I've got a December cow tag in the valley that I want my 9yr old to punch for me, so I was not the trigger man this time. If I was, we would have gotten a nice bull, and only 2 miles from the truck with barely a mile of that being swampy. The designated trigger man (who I owed for packing out 1/2 of my first moose) got bull fever and spent a legit +1 minute with a ~55" 3x2 brow bull broadside because he was fumbling with his rangefinder. I had time to: (i) stand up from my nap, (ii) find the bull (trigger man spotted it), (iii) determine it was clearly legal, (iv) take 5 steps to start setting up my phone skope to film it for trigger man, (v) look back and see him dicking around with the zipper on his coat, (vi) whisper yell "WTF are you doing? grab your gun and shoot him!", (vii) argue with trigger man why he didn't need to know the EXACT range since he said he was good to 300 yards and it was obviously way under that, (viii) walk the 15 steps over and pick up trigger man's gun and hand it to him, (ix) set up a shooting rest, (x) curse triggerman out urging him to just put a bullet in it, the target is the size of a basketball backboard, (xi) set back up on my binos to verify shot placement.
Triggerman finally says "he's at 254 yards" and picks up his gun (which he set down after I first handed it to him), chamber a round and watch the bull step into the thick alders before triggerman could shoulder the rifle. JFC I was mad. We repositioned hoping to see the bull pop out on the other side. But, the bull was just hanging out in the thick stuff giving us the occasional glimpse of the back half of one of his paddles, and so we sat and waited. Wind was perfect, sun at our back, we just needed him to step out of a 20x30yard patch of alders. After an hour or so, the bull decided to boogey and took off without giving any shots.
Then my truck decided to try becoming a submarine since the creek rose a LOT while we were up the ridge. That did not go well. Managed to get back up and running thanks to an incredible buddy, and we kept hunting but only saw another cow. Couldn't make it back to my spot since the creeks kept getting worse.
I'm still pretty pissed about it. Sure, we'd have been extra f'd had we killed that bull and HAD to keep going back and forth across what quickly became a serious whitewater river. BUT we would have at least killed that bull. Recovery would have been hypothetical-then-future johnnycake's problem and that poor bastard always manages to figure something out.
alaskapublic.org
