Teach 'Em to Hunt
by Glenn R. Latham

"Dad, I like eating antelope so much I want to shoot my own." That's the kind of request that's music to a father's ears. Coming from my 15 year old daughter, it was a full symphony!

Here in Colorado, hunters born during or after 1949 are required to pass a hunter safety course before purchasing a hunting license. I called up a local sporting goods store that sponsors the Division of Wildlife's Hunter Safety program, and signed us up to take the next course. I of course had acquired a hunter safety card years ago, but taking the course with my daughter seemed the right thing to do. Besides, you never know, I might learn something!

I had heard stories about some of the instructors tending to exaggerate things a bit, from friends who had taken the course over the years. I wasn't disappointed! Our instructor was a character! No one (especially me!) could give him the correct answer. He found fault with anything anyone said or did. Oh well, if ya wanna hunt, ya gotta put up with it. I debriefed Amy after the classes to correct some of the goofy information we received. In the end, Amy passed the test easily, and her old man managed to ace it (PHEW!).

I had taken Amy and her brother Grant shooting a few times, of course, but they weren't particularly interested in it, and got their fill in about 10 minutes or so (anybody else been there?). Reactive targets held their interest for a few more minutes, but not many.

Now that she had a goal, though, Amy took her shooting sessions seriously. We of course started with the .22 rifle. I have a nice little Remington 510 that has been converted from single shot to magazine feed, and which sports a 3-9 Redfield scope. There is nothing that will douse enthusiasm as fast as failure, so I started her shooting from the bench. Paper targets are a bit boring, but they tell the story, and track progress. After she gained control of the trigger, we moved to reactive targets and hunting positions.

(As a minor side story, my club has an active junior .22 program, and both my kids decided to try it out. The first few weeks were classroom safety instruction, but finally the day came when they could shoot. Even though bench shooting isn't part of smallbore, the kids got to start there, and the targets were clay birds in the 25 yard backstop. A grand time was had by all. Next class the students got into the real McCoy - prone with a sling. "Ow, this hurts my arm. My arms gonna fall off." Well, that was the end of smallbore shooting.)

"I'm not gonna use a sling!" Okay, okay, no slings. I find I use the sitting position a lot when hunting, so this is where we spent a lot of time. A half size ram silhouette target was a good size for 50 yard shooting, and Amy was soon scoring about 80 percent hits. Offhand shooting is great practice, but not a recommended position in the field for young shooters (or old ones, for that matter, unless they can practice enough to get good at it). Amy wanted to shoot offhand anyway, so who was I to deny her? She soon was making close to 50% hits - I was impressed!

Next she had to learn to shoot a hunting rifle. I had an extra stock for a Remington M-78 (the plain-Jane M-700), so cut it down for her and installed a pull-off .308 Win. barrel a friend had given me. Apparently the fellow had used it for a crow-bar before giving it to me, it was bent noticeably! I straightened it as best I could and gave it a shot.

As a cast bullet shooter, it was easy to work up a light cast bullet load that would allow Amy to become accustomed to the rifle without recoil becoming a factor. Unfortunately, when I got the velocity up enough for a hunting load, it started walking its shots as the barrel warmed. I may have straightened the barrel, but it wasn’t happy about all the movement, and I won’t stand for a barrel that has a mind of its own.

The M-78 was originally a .30-06, so I screwed the factory barrel back on. I had shot this barrel a bit before pulling it to make the rifle a switch-barrel, and knew it was good. I would have preferred the .308, as the smaller case handles reduced loads a little better than the .30-06.

A light charge of Accurate 5744 with the LBT 310-140-SP (147 grs. ready to load) was accurate and mild, and Amy shot it quite well. As the summer progressed, I added more powder until the velocity was almost 2100 f.p.s.. This is just a little less than a .30-30 factory load, more than adequate for deer. "Deer? I though she wanted to hunt antelope?" Well, yes she did, but antelope licenses are limited, and she didn’t draw one, but did draw an either-sex deer tag.

My hunting buddy, Bruce, has three teenage daughters. They too expressed and interest in going hunting, and they all drew either-sex licenses for the same area and season as Amy.

We all went hunting, saw a number of deer, had a good time, but came home empty. I suppose that’s just as well. I wouldn’t want them to get the idea that a license in the hand equals venison in the freezer (just because their old men make it seem that way is no excuse).

The next year Amy and I applied for both deer and antelope, but only drew the deer tag again. However, this time we both had a license for the same area and season. The first year, my license was for a different season and area, so she was "hunting" and I was "guiding" on our trip together. As such, it didn’t really matter that her rifle carried the bolt from my rifle, but this year, sharing one bolt between two rifles didn’t seem a great idea. She needed her own rifle. (Ain’t it amazing the excuses we can come up with for buying a new gun?) Two of Bruce’s daughters also drew a license for this area.

At a local gun show, I found a well used Savage 110 in .270. Well, at least it looked like it had been drug through a briar patch or two! The bore, however, looked fine, and the price was certainly right, so it followed me home. As is my custom, it came out of the stock right away for an inspection. Everything looked in order, except for the usual accumulation of dirt and weed seeds. It was cleaned up, the trigger lightened to a more reasonable three pounds (I like two pounds on my rifles, but that’s too light for a beginner), and a little wood removed from the barrel channel where it was touching the left side of the barrel. I prefer my rifles to be free floated, if they will shoot that way. Changes in weather will cause the wood to move, and varying pressure of the stock on the barrel will cause the point of impact to wander. Have I mentioned I don’t care for a rifle with a mind of its own? I have? Good! The stock was of course shortened to fit Amy and a shotgun-type recoil pad was added.

Normally, I will epoxy bed the receiver of my rifles, but it shot quite well in initial tests (1.25"), so I left it factory bedded.

Never having owned a .270, I was not set-up to cast and load lead bullets for it. I did, however, have a couple boxes of Hornady 100 gr. Spire Point bullets on the shelf that I had bought years ago to load for a friend’s .270. I tumbled them in moly and loaded them over 40 grains of Thunderbird 322. I figured this would be a good practice load; sufficient velocity for hunting (with the right bullet, of course), and manageable recoil.

Amy shot this load quite well from the sitting position, and never said anything about the recoil until she shot it from the bench. It’s amazing how hunkering down behind a rifle brings the beast out of it. It didn’t really hurt her, it just kicked noticeably more than from hunting positions. Even still, she shot groups averaging under 1.5", which ain’t half bad for a relative neophyte.

But as I mentioned, the Hornady 100 gr. isn’t a hunting bullet. It’s great for varmints, but it’s built too light for humane big game shooting. I wanted to keep the bullet weight down to keep the recoil manageable, and was eyeing the 100 gr. Barnes X-Bullet, but I could not find any locally. Yes, it too is only a 100 gr. bullet, but it is built for big game hunting, and is perfectly acceptable for the task. I did find some 120 gr. X-bullets, so bought a box, moly treated them, and loaded them over the same charge of 40 grs. of T-322. I did not chronograph this load, but with the 100 gr. Hornady bullet, velocity was 2850 f.p.s., so I suspect these bullets were doing about 2750 f.p.s. at the muzzle.

The area we had drawn to hunt contained a significant amount of public land administered by the Division of Wildlife. This property has a full-time resident game warden/farmer, whose duties include planting crops each year just for the local wildlife. The land runs from river-bottom thickets to crops interspersed with windbreaks to rolling sagebrush, providing quite a variety of cover. We chose to hunt from tree stands in the river bottom, in an area that was relatively open, but with heavy cover nearby.

The season opened on Tuesday, but Amy and I drove out the next Friday morning. Bruce and his daughters were to come up after school on Friday.

Amy and I got there about 11:30, set up the camper, had a little lunch and headed for the area I had hunted the previous year. The roads and parking areas are along the border between the cultivated areas and the river cover. We parked and walked into the cover, and soon jumped 5 mule deer does, although the brush was too high to get a shot. We walked in farther and I found the tree I had put my stand in the previous year, and located another tree only about 10 yards away which would hold Amy's stand. We went back to the truck and carried the stands in and I set them up. One is a ladder stand, and although it is heavier and more awkward to carry, it is a snap to set up. The second stand is one I borrowed from a bowhunting friend. It hangs on a "T" screw and has a chain that wraps around the tree. The steps to get up to it must be screwed into the tree, so it takes a while to put this one up.

After I had the stands up, I put Amy up in the ladder stand, and walked out to the truck and drove a mile or so up the road to put up a blind for Bruce and his daughters. We had discovered a downed tree that made a pretty good natural blind, but it was held off the ground by its branches. He bought some camo blind material, and I draped it over the trunk to make a more complete blind for them.

While I was walking in to put up this blind, I kicked up a nice whitetail buck, which happened to be bedded down right behind the downed tree we had picked for the blind! I put up the blind, then hiked the rest of the way through the river bottom cover to Amy's stand. On the way I kicked up three does, two whitetails and one mulie. They all obligingly headed for Amy's stand.

I expected to hear a shot at any time, so I worked my way slowly back to Amy's stand, so as not to push the deer too hard. The woods were quiet, and when I got back to her stand, she told me, "Dad, you missed a show!" The does had sneaked up on her right side, and she didn’t see them until they were only 20 yards away. Being right handed, her rifle was pointing to her left. The does were looking right at her, and she was unable to move to get in position for a shot without spooking them. She just watched them watch her until they wandered away. A short while later a buck came by, too.

It was getting dark, so we headed back to camp, had dinner and awaited the arrival of our compadres.

The next morning, we climbed up in our stands just as it was getting light and waited. After about an hour, I saw a pair of does coming up from behind us, but they changed their mind and headed back the way they had come. A short while later Amy and I both saw some deer in the heavy brush nearly 200 yards away straight in front of us. I was able to pick out two does and a fawn, and off to the right about 100 yards from them, closer to the river, a nice buck was browsing. His tines were so tall I at first thought he was a mulie, but when he turned his head there was no doubt about his whitetail ancestry.

We watched the does, and eventually one of them and the fawn worked their way towards us a bit and out of the brush. They were far enough away that Amy and I could whisper to each other without disturbing them. I told her to take the one on the left, the big doe, then they switched places, and I changed my instructions. At her shot, the doe took off in high gear, as all whitetails seem to do, but her legs looked like they were about 10" shorter! She went out of sight behind a few trees, but I wasn’t too concerned. I had constructed a rest of conduit covered with foam pipe insulation, so Amy was able to make a nice steady shot.

We climbed down and went to look for her deer. We didn’t have to search too hard as she had only gone about 35 yards before piling up. The bullet had entered just in front of her right shoulder and exited just behind the left, damaging the lungs enroute. I later paced the shot at 143 yards. The 120 grain Barnes-X boat tail moving out at about 2750 fps from the muzzle did all a bullet could be asked to do.

Some may question shooting a doe with a fawn in tow. By the time hunting season rolls around, the fawns are long since weaned, and are like a 20 year old kid that doesn’t know when to leave home!

We gutted Amy’s deer, then drug it to the truck (about 500 yards) on a child’s plastic sled. This was a trick I came up with just before we left, and it proved to be a winner. The sled is more like a shallow boat, about 20" wide, 40" long and 3" deep. We first wrapped some 6 mil. landscaping plastic around the deer, then placed it on the sled. It hung off the front and back of the sled, but that wasn’t a problem. I tied the rope from my deer drag around her neck and snout, and Amy kept the head off the ground while I drug the sled. Even though there was no snow, it slid easily over the dry grass and weeds.

After hanging and skinning the deer, we had some lunch. Bruce and his daughters came back as well, and told their stories of watching other hunters wandering through the area in front of their stand.

After lunch I went back to the tree stand alone while Bruce and his daughters hunted the food plots and sagebrush. I didn’t have to wait too long before a nice whitetail doe came by which another hunter had spooked down the river. The .45-70 spoke, and my hunt was over.

Bruce’s daughters still hadn’t had an opportunity to get a shot yet. He had been hesitant to put his daughters up in the tree stands (yes, we were using safety straps!), but I finally convinced him it was the best way to see deer, especially deer that were close enough to shoot and not spooked. Sunday morning he took his daughters to the tree stands for the morning hunt.

It had snowed a little, maybe ¼" that night, and it was a good bit colder than it had been on Saturday, with temperatures in the teens. The girls toughed it out for a while, but were quite cold and uncomfortable. I slept in that morning, but got out about 9:00 and checked on the "troopers in the trees." They hadn’t seen anything close enough to shoot, so I drove about a mile down river, and hiked back through the cover to try and drive some deer their way. I kicked up several deer, but they ran along the river, and didn’t come by the stands.

We broke for lunch, and planned our next strategy. We hadn’t hunted the west half of the unit, so decided to give it a try, since it seemed most people had been hunting the eastern half, and the deer were pretty well spooked in there. The property is divided into 1/3 mile wide sections for small game hunting, with the section boundaries running perpendicular to the river. A friend who has hunted the area quite a bit said that units 17-21 west were pretty good for deer. I parked at unit 17 and Bruce took the girls down to unit 20, as most of unit 21 was on the opposite side of the river. I gave them time to get down to their unit and find a place to wait for the deer, and started working my way through the cover.

In some places the river is very close to the access road (such as in unit 21), but where I started it was at least ¼ mile from the parking area to the river. This is a pretty wide area for a one man deer drive, so I snaked my way through the cover, making sure I hit the heaviest spots to kick out any deer hiding there. It was a while before I saw any deer, and the first were a pair of whitetail does. One headed up the cover toward Bruce and the girls, the other headed out into the crops. A short while later, I kicked out two mule deer does, which headed the right direction. A few minutes later I heard two shots. I got up on a high spot, and could see Bruce and the girls just a little way ahead. When I got to them, they were admiring a nice fat mulie doe that fourteen-year-old Lisa had taken with one shot through the spine, just above the lungs. Lisa was using a sporterized Springfield Bruce had bought this past summer, shooting 150 grain Barnes-X bullets. Fifteen-year-old Sheri had gotten a shot too, but had missed.

It was nearly dark by the time we got back to camp, so we packed up and headed home.

Bruce’s three daughters had all applied for late season cow elk licenses, and all three had drawn, but poor Bruce had not. I did not have Amy apply, but I did and drew a cow tag as well.

We arrived at the home of some friends of Bruce’s about 1:30 in the afternoon, unloaded our stuff and headed out in search of the wily elk.

Elk hunting in this late season is quite different from hunting in the regular seasons. The animals migrate out of the high, timbered mountains and down into the rolling sagebrush and farm country for the winter. Hunting them is much like hunting antelope, as they are herded up and constantly on the move. You just drive the county roads and back roads, glassing from the high spots until you locate a herd.

The area we were hunting this afternoon has a few sections of public land here and there, but is mostly private. We stopped and glassed the parcels of public land, but were only coming up with "track soup" (similar to stone soup, the primary ingredient of which is inedible). We were in two vehicles, and after driving about as far up this particular county road as it seemed reasonable (there was little public land farther up), we decided to backtrack about four miles and take another branch. While driving back down the same road we had just come up minutes before, I looked off to the east and spotted a herd of elk strung out along a fence line. The fence was the boundary between public and private land, and the elk were on the public side (which doesn’t mean much, as a fence hardly slows them down as they glide over it). If they continued in their current southerly direction, they would head deeper into public land, as the fence shortly cut off to the east. The road also curved off to the east, so there was a chance they would cross the road about 3/4 mile farther ahead. We drove around the bend and out of sight, got out and planned our stalk.

The country here was rolling sagebrush hills and there were a couple of rises between us and where we last saw the herd. Lisa and I headed in to intercept the herd (we hoped) from the east, and Bruce took Anna and Sheri to intercept them head-on. As we got close to the top of the second rise, I began glassing in earnest, hoping to spot the herd before they spotted us. I expected them to still be on the high ground where we had first seen them, but it began to look as if they had disappeared. I crept up a little farther, then ducked down quickly. The herd was spread out in a little valley right in front of us.

We got down low and crept up to the top of the hill. I asked Lisa if she wanted to take a shot from the sitting or prone position, and she chose sitting. If she had chosen prone, we would have had to get a little closer, because of a mild swell in the hillside in front of us, and the sagebrush and weeds. I had just about gotten her settled in on a large cow that was off by itself, when a shot rang out, and the herd started up the hill right toward us. They only came about 50 yards, then stopped, not knowing where the shot had come from. I asked Lisa if she could pick one out by itself, and she told me to go ahead and take a shot. I picked out a nice cow standing broadside, held high on her shoulder (they appeared to be at least 250 yards away), and touched off a shot. The crosshairs looked good, but I didn’t hear the bullet hit, possibly because of the muffling effect of 5" of snow on the ground. The herd took off to the west, toward Bruce and the other two girls. We heard another shot, and the herd disappeared.

Lisa and I walked down the hillside and found my cow stone dead. She had gone about 60 yards after taking the bullet high through the lungs. I was using my Remington M-78 .30-06 with 150 grain Barnes-X bullets. About this time we heard another shot, and looked about 200 yards across the hillside and saw Bruce and the other girls. We walked up and found them standing over a nice cow, slightly larger than mine. Sheri had shot it high through the neck with a Remington Model 7 in 7-08, shooting Barnes-X bullets. It was still alive when they got to it, so the last shot we heard was the coup-de-grace.

It was about 40 minutes until dark, so we took pictures, and Bruce and I hiked back to the county road and drove the trucks in to where the animals were. A jeep road went most of the way, and we circumnavigated our way through the sagebrush the last few hundred yards. We gutted the animals by headlight and flashlight. Fortunately, there was a half-moon above. Combined with the snow on the ground, it was really pretty bright out. We finally got back to town about 9:00.

By this time I was really beat and sore. Bruce and I discussed the fact that we certainly didn’t need any more meat, although two of his daughters still had licenses. He talked to them individually and they both said that if their sister didn’t care to hunt any more, they didn’t either. That made the decision pretty easy. We called it a hunt.