The story of this deer started in September, my first sighting. While driving to work in mid- September not more than a mile from my front door I watched three bucks cross the gravel road 50 yards in front of my pickup, as I watched them jump the fence and jog slowly away from me. I stared in confusion thinking, why is there a mule deer buck traveling with two whitetails? Then reality set in! Looking at this deer from the back, seeing his width and height put disbelief in me of what I had just seen, Holy S$#t!! That was a whitetail! 

Backstory, I pretty much stopped hunting years back after seeing the devastation on the whitetail population from years of disease wiping out nearly all the deer on my father’s family ranch. Earlier in the year, I watched from my house, which sits on a hill overlooking the Yellowstone River as the spring thaw created an ice jam, flooding hundreds of acres of heavily wooded river bottom. Escaping the flood, row after row of whitetail followed the elevated irrigation ditches to higher ground, forcing them back into the rolling hills and cropland surrounding the ranch. We finally had some whitetails back in the country.