1 YARD AT A TIME
Kelly Wiebe leaned over and whispered, “Patience (grasshopper). We need to do this 1 yard at a time.” It was déjà vu all over again, almost a decade to the day when Wiebe and I made a long and painful butt crawl — sneaking in on the tall, dark and handsome Alberta mule deer buck that adorns the wall in my home office in Minnesota. And here we were once again, easing through a copse of aspen, shaving off distance to another nice 4x4 — one we’d been tailing for a day and a half.
We were reasonably sure the buck was bedded in the brushy bowl below us, but weren’t sure exactly where. We’d spotted him from a high vantage point a couple hours earlier, but had lost contact when we made a long arcing hike to get into a better position. The problem now was all of those eyes we had to deal with — several does bedded up higher on the slopes, acting as sentries. “We need to work our way up to the edge
