BEANFIELD RIFLES

When I shot my first white-tailed buck, I really had no clue how to hunt America’s favorite big game animal.

Back in the late 1970s, I lived in Southern California where I was editor of a weekly outdoor newspaper. I grew up hunting mule deer and their secretive coastal cousins, the Columbia blacktail, and although I’d read a bit about whitetail hunting in Outdoor Life and Field & Stream, I had no clue what all the fuss was about. Then some friends with family in eastern Montana invited me deer hunting. Back then you were allowed a buck of either species, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll try and get one of those whitetail things.”

So, one crisp October morning I took a stand at the head of a narrow, brush-filled creek bottom adjacent to a scraped cornfield and waited while some pheasant hunters worked their way toward me. They flushed a few birds and banged away, and out of the draw raced a deer.

“Buck!” I gasped to myself. “White-tailed buck!”

I made a quick move and went prone, resting an old Browning BBR in .25-06 over my daypack, placed the cross-hairs on the buck’s shoulder,