It was mid-afternoon by the time the shooter buck I’d been watching finally moved over a ridge, giving me a window to commence a stalk. Fifteen minutes later I was glassing from where I’d seen the buck and its harem disappear, but there was no sign of them.
Then, more than a mile away, flashes of white caught my eye. Setting up the spotting scope, I watched smaller bucks chase does in circles through the sagebrush. Moments later, my buck stepped into view. The pronghorn was easy to recognize, and just the sight of it made me gasp. Its body dwarfed those of the inferior bucks in the group, and its black face almost shined. But it was the right horn that jutted 90 degrees to the side of its head that left no doubt this was the buck.
My dad was with me on this hunt, and we both had a tag for the northeast corner of Wyoming. We’d seen this buck the day before while scouting, and I immediately knew I was going home with it or nothing.
While Dad and I had shared many hunts over the past 40 years, this was our first pronghorn hunt together. Dad had taken a few antelope on his own, including a high-scoring record-book buck that neither of us will likely ever beat. I’d been on a number of hunts in various states with both bow and rifle. But this was the first time we’d chased the desert dwellers together, and we were in no hurry to fill tags. Like my dad, I grew up in western Oregon. We’ve hunted Columbia blacktail deer and Roosevelt elk our whole lives. The habitat they call home is more like a jungle rainforest, so we welcome any hunt that takes us to wide-open spaces, like pronghorns do.
