This is my second year hunting in South Dakota, courtesy of the US Air Force. (I still haven`t forgiven them for making me leave Alaska....doubt I ever will). Anyway, it`s been a productive year so far. I got 2 pronghorn bucks last month, first time hunting them since my dad and I went to Montana when I was 17. Saturday was the opener of the West River deer season. We saw lots of deer on Saturday, but nothing I was going to shoot on the first day of season. My oldest son (17) got his first deer though, so it was a good day. He has never really shown a lot of interest in hunting, but decided he wanted to go this year. He shot a very big mule deer doe at a little over 250 yards, quartering away. He used my handloads, 25/06, 100 grain partition at about 3100FPS. The bullet entered in the ribs and we found the rear half just under the skin in the neck. Monday we went back up to a different spot. About 100 yards from the truck we jumped a whole bunch of mule deer does. I couldn`t pass up a deer that I could darned near drive to, so I took the biggest doe that I saw. The bullet (handloaded 7mm Rem Mag 150 grain Ballistic Silvertip) hit a little far back and she ran over 100 yards, but I saw her fall when she tried to cross a ditch. A blind man could have followed the blood trail, it was about 2 feet wide. After getting her in the truck, we went to another place, hoping to find some bucks (we each have one antlerless tag and one any deer tag). We started walking little draws that had quite a bit of cover in them. Soon my buddy Todd sees a mule deer buck running across the hill in front of him, about 200 yards away. He takes a shot, and we watched the deer skid on his nose for over 10 feet. It was a 3x3 mule deer..a typical SD buck. My other buddy, Tony had whitetail tags, so he was ready to head for the wheat fields and find some whitetails. As we were helping Todd clean his little buck, I saw some movement down the canyon from us. Tony and I decided to check it out and started walking down the canyon. Not more than 100 yards from where Todd was cleaning his mule deer buck, a 5x5 whitetail buck exploded from behind a clump of sage brush. Tony shot and this buck rolled a couple of times, then jumped up and headed up the hill. We found him about 10 minutes later up on top of the hill. He had made it about 80 yards, but we could not find a single drop of blood. How he made it tht far I`ll never know. We still have one tag left each, so we will be doing it all over again next week

[ 11-12-2003, 03:01: Message edited by: hoss101 ]

Sounds like a good start to me!