It was raining -- finally -- and Doug Gattis and I were both getting excited. The fall of 1997 had been unusually dry and warm in southwestern Oregon, and that had made the deer hunting much more difficult than usual. Which sounds a bit odd, I know. One prays for cold, perhaps, and maybe a little snow from time to time, but how many times have you ever heard someone say, "Boy, if it would only rain like Hell, we’d really get into the bucks for a change!" But that’s the way it is with the region’s Columbia blacktail bucks, Gattis had assured me day after warm, dry, sunny day, as we prowled the mountains near his Medford home looking for a much better-than-average blacktail.

The morning had broken wet and gloomy, with a dense fog hanging along the valley floor. Peering out the window before first light at the light rain, a thermometer showing a temperature in the mid-30’s, and a falling barometer, Gattis was all smiles. "This is what we’ve been waiting for," he said as we headed out. "I’ll bet we see something good today." Not that we hadn’t already, mind you. Despite the mediocre conditions, we were seeing an average of 7 bucks a day, with at least one of them a very good buck indeed. It’s just that on this hunt I was hoping to roll 10 the hard way, draw a winning lottery ticket, find the four-leaf clover, and chosen to pass them by.

When it got light enough to see, Gattis and I were glassing a deep timbered draw where we had seen some good deer earlier, as well as one doe that was ready to breed. When we didn’t see anything there at first glance, we decided to move and check another timbered saddle, an area where we’d seen lots of deer earlier as well as some overly-large buck tracks. We were, as always, wired tight with anticipation.

As we peeked around the corner we saw the first deer, a nice 3x3 buck with tall, heavy antlers. Behind him 50 yards or so was a doe, placidly taking her breakfast. Tending her was another buck. It only took a milli-second to know that we were in business...

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I had learned about Doug and his wife, Janet, and their guiding operation (Southern Oregon Game Busters, PO Box 1576, Medford, OR 97501, 541-770-5050) through a mutual friend. After hearing about their track record for producing excellent results on trophy-class bucks both for their clients and themselves, I had to come see for myself. Growing up I cut my teeth hunting both true blacktails and their close cousin, the California mule deer of the southern and central California coast. After two decades of serious deer hunting from Alaska to Alabama, California to the Carolinas, and on into both Canada and Mexico, I’ve come to believe that the "Pacific Ghost," as my friends call the blacktail deer, is the most difficult trophy-class buck of all to take, bar none.

That the blacktail is indeed a ghost-like deer has been recently confirmed through a study conducted by the Oregon Department of Fish &Wildlife. In this project, cameras keyed by an electronic beam/receiver set-up, took pictures of deer as they moved through their natural habitat. This study showed that 17% of all bucks moved during legal shooting hours, while 83% of the bucks did not move during this time. In fact, the prime buck movements occurred between 10:00pm and 5:00am, with more than 40% of the bucks photographed during the after-dark period being mature 4-point or better bucks. Interestingly, during this same survey the does and fawns displayed a more balanced travel tendency, with 44% of them being photographed during daylight hours, and 56% during the night.

As our hunt moved along during the week, Gattis explained that he likes to scout his hunting areas well before the season opens, using what he finds to determine where to hunt during the earlier archery and rifle seasons. As the season wears on, he uses both his knowledge of local deer movements and patterns, as well as the availability of key food sources, to track the deer. It is much later, however, when the chances for taking a bomber buck begin to tip in the hunter’s favor. "The best time to take a really monster buck is during Oregon’s special late muzzleloader season," he told me. "That’s because we can hunt during the rut, the great equalizer in this game. During the last couple weeks of November, you’ll see more and more different bucks each and every day, and have a chance to finally start spotting some of those real bruisers that just never show themselves during the daylight hours the rest of the year."

Gattis, who has lived in the Medford area for 30 years, has been outfitting for blacktails, Roosevelt elk, black bears, and varmints full-time since 1990. Currently he and Janet hunt both public and private lands throughout southern Oregon, including the Cascade and Siskiyou mountain ranges. Both are accomplished blacktail hunters in their own right. Doug has personally taken 5 public-land blacktails that will beat the B&C minimum score of 135 points. In their home, the couple has 13 blacktails mounted, all but one of which has been taken on public land, and the smallest of which scores 117 B&C. Of the mounted blacktails, Janet has taken 3 of them, two 4x4’s that score 118 and 124 B&C, and a big 3x3 that scores 120. When the Gattis’ are not guiding, they’re hunting for themselves, or scouting for new "hot spots" to take their clients.

Doug and Janet also have a solid track record of producing big bucks for their clients. To date, their clients have scored at a 68% success rate during the general rifle season, 100% during the special late muzzleloader season, and 50% during archery season. "During the general rifle season, our clients take bucks that average about 100 B&C points for a large 3x3 and 115-125 B&C points for a typical 4x4," Doug told me one afternoon. "This is high when compared to unguided public land hunters, whose success is much lower and who shoot deer averaging 1 1/2 years old, according to Oregon game department statistics. During the late muzzleloader rut hunt, the smallest buck taken by one of our clients before you came is a 3x3 scoring 105 B&C -- and I told the client not to shoot, that he could probably do better, but he decided to shoot the deer anyway. The average of the 7 bucks taken so far by our clients on this hunt is a 4x4 scoring 130 B&C points, and 4 of them make the B&C all-time minimum of 135 points.

While Gattis will hunt public land during the early rifle season, he has been concentrating his efforts during the late muzzleloader hunt on private ground. We were hunting a large tract of private land near Medford where he has exclusive guiding rights, and during my stay he began negotiating to obtain exclusive hunting rights to two more large pieces of private ground that he hopes to begin hunting in 1998.

Up until 1997, there were two ways to hunt Oregon’s late muzzleloader season: either draw a tag -- which right now generally takes at least one preference point -- or purchase a landowner tag, issued by the state to landowners based on a formula that considers how much land they own in deer country. However, beginning with the 1998 hunting season, Oregon began issuing a number of special outfitter tags for all big-game species. The new outfitter tags will cut significantly into the pool of tags available for the nonresidents, as the state plans to issue up to half of all nonresident tags in this manner. Gattis has applied for the maximum allowable number of blacktail tags in his home unit for the 1998 season.

For 1998, Gattis will be charging $2750 for a 5-day public land blacktail hunt. On private land the price is the same, but clients must add a $1000 trophy fee for killing a deer, and $250 extra if the buck green-scores over 135 Boone & Crockett gross points, money Gattis must pay the landowner. The hunt price includes guide service, airport transfers, meals, lodging, trophy care & caping, and the use of a refrigerated meat cooler, but not licenses & tags. Gattis recently completed work on a hunter’s bunk house, a comfortable and roomy place with 4 queen-sized beds, 2 showers & sinks, and 2 separate toilets. They also have rifle range and archery targets for sighting in at their home, which is where hunts are headquartered out of.

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The fog was just a haze, and the rain just a drizzle. The doe was concentrating on her browse, and the two bucks were more interested in her than in us. I eased into position as quickly as I could without making noise, took a good rest, settled the front bead into the Vee of the rear sight, brought my sight picture slowly up through the buck’s front leg, then eased it left behind the scapula. The range was just 50 or 60 yards, and there was a little in the way of brush in between us as I slipped the safety off. I took a short breath, let a bit of it out, and squeezed the trigger of my .50 caliber Thompson/Center System rifle.

The plume of grayish smoke took the buck out of my vision, and with Doug keeping his eyes on his instead of looking to see what happened I instinctively went for a speed loader, dumping a pair of Pyrodex pellets down the barrel and ramming another Nosler Partition HG Hunting Sabot down on top. As I fumbled with my capper -- I admit it, the shakes were beginning to get to me -- Doug watched the buck stumble off up the hill and into a mixed cover of live oaks and pines. "I think he went down just up there," he said quietly, pointing up the slope. We caught our breath, made a quick plan, and followed.

Fortunately, he wasn’t too hard to find. The rain had started to fall, and that would have made blood trailing difficult at best, while keeping the old powder dry somewhat problematic. As we snuck along, Doug had whispered that he thought this buck would make both the Boone & Crockett and SCI book minimums easy. I didn’t know about that, nor did it really matter. All I knew was this buck was a deer I had dreamed about since I was a tow-headed boy who watched his father fill the family larder with venison. Later taxidermist and official SCI measurer Dennis King taped his tall 4x4 antlers at 158 4/8 points.

Holy mackerel! We slapped five, and I whooped and hollered like some 12-year-old who’d just hit his first Little League home run. It was raining harder now, and before it was all over we’d both be very much on the wet side. We cared about as much as I did as a boy when I got my school clothes dirty. If my wife had called and said Ed McMahon had just showed up with the envelope, I’m not sure I could have been any happier. This was the blacktail of a lifetime for me. Doug went off to fetch the truck as I dragged the buck down the mountain, giggling as if I asked the prom queen to the homecoming dance, and she’d said yes.

Later, as I hit the pillow, I thought back over 25 years of blacktail hunting. The collage of memories came fast and hard, with bits and pieces of the days and weeks and seasons that led to this special morning keeping me awake well into the night. There was a big 4x4 that gave me the slip in the Trinity Alps of California one weekend, vanishing ghost-like when I was sure I had him cold. I can still see the arrow I shot over the back of a beautiful 4x4 late one evening along California’s north coast after weeks of scouting, planning, the setting a tree stand when I thought everything was just right to hunt his sign. It was, except for my shooting. I once jumped a good one from his bed in the rain forest jungle of Washington’s Olympic peninsula on a soggy afternoon, and would have centered him up except for that 3-foot wide trunk of a laurel tree that took the bullet instead. There were many more memories, all of them special, and while none of them will be replaced by this deer, he will always be extra-special simply because he’s a superb blacktail buck, and of this caliber they’re awfully hard to come by.