king' s outdoor world - Index

king' s outdoor world - Hunting Illustrated April/May 2008 - Index

BY KAMEAL CLARK
56
ONE OF MY
Dreams
CAME TRUE
I
was standing in the middle of
a quakie patch, shaking from
head to toe, when Brian asked
me, “Did you get him?” One look
from me was enough to tell him
that I fl at out missed and I was not
happy about it. A fi ve-point bull elk
standing at thirty yards, bugling his
guts out right at me and I hit the
base of a tree instead of him. I hate
disappointment like that!
My husband Brian and
I have hunted many places and
animals in the thirteen years we’ve
been together. We’ve shared a lot of
experiences together, from our fi rst
vacation hunting moose in Canada,
to our honeymoon hunting ten
plains game animals in South Africa.
We’ve stalked big muleys and
called in plenty of turkeys, but one
adventure we hadn’t been on was
HUNTING ILLUSTRATED.com
antelope hunting. When we sat down to
fi ll out our tags in April of 2006, we had
ten points. Ten points takes ten years to
accumulate and, for me, that felt like
forever. An antelope was an animal
that I wanted to hunt pretty badly. Their
grace and speed are just so beautiful to
me. So, when the draw results came out
in June and I found out that we were
lucky enough to get tags I was ecstatic!
Since we had now waited so
long for this hunt we needed to be as
prepared as possible. Our friend Jimmy
had also drawn a tag, so the three of
us sat down to plan our fi rst scouting
trip. In looking at the calendar and our
busy schedules, we decided to plan our
scouting expedition for mid-July. When
that time came, we packed up our Tahoe
and headed to northern Colorado. Upon
arriving into town, pretty late, we found
every motel/hotel was booked. The
town was so small that we didn’t
think we’d need reservations, but
little did we know it was their annual
town celebration. I took this as a bad
sign and held out little hope in seeing
many antelope. My intuition was
correct because we didn’t see much.
We were told by the local game
warden that we were plenty early
and not to get down on ourselves. He
said that the big ones were there, but
it was a big unit and that we’d need
time and patience. So, at the end of
the weekend, we headed home fairly
disappointed.
Since archery elk season
ran the month before our antelope
season, we didn’t have the chance
to go scouting before our trip north.
At this point I didn’t care. The