During the year, 1956, Dale Moore and I planned another one-day trip to hunt for deer, not far from Boise, on the nearby foot hills. We always referred to this area as the Boise Front. This was also the place where I first started hunting at the old age of twelve years. We did not need much time to get to where we wanted to hunt. We only had a few miles to drive up the Bogus Basin Road from town. There was an abandoned ranch, about a mile off the main road. From there we would walk to the hunting area. Deer can be found near where we parked the truck for the day. The terrain was just rolling foothills, with mostly sage brush and willow filled creek bottoms. Occasionally a spring would pop out of the ground on the hillside, causing a pocket of Willows to grow. Over the years some of these pockets would grow quite large. The willows were in their fall yellow colors and some of the leaves had fallen to the ground leaving bare patches here and there. The time of year was early October and this year it was unusually warm.
We walked for several hours. working up a pretty good sweat, without seeing so much as a fresh track. Finally, Dale and I split up to cover more country, when I approached a large willow patch on a hillside. The willows had grown there because of a spring seeping out to feed it. As I neared the lower part of the patch, a very large four-point buck burst out of the open hillside in front of me. I was carrying my .30-30 Winchester Model 94, and knew it would Shoot Straight. I held on a spot behind his head, and on the first shot, down he went in a heap. He was not going any further, so I didn’t even bother to shoot him again to finish him off.
Dale heard the shot and as so many times in the past, he knew very well that a deer must have walked out in front of me. I was still looking the buck over when he showed up. Together we could see the buck had been shot at before. We found four other wounds where someone had hit him but just barely. He had a crease on the rump, which just cut the hair, a rear ankle was broken, a crease was cut across the underside of the stomach and the fourth bullet got him squarely between the hind legs. He had lost must have lost his family jewels to that bullet. We surmised these near misses would not harm the meat. We were quite a long distance from the truck. The buck was large, and we would have a hard pack to get him out.
After Cleaning him out, we cut his head off to leave it behind. The antlers were too large and heavy to want to take them home. We had to lighten the load, as much as possible. We then cut him in half and away we went for the truck. Most of the trip was downhill, which helped but we still had to rest regularly. Each half would weigh over a hundred pounds or more. After much grunting and groaning we finally made it to the truck with our loads. We were both tired to the bone but happy to have us a nice deer to take home. The trip back to town did not take very long. We skinned the buck out at Dale’s, then hung him in his garage overnight. The next day Dale would take him to a meat processor to be Cut into steaks and such. We would split the cost and the meat between us. In a week or so we received the meat back from the butcher. We divided it between us as planned.
Dale was the first to notice how strong the meat was. You could hardly stay in the house while cooking it, it was really bad. I tried it on an early camping trip and it was worse than l thought. I conferred with Dale on what to do with it. We decided to have it all made into salami. Dale gathered it all up and took it to a place in Emmett to be processed. This turned out to be really good eating. It seems like the stronger the deer, the better the salami tastes. At least it wasn’t a total loss therefore we surmised the shot between the legs must have done harm to him after all.
Later in the fall I talked to Uncle Charlie March about getting a large buck on the Boise Front. He was in the area the day before we were and had shot at a large four point buck several times. He knew he had hit him a couple times, but he never went down. None of the four times the deer was hit would have killed him. He probably would not make it through the winter because of the broken ankle as it would prevent him from finding enough food, after the deep snow started falling. Dale and I would go out again before the season closes for him to get a deer, for his tag. I used mine on the buck, but I would go along to help him pack his deer out should he happen to shoot one.