One Heck Of A Ride

37 Everyone’s Deer I hunted, and I must agree with Jack O’Connor. Coues deer are the most difficult to hunt of all the deer I have hunted. A Miniature Whitetail On A Campeche Estate My next whitetail quest was in November 1998, when Norm Epley and I and a client from Bakersfield flew to the state of Campeche on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. At the time, the local Coca-Cola distributor, a man named Eduardo Rivera, was the only outfitter who was guiding foreign hunters to indigenous tropical whitetails, white-lipped peccaries, and red brocket deer in that region. I knew other hunters who had hunted with Eduardo, and knew that most of his hunts took place in two large high-fenced enclosures, but nearly everyone I talked with said the thick tropical rain forest habitat helped make the experience sporting, and that they would hunt with him again. There was nothing difficult about the hunt, however. We stayed at a hotel in Campeche, and were driven an hour from the city to where we hunted on foot each day. The three of us were there for a week, and we all took tropical whitetails. There were no blinds that I saw; we just walked out into the forest each day, moving slowly and trying to keep the wind in our faces, hoping to see a deer before it spotted us. I saw maybe five or six decent bucks that way. Tropical whitetails are the smallest white- tailed deer in North America, and the subspecies we hunted (Odocoileus virginianus yukatanensis) is one of the two smallest of seven subspecies that SCI includes in a category it now calls Central American whitetails. I shot my buck while it stood watching me from brush less than fifty yards off. He probably weighed only fifty or fewer pounds The Campeche wilderness author hunted in 1998 Author’s Gold Medal central American white-tailed deer and was only about two feet tall at his shoulder. His little antlers were officially measured at 66 5/58 SCI, which amazingly easily qualified him as a gold medal animal. His coat was a light reddish tan color, with light gray along its chest and white on its throat, stomach, inner thighs, as well as under his tail. I also shot a red brocket deer on that hunt, and it was even smaller than the whitetail. Soaking wet, it might have weighed 28-30 pounds. Standing on the tips of his toes, he might have been 19-20 inches tall at the shoulder. He had a stout body, a short tail, a long face, and an arched back that reminded me of some of Africa’s duikers. Its antlers were only short spikes, but they ranked No. 7 in the SCI book when I shot him. (The last time I looked, they had dropped to No. 16.) I found the 500-year-old walled city of Campeche interesting because of the unique