In the fall of 1956, Dale Moore and I decided to go to the Boise Front to try for deer. The Boise Front is what we call the low foothills a few miles up the Bogus Basin Road, near town. We hunt this area several times each year until we fill our tags. Since we are a good hunting team, each of us goes with the other to help with packing the deer out. In early October, the weather is still fairly nice, just a little frosty at times, seldom any snow appears that early. The leaves on the willows are turning colors and the Balsa Root Spear Leaf plants are dry and crackly. We would avoid them, whenever possible. The noise from these Plants can be heard for a mile. We parked off the Bogus Basin Road near where we wanted to hunt. We made a big circle up past an old ranch towards the timber. There were a lot of tracks where deer had been out on the open hillsides feeding on bitter brush, but they were in hiding from when the sun came up. During the day, deer usually hang around the large bitter brush patches to lay where its cooler. They also plan an escape route in case they need it. I was walking down a fairly open ridge with feeder draws on both sides, checking for deer everywhere as I went. Dale was below me a hundred yards or so. I was crisscrossing the main ridge, so I could look down in the draws on each side, in case some deer were bedded down out of sight.
Suddenly, right beside me, out ran a four-point buck and a large doe. They went out into an open grassy flat, running hard. They probably had been shot at before and wanted to put some distance between them and me as fast as possible. I was carrying my .30-30 Winchester Mode1 94, so I started shooting at them. I was sure I had hit the buck, but he never went down. The doe split off in a different direction after the first fifty yards. I had shot several times at the buck, when Dale showed up beside me. He quickly picked up the buck, running across the grassy flat. His first shot hit him somewhere, because he went to his knees but regained his balance. After that there was no catching him at all. He was bounding forty to fifty feet at a jump. I was shooting at him, as well as Dale, and we were both hitting the ground way behind him. He was just simply flying, when he went off the point at the end of the grassy flat. We trailed him down the creek for about a half a mile, until he went through a herd of cattle. The cows spooked in all directions making tracks everywhere. This was where we lost him. We could not find his tracks at all. There were no blood spots anywhere either, therefore we had to give up and hope that he would be alright. After looking for an hour or so we went back up the hill to see if we could find the doe. She had joined up with another pair of does and all of them went for parts unknown. When spooked, they can cover a lot of miles in a hurry. Nothing left to do but head for the truck. We made another pass at where we last lost the buck trail but we still could not find any tracks. The afternoon was about gone, the sun was getting low in the west, We then headed for the truck. We talked and we laughed about the way the buck bounded down the hill. We had a good time and found some deer to shoot at. We called it a successful hunt despite not getting a deer, this time.