**********Apache Outdoors**********
Coues Whitetail
The most sought after tag on the San Carlos is the Coues Whitetail deer. Hunters stand in line 2 days before the tags go on sale and usually sell out the first few hours of the morning. Many hunters get left out by the time they get to the front of the line. But if you are one of the lucky ones to purchase a tag for the coues deer, you will have a hunt that will bring you memories and experiences that will last you a lifetime. Pursuing one of these truly trophy bucks is something you will not soon forget. Most hunters who hunt the coues deer have the same belief that they are the hardest animal to hunt in North America because they have the ability to disappear right before your eyes and re-appear again. You can be glassing an area for hours just a half mile away and stop to rest your eyes for a few seconds and look again at the area you have been glassing for hours and all of a sudden there they are. First a couple, then a few more and before you know it the hillside is alive with these well camo-ed deer. Of course they don't magically appear and re-appear, but they are adapt to blend in with their surroundings like no other animal on the north american continent. Their mostly gray coat gives them the ability to blend in with almost any color in the wilderness. Since gray is a neutral color it almost melts with the surrounding terrain and all of a sudden they are gone. Glassing plays perhaps the single biggest activity in locating these deer and most is done at very long ranges. We usually spot these deer sometimes as far away as 2 or 3 miles! But there can be instances where you pick apart the terrain on a hillside at a half mile and glass over and over the same area until you spot an eye or the tip of an antler through a bush or grass. Once you locate a deer it stands out in plain sight until you take your eyes away for a minute and when you look back they are gone. That is the Coues Whitetail Deer of the American Southwest.
These deer will usually inhabit areas remote and rugged but also can be in places that you pass each day as you are enroute to the "secret" spot for deer. I have witnessed for myself an area such as this that surprised even me being an experienced hunter and avid guide. It was near a highway that leads to the east on our reservation. I got a tip from my nephew and also spotted them myself from a helicopter from doing a game count for the recreation and wildlife dept. We decided to hunt an area close to the paved road and as we walked into the area, I saw 3 coues bucks walking to their bedding area on a very windy day. I put a stalk on these deer and found them right where they went over a small ridge out of the wind. Fortunately they had not bedded for the day yet. But they weren't what I was looking for so I let them go and my nephew was to the west of me by only a quarter of a mile and he didn't return right away at our pick up point so we began to look for him. Now this area is only about 1 square mile and has a road around the entire area so we figured it would be easy to hunt. well I later learned as we saw him walking near where I had walked through and finally picked him up an hour later that I had walked right pass a huge buck that would have scored into the 120's! I had walked within 40 yards of the buck and neither of us ever saw each other. My nephew tried to put a stalk on him and took a couple of shots at him from 250 yards but missed. He was bummed as you can imagine. But all this took place just off the highway on a well travelled road. That is the ever so elusive coues deer. So if this sounds like your kind of hunt, we will strive to make your hunt as memorable and successful as possible and that you carry these memories forever.
