Venison

I drove up into the La Sal Mountains this morning, arriving at dawn. I hiked about 2 miles stillhunting up through the scrub oak and aspens. I jumped a bunch of does but wasn't seeing any bucks. I passed through a big alpine meadow and worked my way up the edge of a shallow draw. I saw a flash of something to my left going up the draw parallel with me through the trees. There was a clearing ahead, so I ran up to it and waited about 5 seconds for the deer to step into the 10 foot wide clearing. He stopped to look at me in the clearing. We were about 60 yards from each other. I could see he was a pretty nice buck, so I took him with one shot at about 9:30am. An hour to field dress him and bone out the meat, and then I loaded the entire animal and daypack on my packframe. Took me an hour to hike back to the truck. Conveniently, a 4-wheeler track was only 200 yards away, so I used that to get almost all the way back to my truck.