According to this, sportsmen are three times as likely to die from a heart attack than from an accidental gunshot wound while hunting. I would have thought that the risk of your ticker giving out were much higher.

When you look at the total number of hunters out there, very few are fatally shot. Even three times that number is still a pretty small number.

Pass the nachos.

—John Snow

If you’re looking for an easy way to focus your binocular—or to check its focus—gaze up at a star. A star is unique because it is a single point of light and when you roll your focus knob back and forth there is no doubt when the image is tack sharp. 

The correct way to focus your binocular is to first look through the side that that doesn’t have a diopter focus adjustment and make that image sharp with your center/main focus wheel. (This is usually the left barrel.) Then look through the other side at the same object, in this case a star, and focus it with the diopter adjustment, which is usually on the right eyepiece. No matter where it is located on the instrument, however, it will only alter the focus of one barrel of your binocular—this is the side you want to focus second. Once you do that glance through each side of the bino in turn to make sure everything is sharp. I do this check while waiting for the sun to get up during early mornings afield.

—John Snow

For some reason there are a lot of people who can't close one eye when looking through a binocular. To compensate for this I've seen folks try all kinds of things, but most often they hold a hand over one objective lens of their binocular while trying to focus with the other hand. This doesn't work so well as you end up mashing the bino into your face.

A better way is to take a lens cap and cover up the objective lens of the side you don't want to look through. Don't spread this around, though, because it is lots of fun watching people struggle trying it the other way.

—John Snow

We got our hands on some more pictures of the amazing 270-inch Iowa buck, including a shot of what looks to be the buck's sheds from a previous year. Enjoy.

I reported yesterday on Jon Lacorte’s mule deer hunt in Wyoming. We followed it up today with a hunt for pronghorn antelope with Table Mountain Outfitters out of Cheyenne, Wyo.

The weather forecast promised gale-force wind and strafing snow by noon, but we planned to be done hunting before the weather turned on us.

Lacorte, marketing manager for Nikon’s sport optics division, made it clear when we loaded into the pickup before sunrise that I had the first shot. That meant I got to ride shotgun, and take my pick of pronghorns. It also meant I had to open what seemed like dozens of ranch gates.

Every antelope we saw in the morning was wearing track shoes, running full-tilt at our approach, even at a distance of a half mile. One of the hundreds of pronghorns wore a handsome heart-shaped pair of horns, the tips of which almost touched. That was the antelope I wanted.

We put together a pair of great stalks, but both ended the same way, with flared white rumps of fleeing antelope tearing across the prairie.

Nikon’s Jon Lacorte has never killed a mule deer, but he’s hoping this is his year. He’s having a legendary season. Lacorte killed a Cape buffalo in Africa and last month arrowed a monster 156-inch Kentucky whitetail.

He’s hoping to break his mule deer bugaboo here in southern Wyoming, hunting with Table Mountain Outfitters out of Cheyenne. The ranch we’re hunting is known for producing heavy, wide muleys – Remington’s Eddie Stevenson killed a 35-1/2-inch-wide mule deer here last year – and Jon is hoping to shoot a good, representative mule deer.

Of course, I’m also hoping for a good deer. I’ve spent the last three weeks chasing mule deer and whitetails with my bow in my home state of Montana and then invested two weeks in a British Columbia moose hunt, but have yet to draw blood. Jon and I will be hunting together with Angie Denny, the better half of Table Mountain’s ownership team.

Here is 8-year-old Will Herald posing with this nice buck he shot with a muzzleloader just a couple days ago. Father Tim Herald gave this account:

He took this 9-pointer at about 50 yards. We filmed his hunt and since the deer came in over an hour before dark, we got a great video hunt. He is on top of the world, and I was pretty excited for the little guy myself.

I had to know about the gear he used (of course). The rifle is a .50-caliber T/C Endeavor that was loaded with 250-gr. shockwave bullets over a full charge of 777 powder.

“It knocks him for a loop,” Tim said. “But he doesn’t care.”

Looks to me like Will is following in dad’s footsteps.

Good job, Will!

—John Snow