassing a herd that must be at least five miles away. Then, you argue almost to the point of blows with your hunting companions as to whether or not a particular buck qualifies for the record book. Finally, you commence a circuitous stalk that takes in at least two time zones.
We’d decided to split up into a couple of groups and alternate hunting between two ranches where we held permits. During the first day my group saw a lot of antelope, mostly solo or in small groups, but the only one that appeared large enough for a first-day shot was just over the fence into the other group’s ranch and seemed dead set on staying there.
Kipp nailed a fairly decent buck late in the day, and after that we headed to Penny’s Diner, a thoroughly modern and friendly little ’50s-style hashery that stays open 24 hours, because it also has some kind of contract with the railroads to victual track gangs and train crews. The cook on grill duty was the spitting image of “Bloody Mary” in the movie version of South Pacific, but she could flap a jack with the best of them.
The next morning we were up bright and early, hunted all day and took one good buck . . . and mine.
By the time I had shot or shot at the amorous little Lothario, it was getting very late, so with long dark shadows and a fiery red sunset, I proceeded to where I was sure the buck had dropped. Simple enough, except for one problem – no buck.
Seeing me weaving back and forth, the rest of the guys reluctantly braved the cajones-famished fence and then, armed with flashlights, we scoured what we could have sworn was every inch of the ten acres where the buck should have been but wasn’t. Everyone had seen him drop, but then we began to doubt our own eyes. Still, I had definitely heard that good, solid meaty ka-thump, so I knew our boy was out there somewhere. Maybe fallen down a badger hole or abandoned mineshaft or rescued by aliens from nearby Roswell, but out there, none-the-less. Finally, at well past ten o’clock we decided to call it a night.
The following morning we all returned to the spot and spent more than an hour crisscrossing the acreage with no success. Finally, after everybody but me had returned to the trucks and were showing more than a little impatience to get on with it, I, too, began trudging back . . . and darned near tripped over my buck that had, literally, dropped in his tracks from a bullet through the spine just above the shoulder blades.
Even more amazing was that the bullet that had staggered him the first time had taken out a chunk of his rump the size of my fist, including several fragments of his backbone. After which he continued to chase the doe in what the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson called “. . . the cruel madness of love.”
By the end of our third and final day four of us had each taken a modest buck with only Matt, our host, missing out because, ever the gentleman, he waited until the last for his turn, which never came.
Okay, so I didn’t score a bragging-size buck, but any day one spends hunting, especially in such awe-inspiring surroundings as the New Mexico high desert, is about as close to Heaven as a guy can get and still return. I grew up in the green forests of Virginia and I love them, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes wonder if the stork didn’t make a mistake and drop me off about 1,500 miles too far east.
Plus I’d met four really great guys that I hope to hunt with again someday. And if I’m ever back through Vaughn, I strongly suspect I’ll overnight at the Americano Motel. That is if they haven’t replaced the carpet.
FIELD TESTS
The hunt provided a good in-the-field look at Minox optics, a brand that, although more than 75 years old, is too often overlooked when considering hunting glass. With a line of riflescopes, binoculars and spotting scopes ranging from modestly priced entry level to precision-made German models that can go eye to eye with Europe’s best, Minox is well worth consideration.
My rifle carried the Minox ZA 5 2-10×40 #4, a scope that’s assembled in the good old U.S. of A using mostly fine German-manufactured glass and other parts. The “shooting high” problem was due to my bad job of sighting in or the rifle might have gotten bumped by good ’ol Delta’s baggage gorillas and was in no way the scope’s fault. Or, now that I have replayed the hunt in my mind several times, I might have instinctively held high, even though I had sighted in my rifle to compensate. Priced well within reach of the average hunter – or those who need to outfit several rifles with good-quality optics – this Minox line offers a bright picture, ruggedness and a great four-inch-plus of eye relief, which those of us with bifocals can really appreciate.
I shot Federal Premium .25-06 cartridges capped off with 85-grain Nosler Ballistic Tip bullets. In my opinion the venerable .25-06 gets far less respect than it deserves. It shoots hard and flat, is easy on the shoulder and is versatile enough to bust varmints one day and mule deer the next.
For information on the entire Minox line, to request a printed catalog or find your nearest dealer, visit
www.minox.com/usa” www.minox.com/usa.