yotebuster

Not more then $200, but I'll give you $300 for it J/K... I would think a gun like that should be worth around 400-450 bucks. That is a sweet caliber, it was way ahead of its time, but in my opinion is the absolute perfect deer round. My dad had one in a Pre-64 model 70, unfortunately it burnt up in a fire, but he always said the 120gr. were the only way to go... If I'm not mistaken 140's are the only factory load made for it... But... go to www.thehuntingshack.com, they custom load ammo, and it is surprisingly cheaper then factory ammo, if I remember right, they make a wicked 120gr. load for .264 Win mag... Oh and let me know if you want to sell it, I'd be interested, of course get a few more opinions on what its worth!

I've seen that in sheep back home, a lot of times it had to do with what they were eating, they call it "foundering" or "floundering" never could hear what the old ranchers were actaully saying! Maybe they got a bunch of rain or something in the area and it caused some better forage then normal? An abnormally high protein diet is the cause I think, the only way to fix it once they get really long is to trim them (on the sheep anyhow!). Funny the lions or coyotes didn't make lunch out of him before you got him!

How do I get signed up for one of these? I'm sure this is on another thread somewhere, but just a quick idea would be good, I'm in the NW valley if that helps. Yote

Hey, I'll take the maps, I'm new to AZ, that looks like a pretty good selection of maps to get me started in any direction from Phoenix!!! Shoot me a message if you still have them, thanks

2118, my lucky number

When the snow gets real deep back home, herds of deer use the train tracks for a travel route, if they are in a particularly deep drift area (5-10ft) the deer can't get off the tracks when a train is coming and get wiped out, the winter of 97 we got dumped on, and I heard stories of trains going through herds of 15-20 deer at a time. They put a huge plow on the front to wipe out drifts (and deer) I could easily see that sending a deer a long ways!!

One that I'm working on right now for the 4th time is "Meditations on Hunting" by Jose Ortega y Gasset. It is a MUST Read for all hunters in my opinion. y Gasset was a spanish philosopher in the 1940's that did works on all sorts of crap, but he really hit a home run when he wrote this one, he was a non-hunter, but wanted to understand the drive that humans have to hunt. It is an incredible book, fairly short, and full of insight on exactly why we love to do what we do. I like being fluent in it cause you can make any nonhunter look like a complete jack_ss using your brain rather then anger, you all should seriously check it out. And no he doesn't state that we are primordle hunters trying to break free of a shell, but rather that we've picked hunting as a sport to retreat to from the daily grind of our lives. This really helped me in my quest to figure out whether I was truly doing the right thing by trophy hunting, and it truly is a natural thing to trophy hunt, handicap ourselves (ex. bows) etc.

Who can I send them too? While new to hunting AZ, we're going through the exact same battle in ND, the G&F is trying to get our congress to vote it in so they don't have to field the backlash after they put it into play, they've been showering the hunting and general public with anti-baiting propaganda for the last year now, even included a pamphlet called "Implications of Baiting Big Game" with every license they sold, it was supposed to be non-biased, but as you can tell by the title, it wasn't quite that way!!! I should post it on here, the cover has a heard of deer standing in at least a truck load of corn in a giant pile. Next thing you know they'll be dumping them out of an airplane with a fake $100 bill printed on one side. It's all because of two G&F employees with a vendetta. My friends and family played a big part in fighting it down two years ago, so keep you're opinions flowing in, but I'm afraid this year the G&F's full on biased non-scientific campaign is gonna win. Good luck to ya'll down here, and give me a contact that I can send my emails to, I'll spread the word back home, get some non-residents in on the tally! P.S.- if you are anti-baiting, please don't lecture me, I'm sure there's another thread to argue that on...

Very cool, its idiots like them that make me sick though, thankfully they let the lion finish that deer, but who the heck worries about going to the bathroom or getting back to hiking after witnessing a spectacle like that? Just goes to show how completely out of touch with reality some people really are.

Twice...

Bill, Isn't it amazing what one gov't employee with an agenda can cause!!! Back in ND, about ten years ago, we had a Game and Fish Dept. biologist that had a personal vendeta against bowhunting, and he actually singlehandedly got the Archery Antelope season closed for a year! Don't ask me how he did it, his reasoning was (he stated) that the does weren't getting bred becasue of the rut season dates (gun season is in october after the rut), but at that time, in ND, bowhuting for goats was a new fad, that had barely caught on. There were less than 200 tags sold statewide (OTC) and fewer than 25 animals harvested the year before, so it got no resistance or headlines until the 200 guys who were into it tried to buy tags the next year!!! Well, it was repealed the following year, but it just blew my mind that one person with a personal agenda could make such a change..... Really scares me when I think about what Obama Clinton could do!!!!!

although the mother will start to push the fawns away, its usually the bucks that run the fawns off in the rut, in an attempt to isolate the doe when she comes into heat, kind of natures way of weaning the fawns off I guess. A zoology degree and having raised whitetails since I was a kid has filled my head with tons of useless information on the behavior of whitetails I guess!

Back home where our deer density is very high, they fight on their hind feet all the time. It is actually much more prevalent when they have fawns, the does get more territorial, I suppose to save the best browse for themselves and their fawns. Bucks will do it too, when they are in velvet especially. My father and I raise whitetails back home, one year we let a couple breeder bucks back together way after the rut (febuary) after they dropped their antlers. I was in the pen when they came together, and they were on their back feet for at least 20 minutes going at it with each other, they never dropped down to all fours the whole time, it was amazing. I tried to break them up, but a 325lb whitetail buck standing on his hind feet is all of 9 feet tall, and its a pretty intimidating sight! It's pretty incredible the power they have, even trying to hold down a partially sedated doe to do vet work on her is unreal, they have so much more power then we do, its very belittling. You don't realize how feable creatures we are until you try to handle a powerful animal like that that weighs the same as you do! Anyhow, thats very cool that you were able to watch that spectacle in the wild, sounds like an amazing morning!

Ok, so I'm e-scouting for next year, going off your guys' advice, heres my application strategy for the first 5 choices: 1. unit 36Z 2. unit 45 3. unit 26M rifle 4. unit 9 5. unit 44 Would you guys put in for the March hunt or the June hunt???? Not looking for any honeyholes, just a general idea... and maybe GPS coordinates.

Thats an amazing story!!!! I always think of that in the back of my head, kinda half hoping a lion trys to take my deer away!! I'm always prepared if not over prepared!! Congrats!!!

Personally I prefer a 140 gr. accubond sitting on top of 82gr. of 7828 SSC coming out of my 7mm STW. I don't have any idea how fast its going, but it gets there just in time to kill the crap out of whatever I shoot it at!!! My thought is, I would rather have an animal with a .28" entry and a .50" exit that is dead FOR SURE (might run a bit if its through the ribs), then risk anything else. Yes you may kill faster with rapid expansion, but why risk it just to see them drop? I like being able to pick up my gun and shoot anything from coyotes (its actually very nice to pelts!) to buffalo without changing bullets. I know none of you would consider going after a buffalo or brown bear with a VLD or ballistic tip, so why get good with a bullet that you can't use for everything, and then have to switch when you decide to go after very large game? I have shot a lot of big bodied ND bucks with 140gr. ballistic tips,(before accubonds came around), and all of them were out scout, actually all of the bullets exited too, sometimes leaving a softball size hole, but I think we owe it to the animal to prepare for a worst case scenario, and use the bullet that will handle that best. If you take out the heart or lungs, even if it is a .5" hole, that animal is dead, 100% of the time, if you dump 1500ft lbs. of energy into his shoulder blade and don't get the lungs (highly unlikely I know, but possible), you're gonna have a bad day, and the animal a much much worse one.

I will admit, those folks in Montana are about as nice as they come, with the exception of us ND fellas! I will tell though, if you wanna see nice people, go to Saskatchewan. If you stop in to a farm to ask permission to hunt, pretty soon you're sitting down to a home cooked meal and a cold canadian brew. It actually becomes kind of problematic as its hard to get any hunting done without feeling rude about not staying to chat!!! I have to admit there are a ton of nice folks down here though, there just happens to be quite a few more pricks mixed in with them then back home.

Headed out early this morning with the shotgun and AR-15, looking to explore the countryside a bit. Went north of Glendale on 17, then jumped off and bumbled into the darkness not exactly sure what I was after!!! Found a nice looking canyone at daybreak that allegedly had a spring a half mile up it (according to my sorry map!). Hiked in about a half mile with the AR and a predator call. Set up overlooking the canyon, and just barely got going on my first set when this fox came roaring in!! I'd never seen a gray fox before, but had a pretty good idea that was what it was. Stopped him at 75 yards, for a nice chest shot, but unfortunately my 50 gr. Vmax exited his back on the other side, messed his hide up really bad! I was ecstatic to have success in my first 30 minutes of hunting in AZ, but sad that I couldn't salvage my first gray fox. Loaded up the .12 gauge and made my way up the next canyon, bumped a huge covey of quail (75 atleast is that normal?) They flushed to far for a shot, but lit in the side of the canyon above me, (which turned out to be more like a cliff covered in prickly pear!). I naturally clawed my way up to them, but they made a complete idiot out of me as I gasped for air and tried to shoot at them! I missed a few before I was able to get my breath and killed one. I ended up picking a few more up after that, which was plenty to make this guy happy!!! Didn't see any deer, and no tracks at any of the springs and tanks I saw. This surprised me as the country I was in looked excellent for deer. I didn't do a lot of hard glassing, but thought I would have bumped into something in the course of the day. It was a lot of fun, I'm definitely gonna get back up there and try it again, only this time I'm gonna get above the quail before I try to flush 'em!!!

Haha, I have an aunt in Wessington Springs! Don't know the folks you speak of, but I'm sure my aunt and uncle do. Thats beautiful country along the missouri river, unbelievable hunting in there too! My cousin killed a 200" muley with his bow a few years back west of wessington springs, he had some POS 1982 model Jennings with 5 mismatched arrows, an accident waiting to happen, goes out his first time and shoots this pig in the neck, drops it in its tracks... anyhow, nice area, nice people, beautiful roosters! Look like wild birds too! More and more of the lodges down in that country are stocking roosters. Not to much wrong with stocked birds I guess, but its kinda nice to know you are shooting wild birds! Kinda like stocked fish, they both bite, fight and taste good, but its cooler knowing someone didn't raise it before you hunted it. The stocked ones do a lot more cackling when they get up though, gotta love that!

Where'd you hunt? Not trying to find out your spot, so don't tell me if you don't want to, just curious as my mom and her 12 brothers and sisters are from north central SD (land of huge catholic families!!!). They've since dispersed and had a bunch of kids of their own, who've had a bunch of kids of their own, so I'm most likely related to someone where you hunted!!! Thank god my dad decided to move us to ND!!!

Haha, I'm not one of those guys, but I did take my dads 30-378 wby to the range back home one day to sight it in for an elk hunt, this bad boy has a break on the end that looks like an anti-aircraft gun. Anyhow, there were only a couple other guys there, so before I shot it I said "you fellas may wanna back up a few feet", cause dad told me its loud as heck. When I touched the first one off, I knocked all of the barn swallow nests off of the roof!!! The mud from them fell all over the place! It was pretty funny, I absolutelly hate muzzlebreaks, after using that thing at the range I figured I'd go back to my smooth barreled 7 STW instead!!

Yeah, I did a little recon on my map and google earth and found a neat little place, sure you've been there. The quail definitely like that area as the wash was full of tracks, it would be fun as heck with a dog, those dang things wore this flatlander out! Fortunately I was able to retrieve every bird I downed, I could see them being impossible if they werent killed DEAD. I'm excited to cook those bad boys up, remind me of little Hungarian Partridge, which are my favorite bird on the table by far! Thanks for the advice Rob, we'll have to go back up there and clean up the rest of the varmints too, lots and lots of tracks, I need someone to run shotgun for me, this is way different than hunting the open pastures like back home!

I didn't do it!!!!!!

Holy cow!!! I dropped my keys at that same water hole last week, having a hard time remembering where it was. If you could just send me the GPS coordinates so I could go out there and grab my keys that'd be greeeaat...

I'd say big old whitetail, but I'm not an expert with y'alls deer down here yet. We have whitey and muleys at home too, if I found it up there, there'd be no question its a whitetail. It'd be one heavy butt muley thats for sure!!! With killer eyeguards to boot!