>>574599The 'Sit and wait' kinda hunting never stuck with me. There's barely any challenge to that; no 'hunt' has taken place. I live in the west as well, don't get me wrong, but every animal I've gone after (except for a very small few) has been an on-foot spot, stalk, then shot. Recently I had an antelope hunt in Nevada. My step-dad -an avid hunter who's still at it in his late fifties- accompanied me. We woke up at 4:00 am and drove out to our unit. We spent several hours driving up and down a road on Cherry Creek, spotting out the different antelope that we'd seen a couple weeks back. We were looking for one in particular that just wasn't showing that day. The next day, we went on the other side of Cherry Creek and spotted our antelope. This was great and all, except it was 2000 yards away across a dry grass field with some high hills in the back. We decided to go for it. As soon as we got out of the car, the antelope started walking back towards these hills. They made a mistake though; there was a small hill line in front of the large hills that obscured their view of us as they moved back. We slowly crept up on them over the 2000 yards, being careful that they didn't pop their heads over and see us. After getting to the apex of this small hill, we spotted them, and they looked toward us. They weren't spooked, however, so we stood still as statues for a good 3 minutes until they loosened up a bit. We then set up the 30-06 rifle on its bi-pod. I was taking some deep, quiet breaths to shallow out the buck fever to get the crosshair resting on the buck's heart. The whole time my step-dad was quietly rushing me, telling me to shoot it. After about 15 seconds of reassuring myself of my shot, I shot! It reared up, then fell over. A clean shot to the heart.
That was the most exciting hunt I've had in a long time, and I'd MUCH rather have the spot, stalk, and shot method of hunting. To me, to my step-dad, to my whole family, THAT'S a REAL hunt.
