To help me make it through the dark days of grad school, I started buying preference points for antelope in Wyoming with the promise that I would take myself if I survived.

Somewhere along the way my two buddies decided they needed to go too. Somehow I managed to make it through the two eternities of education and we were ready to go.

We threw our gear and 10-year-old boys in the truck and hit the road. Eighteen very long hours later, after the boys had watched “X-Men Origins” a dozen times, we made it to our destination.

Man, was it cold! It was snowing and blowing like crazy. Naturally, the one tiny hotel was booked up, so we set up our tent right in the eating pavilion at the local campground, tying it off to picnic tables to help block the wind. It’s not like anyone else was dumb enough to be camping there.

Despite the chilly weather, it was good to be hunting again after three years of school. I enjoy all kinds of hunting, but I truly love to hunt antelope. There is just something about the rolling sagebrush country and belly-crawling through the cactus that makes me smile.

It had been a good year for the game, and the antelope were everywhere. I have been back a couple of times, but have never seen the numbers we saw that year.

Along with our buck tags, we had a couple of doe tags that we had no trouble filling. We looked over dozens of bucks before Eric spotted a whopper, and the race was on.

We spotted him on the rim of a plateau, but he spotted us too and was off and running. We raced around to the back side of the plateau just barely in time to catch him coming across.

Eric made a long shot with his .280 Remington and managed to bring him down. Eric’s buck had 15-inch horns with massive bases. One of the biggest I have seen on the hoof.

There was one lonely tree at the campground. One of only a few in the whole unit that we used to hang our antelope. By the end of the hunt, it was quite a sight with six antelopes hanging in it. It was a good thing nobody else felt like camping that time of year.

On the second day, my boy Josh and I spotted a herd grazing along the shore of the lake. We were up on the hill above them, and by crawling and using the roll of the hill were able to get within 200 yards without getting spotted.

I sat up and got my .280 Remington on my shooting sticks and waited for the buck to clear the does. When he finally did, I made what I thought was a good shot, but the herd ran off around the hill out of our sight.

Josh was off like a shot after them. I caught up to him, standing over my buck, which had only gone 50 yards. The rest of the crew had heard me shoot and came to congratulate me and help drag him back to the truck.

By this time, Doug’s boy Jack was getting tired of just looking at antelope, and wanted his dad to shoot a buck so bad, he was crawling out of his skin. He didn’t care about size, any buck was just fine with him.

We were trying to keep him contained long enough to find a good buck when Doug managed to kneel right on a cactus. He was rolling around trying to get the spines out when a nice buck fed over the hill right in front of them. He managed to ignore the pain long enough to drop the buck cleanly at 75 yards with one shot from his .243.

In three days we had managed to take three nice antelope. We celebrated that night by roasting hot dogs over the campfire.

Of course, we woke up in the morning to clear, bluebird weather. We messed around looking for some rabbits for the boys, but finally, grudgingly, packed up and started the 18-hour drive back home. Luckily, we had our “X-Men Origins” to keep us entertained.

I have certainly been on my share of hunts, but spending that time, and sharing those experiences with my friends and our boys, makes this hunt one of my all-time favorites.