[SageValleyOutdoors]

My 12 year old got a spring bear with a rifle as his first big game animal, and we were hoping to follow rhat up with an archery mule deer. We had a target buck we hunted hard for the past two months, and we got super close over and over again - he missed on our first stalk at 23 yards in mid September, and never got another shot at him. We were at 34 yards this morning when a swirl of the wind sent him running.
We thought our day was done, but after hiking some coulees and a LOT of glassing, we found a couple of bucks in a narrow finger coulee about a mile away. Tired, after a long day of hiking and glassing, Matty didn’t give up: “we’ve only got a few hours of light and it’s our last day. We’re not gonna kill anything in the truck - let’s go for them!”
We hurried to the last place we saw them, and no bucks. There weren’t many places for them to go in the wide open prairie, so i told him we’d ease up the next drainage, so to nock an arrow and be ready. As we slowly created the ridge, the first buck was below us feeding - quartering hard away from us, his head in a bush. Rarely does that ever happen - and the buck was only 27 yards away! Marty’s arrow hit the buck a little far back, but with the quartering angle, it went up into his chest for a quick recovery. A GREAT consolation buck in the last few hours of the General season in our zone.