Another Hunt Goes The Distance!

Immediately following Bill Kelley's "Overtime Archery Hunt" we had the priviledge of hunting with another friend who's family has hunted with us over the past few years. Bob MacMillan and his family have been very fortunate drawing tags and we've shared many great hunts with them. This year was Bob's turn as he drew an early rifle bull tag and called us up! Knowing Bob's tag was dang near a once in a lifetime tag we put a great team together with Jeff, Manny, Mel and myself as the guides and Glen Dishmon as our chef! Bob is a dedicated trophy hunter and a person who enjoys all aspects of a hunt. He told us from the beginning that he would rather hunt the whole hunt for a giant bull and go home empty handed then shoot a big bull early on! Bob lived up to that promise and we hunted for our biggest bull which was the one and only King Henry but the rut was slow and he no longer bugled as much making it very difficult to locate him. We hit it hard every day, called in good bulls every day and chased King Henry several times but no shots were fired. On one day while realizing we had no chance of catching up to King Henry we heard a Lion take out one of his cows! The noise was unmistakeable and by the time we got to the cow she was dead and the lion was gone. I set up a camera and got some great pics of the Lion that same evening and over the next few days... Bob was very excited at the chance to take this Lion so we set up a blind and Bob put in quite a few hours hunting over the kill but the Lion would never show up while he was there. It was still a neat experience and made the hunt that much more special. Just like my archery hunt, we finally decided to give up on King Henry and go look for the big bull that Bill Kelley and I saw just before he killed his archery bull. My friends Manny Madrid and Mel Kincaid had been scouting that area for us and had several bulls up to 380" located but they still just weren't big enough, even halfway through the hunt! Bob, my other friend and guide Jeff Wright and I headed down to this new area and during our first morning there we found the bull most guys dream about! This was a bull I hadn't seen before, extremely long beams with tons of distance between each tine, wide and good on all of his tines, this bull would no doubt beat 390" and most likely was mid 390's! This was where I realized how dedicated Bob was when he told us he just didn't like that bull and we still had a couple days left so let's keep looking! Like Bob said earlier, he wanted to hunt the whole hunt for a true giant and only in the last few minutes he would downsize if the chance presented itself. We were in search of a certain bull that i only had a brief glimpse of on the archery hunt. The bull had a huge extra tine on one side and abnormally long G4's with a really good frame. Several other hunters had seen the same bull and figured his G4's were around 28" long! With what I saw and what the other hunters saw, this was definitely a bull we needed to see again. We named this bull "Kickstand" because of his abnormal tine that "kicked" out to the side like a kickstand on a bike.

We spent a ton of time looking for "Kickstand" and passed up opportunities at several bulls between 360-390" in hopes that Kickstand was around and not broken. It was on the very last day when Manny and Mel called stating they had found Kickstand but he had broken both of his G4's and a G3 and was a little smaller than we had hoped on the frame. This was the last minute of the hunt and Bob said "let's go look at em'"! We took off and as we ran up and over the last mountain we found his herd and snuck in. We never got a good look at the bull but as they finally winded us and started taking off I stopped Kickstand in an opening and Bob quickly and instinctively hammered em'! Bob had already made up his mind that he was going to shoot this bull regardless of the breakage simply because it was a bull we had hunted very hard for and it had a history. It wasn't any ordinary bull, this was the ghost that had eluded us for days and this was the last chance to take a bull on this hunt so it was a no-brainer! This bull had huge G4 tines before breaking and great character making him a special bull and a great bull with 7 full days of hard hunting behind em'! Congrats again Bob, it was a hunt we will always remember! Jimmy>