Palouse Outdoors:Montana Mule Deer Adventures

The stainless carafe made a metallic thud as it slammed onto the pine booth tabletop. The urethane coating had worn away over the years, as has the luster of this and other small Montana towns whose economy has waned and the youth have fled.

Her nametag read "Betty," so I assumed that was accurate. Built like Mimi from the Drew Carey Show, she was robust with heavy makeup, voluptuous brunette hair with silver streaks, and an attitude that could make dried paint run. I hoped there was hot coffee in the carafe and prayed that it found the cracked porcelain mug on the table rather than my face or lap.

Faded posters of former rodeo queens and John Deere and Gleaner combines of yesteryear decorated the wood paneled walls of what was likely a hopping café in a former life. An aging couple sat speechless at a booth across the way. The weathered cowboy wore a dust-stained straw Stetson and plunked on his smartphone, the deep lines across his dark face made more evident by his labored vision. His wife stared at him expectantly, though I suspect there was little to discuss these days.

Betty gabbed incessantly at another woman, spewing hate speech about numerous people who may or may not have betrayed her at some point. She knew these people well based on the information she divulged freely to the café patrons, a hazard of living in an excruciatingly small town. She may have reasoned that the sins of those she chastened were known to the regulars, and the gossip meant nothing to the rest of us who were passing through. The gal she gossiped with may have been a fellow waitress or just as easily a sister or cousin. Neither had any interest in waiting on tables.

Betty somehow managed to dump coffee into my and Bill's cups without so much as a glance in our direction. I didn't dare ask for cream.

"What do you boys want?" Betty growled as if Bill and I were regulars who had memorized the menu. The other patrons nervously looked on.

"Two eggs over easy with wheat toast and hashbrowns," I replied, guessing basic breakfast foods would be available.

Betty shot Bill a look from the corner of her eye, which unnerved him.

"I'll have the same," Bill squeaked.

"How original," I chided. Betty, unimpressed by my sarcasm, stormed into the kitchen.

I had lost my appetite and merely hoped that requesting food would remove Betty from the table long enough for Bill and I to swallow our coffee, throw down a $20, and escape unscathed before the Hotel California voices began to sing from the kitchen corridor, and Betty returned with a large meat carving knife.

Montana deer tags had brought us nearly to North Dakota into an area we had learned of a few years prior. Deer numbers were down, and the hunt was getting long in the tooth, particularly with the change in weather. Like most hunting adventures, we had experienced everything Mother Nature had to offer – warm and sunny, cool and rainy, freezing fog, and abysmally cold and windy. Outside the cafe, the wind howled over 30 miles per hour, carrying sideways snow through a bitter 16 degrees.

"Do you think Don and Andy found a buck this morning?" Bill asked.

"I hope so, lest they freeze to death. Damn fools. No deer is worth enduring this weather. Besides, we've two days left. Plenty of time to lay down a good buck." Ironic was this wisdom from a guy dubbed "Brad Littlebuck."

The clanking of steel cookware and annoyed obscenities drifted from the kitchen, followed by Betty bursting through the swinging doors carrying our plates. She slung the plates onto the table with the grace of a drive-by shooting – a technique she had perfected over the years – just hard enough to cause a scene and shift the plates' contents to the far side, just short of spillage. I noticed the plates were plastic, like grade school lunchroom ware, sturdy enough to handle even Betty's antics.

Bill and I inhaled our meals with one wary eye on Betty and the other on the aggressive arctic blast screaming beyond the large glass pane sporting a small-caliber bullet hole. We had the good sense to keep quiet about our runny egg whites.

With breakfast consumed and Betty preoccupied, we dug cash from our wallets, left a small heap on the table, and muscled our way through the wind to the truck. The others in the café watched as we made our break, their eyes asking us to save them from the beginning of winter's groundhog days. The sun was also breaking from the snowstorm, which must have given Bill a peculiar sense of hope.

"If the sun comes out, it just might warm up enough to take a walk."

I glanced at Bill as if he had three heads. High wind and temps in the teens leave little room for warming sufficient to sucker a guy out of a cozy truck cab into a version of a frozen Mount Everest nightmare. Still, Bill had a point. Without a hunt, we were in for a long, uneventful day.

"Let's head back to that eastern Block Management Area. If nothing else, we can run White-tail Loop and maybe spot that big buck you and Andi saw chasing a doe the other night."

Bucks were chasing despite the bitter cold, which brightened our spirits. We stopped to film a few on private land, mostly to stall on suffering through the conditions. The resilience of wildlife is awe-inspiring, but I suppose if you're going to be miserable, it's better to be active through the worst of it.

My left eye twitched slightly as we rounded a corner on White-tail Loop onto state ground. Two days prior, a beautiful 4x4 muley stood broadside, wide open, 300 yards from the road as we drove through. He watched as I stepped from the truck, crossed the rusted barbed wire fence, made a prone rifle rest, and Bill trained the video camera on him for a perfect shot. Unfortunately, the sizeable 3x3 I had missed two hours prior on a seven-mile hike in the rain got into my head, and I shot well under that second buck. He only gets bigger each time we replay the footage. Sadly, he was nowhere to be seen a second time.

The wind had finally chased the snow out of the country when Bill and I rolled up to nether regions of Block Management and Bureau of Land Management parcels, mere spitting distance from the Little Missouri National Grasslands. We had nothing better to do than build hope that the sun's warmth would sap the sting from the air and keep the deer on their feet for easy spotting. Against my better judgment, I layered up, donned my frame pack, loaded my 7mm magnum bolt action, and set out across the frozen wheatfield.

Not 100 yards from the truck, my ears felt encased in razor blades, and the sides of my head throbbed. The wind cut directly into and around my facemask as we trudged straight into it.

Brad Trumbo

Freezing temperatures and high wind were routine on the Hi-Line and required bundling up to endure the conditions.

"This is not sustainable," I thought. I was fully prepared for another seven-mile day as I stepped from the toasty truck cab, but this ole boy was no match for a Montana Hi-Line winter blast, and I made no attempt to hide my misery "like a man."

A shallow draw was less than 200 yards ahead and would likely offer a wind break sufficient to layer up my head protection. As Bill and I dropped into the bottom, I stripped my pack, found another winter hat, and stretched it over my ears beneath the facemask. The throbbing in my skull ceased almost immediately, restoring my faith in being able to hike until I punched my tag.

The finger draw we walked from east to west entered the main north-south running draw less than 100 yards later. Easing in and glancing to my left, a muley buck stood in his bed, soaking up the sun just beyond the shadow of the draw bottom. He was close, about 80 yards. Close enough that reaching for the rangefinder never crossed my mind. His antlers were obvious, as was his young age, but his forked antler was visible to the naked eye, which was enough for me.

"I think you can do better if you want to," Bill said, like any good friend and cameraman who tagged out on a fine 4x5 two days in and didn't want to be the reason we wimped out on a miserable freezing hunt. But Bill knows me well enough that he had the camera trained on the buck and rolling immediately.

"I don't care!" I whispered while seating the gunstock into the shooting sticks.

Being a scientist has its advantages, and while I never thought I would say this, the myriad collegiate calculus classes have benefitted me well over the years, mostly in deer hunting calculus. Deer hunting calculus is a curriculum all its own, and the equation functions much like a physics word problem where qualitative nonsense can somehow be mashed together to solve for quantitative variables. In this case, the equation determines whether to shoot or not.

When that young buck appeared, the variables of wind chill, number of days hunted, number of days remaining in the hunt, over 35 miles hiked throughout the week, two big bucks missed, only one day left to hunt sharp-tailed grouse, and the buck standing in a sheltered, sun-soaked draw only 1/3 of a mile from the truck lined up like triple sevens in a slot machine. The equation was subconsciously solved upon the first sunray glistening from the young buck's antler beam. Moments later, we stood over my beautiful 2x3 muley.

Brad Trumbo

A young mule deer buck keeps tabs on a doe in estrus as the small herd feeds.

"Littlebuck strikes again," Bill said as we high-fived.

"He'll be a fine-eating buck," I replied through a toothy grin. "Now, let's get back to the truck!"