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Check out issue 143 of Eastman’s Hunting Journal (Elk Addition).  There is an article that features burros in the back-country!

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Each year my mind wanders from tenkara fly fishing to hunting.  It gains intensity during September as small game season nears around the first of October.  I usually sneak in an extended backpacking weekend of “Surf ‘N Turf” (mountain small game combined with tenkara trout) just prior to the start of the first big game season. I hunt mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and elk during the rifle seasons in my home state, almost exclusively in federally designated wilderness.  The wilderness I hunt most often is an area just a mile from my boyhood home that I’ve been frequenting most of...

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It had rained all afternoon and most of the night. I was camped along a little spring fed mountain valley about 7 miles into a Colorado wilderness area at 10,250 above sea level. When I left for my morning elk hunt it looked like it was going to be a bluebird day. Before leaving I took the turnout blankets off my burros so they could dry out and not get too hot in the sun. I came back into camp around lunchtime. The sun was shining and the temps were in the upper 60’s, a beautiful day. One of my...

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On a cloudless, moonless night in October I camped on the open prairie of northwestern South Dakota. Not far from where I pitched my tent the Lakota had conducted the last known wild bison hunt over 100 years before. I was so remote that at night there wasn’t a visible light in any direction over the rolling grassland. No lights except the millions of brilliant stars that were so bright I did not need a flashlight to see. The stars stretched from one horizon to the other. I had never seen the Milky Way in all its glory as I...

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I was in the back-country on an archery elk hunt. (It seems like a lot of my stories start out this way.) My burros were in their portable corral when a couple of horse riders rode by my camp. I had left a few minutes before and was about 1/2 mile away headed out for my afternoon hunt. I could see them down the valley and could hear them talking but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then I heard the laughter, so loud that it echoed down the valley. It was obvious, they were laughing at my...

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