Our hunt began on the 8,000-acre Tope Ranch in Wyoming, just a 10-minute drive from Watkins' comfortable ranch house-cum-hunting lodge. I was guided by Watkins' son Richard, a full-time National Guardsman out of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Jake Jacobs of Weaver Optics was my hunting partner for the first part of the week. Right at first light, we spotted a good whitetail, along with a couple smaller bucks and does, in a hay field. We hustled out of the truck to try and get set up for a shot, but by the time we did, the buck had fed down over a hill. We moved a few hundred yards to our left, thinking that he might swing around into the bowl below us, but he had apparently gone straight down into a wooded draw and disappeared. Rather than go after him and risk pushing him to the extent that we never saw him again, we got back in the truck and drove around the ranch, stopping occasionally to glass. Hunting from a truck gives Watkins' customers their best chance to see the most deer. For one, the deer are accustomed to ranch trucks and don't spook at the sight of them. Second, given the size of the ranches Watkins leases, you could walk and hunt all day and see but a fraction of the property…and a fraction of the deer.
We headed back to the Tope Ranch, in search of a buck for Jake to put his tag on. Once again we saw whitetails in the hay field at first light, but this morning there was nothing worth chasing, so we continued on around the backside of a hill where we'd seen a very wide 3×4 mule deer the day before, which Jake and I had both passed on. I had done so because I was hoping to tag a whitetail in Wyoming (which I ultimately did about an hour later). Jake passed because he would never have heard the end of it if he shot a deer before his "guest." But Jake had never shot a mule deer before, and this guy would make a hell of a first one, so the search was on.
With Jake and me both tagged out in Wyoming, it was on to Montana. After two beautiful bluebird days with temperatures in the low 50s, Day 3 felt much more like deer hunting weather: freezing fog, drizzle and temps in the mid 30s. The day had a promising start when we saw a big, mature mule deer around 6:45 a.m., just over the fence on the neighboring ranch, standing and looking at us from about 70 yards away. But after a few minutes he turned and walked away. We drove and glassed and drove some more, covering various terrain features before driving across a deep dry creek bed and into a low willowy area. We were driving along the edge of the woods and about to go around a bend into a pasture when Richard hit the brakes. Lying just inside the wood line was a beautiful, high-racked 4×4 whitetail.
With Jake now tagged out, I had a new hunting partner on Day 4, as both Drew Goodlin of Federal Ammunition and I were still carrying un-notched Montana tags. We drove to the western edge of the Arpan Ranch, just a few miles from camp, drove through the gate and waited for it to get light. It had snowed about an inch overnight and was still overcast with some flurries. When shooting light finally arrived we started forth, drove a quarter mile or so, and crested a rise in the road when Drew, from the back seat, called out, "Does!" Richard and I quickly spotted them, standing 70 yards in front of us among some trees to the right of where the road cut through the timber. About a second later, Rich said with urgency, "Big buck! Shoot that buck! I can't tell what he has, but he's heavy!"
I was back with Drew on the coldest morning of our hunt, when temperatures struggled to keep their head above zero. We started out checking on a group of about 35 whitetails we'd seen in a field on the Arpan Ranch the night before. Some were there, but we didn't see the biggest buck we'd spotted the previous evening, so it was back to the ranch where Jake had killed his whitetail on Day 3. The cold weather had clearly turned on the deer, because before long we saw a decent whitetail sprinting across an open field and into a wooded creek bottom. We drove over to where we'd last seen him, but there was no sign of the buck, so we spun around and continued down the treeline. Within minutes we witnessed yet another buck, this one better than the last, chasing a doe across the open pasture and into a creek bottom.
As I mentioned earlier, I was shooting Federal's 200-grain Fusion ammo in .338 Federal. This is an awesome all-around big game cartridge that performed well at both 70 and 270 yards. It has less recoil than a 7mm Rem. Mag. or .300 Win. Mag., but still musters a muzzle velocity of 2,700 fps, about 2,500 fps at 100 yards, and roughly 2,000 fps at 300 yards. As far as foot-pounds of energy, we're looking at 3,237 at the muzzle, 2,746 at 100 yards, and 1,940 at 300. If you zero your scope at 100 yards, you'll see about 4 inches of drop at 200 yards and 15 inches at 300.
OL’s Senior Editor John Taranto traveled to the Montana/Wyoming borderland for the unique opportunity to take a whitetail and mule deer in one hunt.