Deer Tracks

On the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, wildlife tracks are everywhere.

Feral hogs are about to take over. There are deer with bigger bodies than the cattle that graze the winter wheat pastures. Coyotes, a few bobcats, and turkeys also roam the rough country that has been invaded by the water-sucking salt cedar tree.

I saw a mule deer for the first time in person, and it was so big I thought it was a Charolais cow. The spread of it's massive antlers was incredible. Unfortunately, the digital zoom on my point and shoot camera couldn't entirely capture the deer's amazing size.

Byron set up a game camera for the first to get a glimpse of the animals that leave their tracks behind on the ranch's dark red dirt.

We usually like to take some sort of weapon with us, just in case we need to defend ourselves. Since we didn't take a firearm this trip, Byron settled for a machete.

After a short hike, we got to where Byron had mounted the game camera to a post. There were 2,548 images on the camera. Five of them were of deer - a nice 8 point buck, and several does and a spike. The rest were of a tumbleweed that had blown over the camera. It took a picture everytime the wind blew.

To make matters worse, after trying to download the deer images from the game camera, they all magically disappeared into that digital Never Never Land that consumes many things on our computers.


Luckily, we had the machete to cut away the annoying tumbleweeds.