This article was first published November 21, 2024, at fieldethos.com.
I’m not nailing theses to church doors or anything, but I’m a Protestant through and through, and as such, my mind doesn’t always grasp the intricacies of Catholic theology. If I understand it correctly, though, the Catholic church, in order to bestow sainthood upon its members, requires the verification of not one, but two certifiable miracles. One healing and you’re halfway there. After making a shot on an antelope that he never should have attempted, my brother Kevin is just one miracle shy of sainthood.
Six of us – my dad, my two brothers, and a couple of my friends – had drawn tags to hunt pronghorn antelope in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin. Being from Oklahoma, we had no connection whatsoever with local landowners, so we were forced to rely on the Bureau of Land Management. Thankfully, there’s plenty of BLM property to hunt out west, and in Wyoming, especially. Still, differentiating public parcels from private was challenging. These days, a nonresident hunter can download an app and subscribe to a service and have that kind of information at his fingertips, but back then a nonresident hunter had to send off for an actual paper map. The road trip from Oklahoma to Wyoming was spent studying that map and wondering whether or not we’d find goats when we got there.
We made it to Medicine Bow, Wyoming, unloaded our gear, and drove out before dark to set up blinds on a couple of the waterholes we had identified on the map. On that drive, the realization set in that this hunt was going to be unprecedented in our collective experience. It wasn’t going to be a matter of if we punched a tag, but rather when and on which buck. There were antelope everywhere.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that the best way to hunt antelope was going to be from the road. That sounds a little poach-y, so let me explain. We’d drive until we spotted pronghorn on public land, then slow down and glass from the truck for a promising buck. If we found one, we’d pull on past him and park. Then one of us would bail out and, using the limited cover available, try to sneak into shooting range.
That’s what my brother Kevin was doing when he spotted his antelope. Of the handful of bucks in the herd, three were good and one was great. A mesa between predator and prey offered some cover, but my brother was still looking at taking a longer shot than he had ever attempted, and he was as close as he was going to get. Kevin’s first shot hit the goat back, and it ran with the rest of the herd for the Promised Land, to the place where public land turned private. Dirt kicked up at his second shot and the buck ran again to catch up with his herd. When the antelope stopped just short of that invisible boundary line, Kevin asked for a range. Dad called it at well over 500 yards and told my brother to aim two feet over the buck’s back, only to amend his estimate a second later to three feet instead of two. Kevin got into his scope, offered up a prayer, and squeezed the trigger.
When shooting a 130 grain bullet backed by 60 grains of powder at that distance, there’s nearly a full second that elapses between trigger break and bullet impact, which means that my brother had nearly a full second to wonder, nearly a full second to hope, nearly a full second to pray for the miracle that he was mercifully granted. At his shot, the antelope fell where it stood.
I wasn’t there to see it myself, but the Good Book tells us that every matter is established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. Who am I to question my father and my brother’s word? I’ve tried and tried to get my dad to manipulate the details of that hunt, to shrink the distance of my brother’s shot in the retelling of the story, but he flat out refuses to do so, leaving me with no choice but to accept the shot for what it was—a certifiable miracle.
Wright Outdoors 