Antelope strikeout: Rare opportunity offers chances, but no shots


FELT, Okla. -- If I had drawn a tag for a pronghorn antelope buck, my hunt would have been over quickly.

Instead, I drew a doe tag in Oklahoma's controlled hunts, and the females were elusive.

Oklahoma's controlled hunts for antelope and elk are once-in-a-lifetime draws. Having applied annually since 1998, I drew a doe permit for Cimarron County in the spring.

Cimarron is the westernmost county of Oklahoma's Panhandle. It supports a low density pronghorn herd that is largely concentrated in the western tip. I know that country fairly well, and I know enough about antelope to know that they can be in one field today and then be five miles away the next day. Therefore, I believed that my chances were as good on public land in the Rita Blanca National Grasslands as they would be on private ground.

Although its administrative footprint is huge, the Rita Blanca contains about 230,000 acres in small and large parcels sprinkled across Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Shortgrass prairie defines the gently rolling habitat. On a high spot, you can see for many miles. I concentrated my search around the community of Felt, about three miles from the New Mexico border. In the distance, near Raton, N.M., the Capulin volcano looms over the horizon. That was my visual reference point. If I got lost, I could always use the volcano to triangulate a relative position to get back to my vehicle.

I intended to hunt the full nine days if necessary, but as usual, a busy schedule eroded my plans. One thing and another, both personal and professional, delayed my departure one day at a time until finally, I was down to three days of hunting. It would take a full day to get there and probably a full day of scouting, which would reduce my actual hunting time to two days. I seriously considered not going at all, but common sense prevailed. To bail on a once-in-a-lifetime hunt was inexcusable.

On Monday, I called my former boss, Nels Rodefeld, chief of information and education for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, for information. Rodefeld killed a buck antelope near Felt in 2012. He texted me several maps and shared some intel.

I arrived in Boise City, the Cimarron County seat, that evening and slept in my teardrop camper among a fleet of tractor-trailer rigs at a truck stop. The next morning, I spied a young man icing down a bank of coolers in his pickup truck. Fit and trim, he looked like a hunter, so I asked him if he knew anything about the Rita Blanca.

"I drew an antelope tag, and I have a real short window," I said. "I'm not just behind the eight ball. I'm between the eight ball and the rail."

His name was Dustin Trammell of Tulsa. He sized me up quickly and said that, yes, he could help.

"I drew a doe tag, too," he said. "I got one on the second day. That's the only time I've ever hunted antelope, so that's all I know about it, but I'll tell you everything I know."

Trammell was a near constant phone and text companion for the next three days. He said he killed his doe on a farm. The landowner charged him $200 for access. Trammell gave me the landowner's name and phone number, and also the name and number of a man that might let me hunt for free.

Trammell said that antelope are used to seeing trucks, and you can drive pretty close to them without alarming them.

"But the second that door opens and they see a human form, they're out of there," Trammell said.

Trammell was scouting by truck with a relative when they encountered a small herd about 350 yards away. Trammell said he exited the truck on the side away from the animals and dropped into a ditch as the relative drove away. He said he belly crawled to within about 200 yards and bagged his doe with one shot from a prone position.

"You see how windy it is out here," Trammell said. "I used a seven mag. Wind doesn't matter at 200 yards, but it starts to matter at 300, and it matters a lot beyond that. My advice is get as close as you can."

He also gave me contact information for a meat processor in town.

"He's not real busy right now, and he can turn it around in a day for you," Trammell said.

Properly field dressing an antelope is essential, he added.

"Pronghorns have lanolin in their fur that makes them waterproof," Trammell said. "If that touches the meat, it'll make it taste bad. That's why a lot of people say antelope isn't really very good, but if you take care of it, it's some of the best tasting meat you'll ever eat. I didn't mess with that. It's so hot and there are so many flies, I just took it to the processor."

Oklahoma has a walk-in hunting access program through which landowners allow some access. A number of walk-in access properties are east of Boise City. They are almost archery only, but about a dozen allow rifles during the antelope hunt.

"I looked at every one of those, and I didn't see an antelope one," Trammell said. "You can take them off your list. Stay west of town."

From there, I relocated to a spot on the Rita Blanca. A national forest service employee arrived as I unhitched my camper, so I asked her if she knew of any parcels that consistently hold antelope. She named four parcels and said that two held antelope more consistently than the others. She showed them to me on a map, and then she gave me the map.

I drove to the two better parcels. I parked my truck, walked into the grassland, topped a rise and encountered a mature pronghorn buck within 150 yards.

Adjacent to that parcel was a private farm with a center pivot irrigation system. The circular field was planted in alfalfa. In the middle, munching contentedly, was a doe antelope. I found the landowner, but she would not allow me to hunt.

From the road, I watched the doe through binoculars off and on for about five hours. She ate for a while and then lay down to chew cud. She meandered all over that field, but she never left it.

At the corner of the field where it met the private land was some derelict irrigation equipment. I figured the doe would leave the field at dusk and bed down in the prairie grass on the public ground. If I could sneak in behind the equipment, I believed I could get a shot when the doe crossed the fence.

There is no cover, but there was enough land contour to conceal a stalk to within about 100 yards of the irrigation equipment. I parked at the far end of the parcel and skulked down the far fenceline for nearly two hours, and then I covered the last 100 yards crawling on my hands and knees. I reached my destination without being detected.

Through binoculars, I watched the doe feed about 400-500 yards away. She did not leave that field. When it came time to bed down for the night, she simply bedded down in the tall grass at the edge of the alfalfa field. She did the same thing the next day and never left the safety of the private ground.

Disgusted, I called one of Trammell's landowners, who welcomed me on his farm. I was on one of his back pastures for a short time when a mature buck with massive horns trotted out of the draw and stopped about 200 yards away, showing a full, front-lit broadside. Again, I could only watch.

At the end of the second day, after spying on the alfalfa field doe and walking two other public parcels, I returned to the private ranch. To my delighted astonishment, a herd of nearly two dozen antelope grazed in a green strip about 200 yards from the road.

A cross fence bothered me, so I called the landowner.

"There's an old broken down pickup truck in a big junk pile just west of your house," I said.

"Yep, that's my junkpile," the rancher said.

"There's a big bunch of antelope on the other side of a fence to the west of that," I said. "Is that your land on the other side of the fence?"

"No, that belongs to somebody else, and he don't allow nobody to hunt," he said.

That's how the season ended. I should have been disappointed, I guess, but I wasn't. I met some great people, and I was near antelope the entire time. That means a lot with so little time to hunt, and I learned enough to do it successfully somewhere else in the future, like maybe Wyoming.

I'll try it again sometime, and I will have a buck tag.


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