As I mentioned briefly, I did redeem myself from my miss in Wyoming! And wow, what an awesome hunt! I had arranged an elk hunt through San Miguel Outdoors with Rodney Prince of Rawhide Outfitters, Inc near Cimarron, New Mexico. And after the first morning’s elk hunt, Realtree cameraman “Squeedunk” Viars and I realized this could be tough. We did hear and eventually see a couple of herd bulls...but they had 70-90 cows with each of them!

Now, I’m not an elk hunting expert but I did the math. We were in for a tough deal, especially trying to get good video.

Driving back into town after that first morning hunt, Rodney and I spotted a group of mule deer feeding in a field along a small river. Upon closer inspection, we could tell there was a couple of really nice bucks in the group.

I asked Rodney what it would take to draw a mule deer tag in that unit and he quickly stated that it was private land and that he had access to tags if I was willing to purchase a license and tag to hunt one of them. And honestly, I didn’t know what to do ...for about an hour!

I, once again, quickly assessed the elk hunting and concluded that we could still hunt elk in the mornings and evenings when they were active and hunt the mule deer after the elk had gone to bed for the day. It sounded like a plan so we drove up to Raton to buy my license and I was fixing to go mule deer hunting!

On the second day, as we were headed out to elk hunt, we made a trip by the river and lo and behold we saw two bucks feeding and we had the wind perfect! Squeedunk and I also had cover to work with and if we played our cards right we could end up about 50 yards from the bucks.

As I glassed the pair, I realized the bigger one was one of the bucks we’d seen the first day. He was awesome! Sure enough, we belly crawled as far as we could, set up in a cane thicket and hoped that they wouldn’t feed away from us. The big buck was at 54 yards but was feeding directly away from me. Plus, I wasn’t crazy about taking a shot that far especially since we had a 15-20 mph cross wind.

Then, the bucks turned and fed back toward us. The MAX-1 did an AWESOME job! Several times the bucks looked at us but couldn’t make us out.

Finally, at 43 yards the big buck turned broadside. I firmly anchored and focused. I was determined not to rush my shot as I had done in Wyoming.

After releasing the arrow, I immediately knew I had made a good hit and I had scored for the first time this year! What a feeling! And he’s a good buck! The G5 Striker did it’s job.

Go ahead. Make fun of my stabilizer. But doggone it feels good on my BowTech!