Traveling AccuFit: Father/Daughter Deer Hunt | Glasgow, MT

Though she’s only 15 years old and a sophomore in high school, Iris McKean is an accomplished big-game hunter. She’s killed five bucks in as many years, the duration of her career as a Montana hunter. But she’s never killed, or even hunted, an elk yet. That was our initial goal with the Traveling AccuFit, to fill a cow elk tag in the Missouri River Breaks, in a unit and a series of ridges and canyons that most hunters avoid because of the rough terrain and the necessity to quarter and bone-out an elk if one dies in the “hellholes” deep inside the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

Iris is built for elk hunting. She’s a decorated distance runner, in both prep cross country and track. She loves hard work and a steep challenge. So we adjusted the AccuFit and slinged up the Savage 110 Long Range Hunter, packed enough food for two days, and threw on our frame packs. We’d take a cow elk no matter where we found her, whether close to the road, or miles inside the maze of adobe buttes and gumbo canyons where they hide late in Montana’s rifle season.

It didn’t work out quite that way. We hiked for a couple miles, following fresh elk tracks, noticing that the wind was rising and warming. The previous weeks had been warm and wet, and the ground was frozen when we started. But if it warmed up too much we wouldn’t be able to keep our feet, let alone pack an elk out of the greasy gumbo.

By noon, the bottom fell out of the ground. Iris slipped, slid, and fell on level ground, let alone on the steep inclines of the breaks. So we called it a day, and on the way home, Iris recalled that she had a doe mule deer tag.

The next day’s plan was set. We’d hunt a mule deer in an area where we might be able to drive, if not walk, once the night’s frost left the ground. We hustled, trying to beat the warming sun, and Iris deployed her accumulated skills, spotting a doe, setting up in a spot where she’d have a shot if the deer stopped, and then making a clutch shot when the doe gave her a brief broadside.

The doe down, Iris then employed the “gutless method,” quartering and taking all the meat off the carcass without gutting it. She then sledded the meat back to the pickup, across fast-vanishing snow.

It was the Traveling AccuFit’s final hunt, and in Iris’s capable hands, made quick work out of a doe that will feed Iris’s family well into the new year.