As Good As Life Gets

As everyone has heard, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.” While there’s some obvious comedic value to this aphorism when looking back on an unsuccesful hunt, its roots run deeper — as deep as you’d like them to go. In fact, it’s turtles all the way down.

Every year, I head off into the mountains, or the desert, or the sagebrush steppe, or wherever else, expecting some grand “road to Tarsus” moment to fall out of the silence and smack me in the head, solving all of those back-burner, niggling life problems that everyone has piled up in the dark corners of their brain. Every year, this does not happen — or at least, it hasn’t happened yet. Every year, I expect that this will be the one.

By the definition I asserted above, this makes me insane, I guess. If this is true — and it certainly appears to be — I’m fine with it. Insanity appears to be what keeps me going.

If not this hunt, maybe it’ll happen on the next one. Yeah, that’s it. That’s always it.

I had never encountered Coues deer on the hoof before, but their reputation far precedes them among enthusiastic Western deer hunters. The gray ghosts. Small, with bucks usually under a hundred pounds, and the perfect size and color to seamlessly blend in with the boulder-strewn deserts where they can be found. “Where they can be found” is also mostly Mexico, but they do exist in good numbers in the extreme southern reaches of the Southwest — border country. They are all trophies.

I hadn’t been particularly keen on venturing down to the border for the last four or five years for some reason, but my limited consumption of news around the time the 2025 application season rolled around suggested that if things down there weren’t completely fine when I put my name in the hat, that they would be when it came time to actually hunt.

To skip ahead a bit, this is one thing the government didn’t appear to be lying about — the border sure as hell seems closed to me now, and piles of trash left from waves of migrants weren’t to be found in the areas where I hunted. I slept soundly… albeit with the six-gun within easy reach, as always. I guess you know you’ve crossed some sort of threshold when you sleep better in a bag on a little piece of foam than you do on a mattress.

What I did see were Coues deer. While they’re said to be especially crepuscular in the early rifle seasons, I was able to glass them up from first light to well after eight or nine in the morning in the North-facing oak thickets, and also down lower in the mesquite hills.

If I can offer any encouragement to the virgin Coues hunter, it’s that if you know how to glass for mule deer you should be able to turn up Coues deer without too much difficulty as well… if they’re standing up or moving. When bedded, they are every bit as invisible as you can imagine, if not more so. Everything that is said about them is true.

While deer in most other areas of the country were either actively rutting or well into pre-rut, this far south the rut won’t come around for at least another month (and possibly two). There were plenty of does and some good-looking bucks to be found, but they were all either flying solo or segregated by gender. Naturally, they are glassed up from across a canyon and separated from the hunter by hundreds of feet of elevation change in thick country where everything that you can step on is loud. Reading between the lines: just because there are bucks for the glassing doesn’t mean there are bucks for the taking. Especially for a hunter flying solo, as I was on this trip.

I did see a lot of deer and had a pretty good hunt as these things go, but the challenge of putting one of these tiny guys to bed and making an hours-long stalk (or a 2,000-yard shot) in thick oak country was too much, and by the time I got to where I had last seen the bucks, they had apparently gone somewhere else.

I gave it a few days in the higher reaches of the unit before working my way down — both in the direction of the border and in elevation. While the terrain is more classically “desert-looking” here, the same rules still apply: glass north-facing slopes and expect that the deer won’t be too far from the thickest pockets you can find. Here, the landscape was dominated by mesquites and grasses, and it was easier to get around surreptitiously without stepping on the omnipresent oak and juniper deadfall of the slightly higher country.

To turn a few days of hunting into a few words, the does showed up, but their future suitors did not. If I scrolled the focus knob on the spotting scope I could see the border wall. Behind it, Mexico. If it wasn’t for the very conspicuous wall it would just look like another series of ranchettes and small towns, and I don’t think there’s a hunter alive who wouldn’t wonder how things look on the other side.

These “general season” rifle deer hunts always serve up ample down time in the middle of the day. I enjoy this; it’s a good excuse to take a nap, or go grill up a burger and have a beer, or simply explore a bit more without feeling like you’re missing too much of the action.

You’re also allowed to just hang out at your glassing knob, bake in the sun, give your legs a rest, and take in your surroundings. It feels a little dirty — like you’re not making the most out of every second of the hunt, something you’ve been led to believe that you should be doing. This is false. There are no deadlines or timekeepers in the mountains.

My gaze drifted without any real intent around the desertscape in the early afternoon. I noticed a loggerhead shrike with a massive grasshopper, and followed it through my binoculars as it perched on a stout mesquite branch and impaled the grasshopper on one of the pinky-length thorns. I’ve seen a good amount of lizards and small mice and rats meet a similar end while out bird hunting, but I had never seen the bird actually do the work until now. The grasshopper squirmed with a mortal futility as the shrike took it apart bit by bit, eventually downing the whole juicy abdomen in one gulp. I can’t imagine what this would look like with a vertebrate.

Some uncertain amount of time went by as I watched another hopper meet its end, and then another. A good system had come through recently, and the range was green and smelled of tenacious wildflowers.

Nothing to do, other than watch that shrike and its prey until the metaphorical cows came home. There were no emails to reply to. No Zoom calls to take. No bills. No work around yard that “needs” to be done. No expectation of a prompt reply to calls or texts. No sirens in the middle of the night. No traffic. No laundry. No inflation. No keeping up with the Joneses. Perhaps most importantly, no desert giant centipedes, either.

While this is something that I harp on to the point of it becoming hackneyed… spending your days in this way agrees with your soul, as if whatever last vestige of your primitive soul pipes up here to let you know that this, in fact, is what we’re supposed to be doing. Just sitting in the dirt, watching the birdies, and being blissfully unaware of all of the reasons we’re supposed to be angry, upset, and stressed on any given day. If you can’t find deep contentment in all of that, I don’t know what to tell you.

While this was an above-average hunt from a critter-viewing perspective, the most important thing that floated ghostlike through the background of my conscious as I stared through my binoculars, picking up the sights and smelling the smells of Coues deer country, wasn’t some grand revelation of the kind I had been hoping for.

It was barely a whisper:

Maybe right here, right now… maybe this is as good as life gets.