You all know that I like to get up in the mountains in the winter and see the animals that know better than to come out during hunting season. I think it’s just outstanding that I have someone to share that with now, not to mention someone to help get the truck out of the snowbank (where he stuck it.)

So we packed our lunch and headed for the hills before daylight to see what we could see. Early winter is a great time to go up, as the deer are in the rut and they couldn’t care less who’s around; they just want to get them some. The weather has brought the big bucks down from the high country, but the snow wasn’t so deep that we couldn’t get in to most of where we wanted.

And we sure enough found deer; for once, we saw more bucks than does. The does were being somewhat more sensible, but the males were all addled. We hunted strictly with the camera, and discovered that there are trophy animals in California after all. You doubt that, after a while, but they’re here.

It’s a ton of fun to watch their behavior when they don’t care who’s watching. We didn’t actually get to see any getting it on, but we sure saw them trying for it, the big morons.

This one was by far the best. He caught Junior’s eye just at the corner of his attention, and I have no idea how. We’d already gone past him and he wasn’t moving at all, but something tweaked at his subconscious, because he backed up for a second look and there stood this monster. He had his body parallel to us but was facing away. He heard us, we could tell when he twitched an ear, but he didn’t care. It took whistling at him to make him acknowledge our presence and turn around.

And what a rack! The edges of their ears average about 24 inches wide, and even though his ears weren’t out straight, he was well beyond that size. Junior thinks he might have been a 28-inch buck, better than anything he’s shot in Colorado.

He was a confident old bastard, and a tough one. If you zoom in, you can see that he’s got some damage done to his right eye, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He just stood there for a good five or ten minutes, watching us watching him, before he calmly walked behind a little more cover. He acted like a buck unconcerned by vehicle noises, which probably paints him as a Yosemite buck, used to tourists snapping his portrait. Hell, he turned to give us both side views!

He’d have been a good trophy, but I think I’m just as glad that he was smart enough to avoid that, and to come down after season ended to spread his genes around. Those are some good genes; get to it, buddy!