North Dakota Recap, Part 2

Read the first leg of the trip here!

With our full limit of cock, er, pheasant, in the bag, the four of us headed due north from Onida, South Dakota to White Earth, North Dakota.  This wasn’t to long after the big snowstorm in western North Dakota so despite our expectations of huge snowbanks and tough ground to hunt, it turned out to be not so bad.  That is, if 14-degree temperatures and 40mph winds are not “so bad”.

The occasion this year was the “Allie Enget Memorial Deer Hunt”.  Allie was the father of my good friend Aaron from Colorado and Allie passed away last fall.  Shortly after one of our earlier elk hunts, in 2003, my own father passed away and the third member of the Doubletough triumvirate, John Tripp, lost his father several years before that.  So these trips are as much a celebration of our own friendship as it is an homage to the lessons and love of the outdoors and hunting our fathers passed to us.  And with that, as surely someone in our group would say, “enough with the milky toast, get on with the story”…..

Hunting NoDak-style is quite a bit different than how we do it in North Carolina.  There’s no baiting allowed, and deer are run with people rather than dogs.  Friends and family come from miles around for what is truly a group effort;  we had anywhere from a half dozen to twenty people with us during the four day hunt.  Hunters would line the tops of coolies, valleys or gullies while other hunters would walk the bottoms with the intention of pushing down out of their bedding areas into the open.  We saw a lot of deer using this technique but you had to be quick on the trigger and have a steady hand.  The photo above is of a mule doe taken at about 100 yards after we drove over to the top of a coolie.  She was with several other does and a dandy buck but was the only taken from the group.  

I knocked down a whitetail doe the first day and by the end of the hunt, we had 9 deer on the ground, including this big 8-point whitetail taken by Bubba Enget of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.  He shot it at just over 400 yards and a second shot at around 200 yards entered below the left ear and exiting the right eye socket. 

On the last day we skinned, boned, ground and hand-mixed sausage for most of the day.  Somehow ol’ Bubba wound up with most of it, but each of us managed to leave with a couple backstraps, roasts, jalapeno & cheese brats or polish sausage.  This was my second trip to White Earth for this hunt and the family atmosphere and group participation in every aspect is a real treat.

The return to North Carolina involved a 14-hour, 700 mile trip to Colorado, followed by a 31-hour, 2000 mile trip home.  I still have the shakes from running the last 1400 miles from Amarillo, 23.5 hours, straight.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and for those with just a few weeks left in the hunting season, how about taking along a family member!

Tags: mule deer North Dakota whitetail deer