XDA

I'm a bad wolf; I didn't commit Bambicide. I passed on some young bucks at about 80 yards and then took two shots in a rainstorm at 200 yards. Missed. I'm going to use the scoped rifle next time, which is soon, as this was just a warm up for elk hunting in about 3 weeks.

It's not like the trip was wasted though. Here are some sights and thoughts.
Above is a clay bank up near the Wyoming border.

Over the divide, the ranches are buttoning up and tucking in for the long winter to come--the big bales of hay are stacked under tarps or awnings and the cows are in the home fields because the next snow (falling as I left) will not be a throat clearing warm-up but will be the first notes of a cold aria that will last until April, that will freeze the fields and water holes, that will make the domesticated animals wholly dependent on hay, and that will lay white drifts in the mountains that won't melt until summer.

Along the creeks and streams the scrub willow has turned yellow, crimson and violet; as beautiful as any daubs of paint by Monet or Gauguin. The taller trees that have lost their leaves stand like ghosts. Just below the rocks that give Rabbit Ears Pass its name, the last gasp of Aspen have splashed two big streaks of gold, like an ancient rune. My vehicle's ground clearance is measured in mere inches so I couldn't take third and fourth rate roads too often but on one try, as I passed a broad spring, a thousand pliant, bare willow wands, thinner than pencils, stretched two and three feet from the ground, sigmoid curve, as red and hard as a whore's nails, and the sound of them tapping against my undercarriage was unique and disquieting, as if alien life forms were reaching to catch hold of my car.

Walking through wet sage, as potent and pleasant a perfume as any ambergris based concoction in Paris, I saw, sprinkled about, winter kill skeletons and ants nests of two types--the dead square yard around a large pile of tiny pebbles and the 20-inch high mound of leaf mold and pine tags. Two juvenile Bald Eagles strafed an area trying to get a bunny to run out of hiding. I loved watching them but I was mad that they distracted me from looking for deer. In a draw, as I stalked some does for the practice, just as I began to feel good about the lack of snakes in the area, I stepped on a large, long, cast off skin with belly scales two inches wide. More to worry about in a warmer time. I nearly stepped on a cottontail. The huge jack rabbits will run out in front of your care giving a head fake every other step until the rabbit finally decides one way or the other.

To the right is a twelve foot high cedar tree with a trunk you can't reach around. Something wrong with that growth pattern.

The area just west of Black Mountain, the near westernmost of the Elkhead Mountains, which teams with elk just preparing to migrate to winter near Maybelle, is dry and low hilled and nearly treeless between the Little Snake and the Yampa rivers. It takes a little while to appreciate its beauty. Featureless and God-forsaken waste come first to mind. The tallest things are the power poles which, in just two months, on every other one, will carry the hulking settled frames of dark brown Golden Eagles scanning the ground for carrion and juking jack rabbits just as we will be scanning for elk herds with the aid of Japanese optics.

After hours of seeing mule deer does and bucks with so small horns they barely qualified as antlered, just as the rainstorm caught up with me, a big male mule deer with four long tines per side of antlers came up behind me, just over my shoulder, up hill at the crest. I walked on and then crouched behind some sage and proceeded to load and lock, sight and then miss and miss again. The second shot was followed by what I thought was the thwack of impact, but there was no blood and hardly any prints in the mud to follow. I spent another two hours to make sure I hadn't wounded it and then saw it again about 600 years off prancing off in that feet together bounding gait without any difficulty downwind. No point in chasing him like they do in The Deer Hunter and The Last of the Mohicans, where deer hunting seems more a race than a stalk.

Steamboat Springs ski area, as if in a dream, to the left.