Buck Fever.

My mind has been on my Dad a lot lately and I know that when this happens he is not far away.

Today I remembered when he took me on my first hunting trip into the Black Range Mountains in New Mexico when I turned twelve years old back in 1960. We traveled to the old abandoned mining town of Chloride in an old military surplus jeep that would barely travel 35 miles per hour and it took us all day to get there.

We spent the night there in an old abandoned cabin and during the night I dreamed that a huge black bear was attacking the old cabin in which we were sleeping. I woke up screaming and it took me a long time to return to sleep and I didn't sleep well the rest of the night. The next day we ate breakfast and climbed back in the old jeep and began the climbing winding trip back into the Beaverhead country near the area where the Warm Springs Band of the Chiricahua Apache lived and cherished before they were forced onto reservations by the government.

Such a beautiful place they called Hermosillo, it still stands out as one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen upon this earth, and a place I wish to visit again before I die. We unloaded our gear and set up camp at the base of Big Brushy Mountain and began to hunt up the ridges running up the sides of the mountain, but it was really hard to see anything because the underbrush was so dense.

It took us about two hours to slowly climb the mountain, we heard deer, but we could not see them. I was carrying an old Model 94 Winchester lever action rifle, the kind John Wayne always carried in his western movies, and when my dad and I cleared the brush and came out onto the clearing on the top of the mountain, I suddenly saw about fifteen deer running down a slope on the other side of a deep canon.

My Dad later described what happened by saying he heard me scream, "Deer" as I levered the first round into the rifle from it's magazine and then began firing at the deer from the hip, never looking through the sights, as fast as I could lever the action and then pull the trigger, until the gun was empty after firing seven rounds in rapid succession never hitting anything.

My Dad was lying prostrate on the ground laughing so hard that he had tears in his eyes. He must have laughed for a full five minutes, but when he could speak he asked me, "T" what were you shooting at? I said, "Didn't you see those deer across the canon?" He said, "I saw them, but the distance to their location must have been a good one thousand yards, you never could have hit one at that distance with your little 30-30 caliber rifle, especially so shooting from the hip and not using the sights.

I had just experienced my first and last case of "buck fever", and it was one story that my dad used to love to tell on me from that day forward, especially when I was a "big bad cop" as he called me. Well we never killed a buck deer, the deer I saw were the only ones we saw the whole trip, but just being there with my Dad is a prescious memory that no one can ever take away. I am greatful for my Dad who took the time to teach me how to hunt and how to take an animal in a fair chase. God bless you Dad, I know you are busy where you are.