Crazy Dad Orange, courtesy Bend Fly Shop.

Restless, I low-crawled around the knob then motioned for dad to join me. A meadowlark landed in the top of the juniper tree and voiced its displeasure at finding a couple of two-leggers near its nest.

A doe and two fawns were bedded 300 yards up canyon, just the tips of their ears and their eyeballs shining above the tops of the yellowed grass. Dark gray. Like mice.

When the doe, after an hour, stood to her feet and began to feed, I turned the glass up to the rim rocks.

The day before in the magic hour, dad and I had stalked a 3×3 and a 4×3 in a boulder garden but lost the moment when they passed behind a wall of rock. Now the light diffused to gold and a deer stood up across the canyon. A lone mule deer doe, she stood staring at us. I looked up the mountain where soft yellow light bathed the rocks and the sage and mountain mahogany.

Some 1,500 yards away, I caught a white spot in the trees on the top of the rim. In my 10X binocular, the antlers showed well above its ears. Dialed to 60X in the spotting scope the antlers looked maybe 26 inches wide but were tall with deep forks.

“You go,” dad whispered.

I stripped off extra weight, leaving backpack, scope and tripod behind. I clipped a roll-up meat pack to my belt and slipped down off the knob, into the canyon for 200 yards then started up the other side out of the shade into the sunlight. I turned and held four fingers under the sun. Forty minutes till sunset. Up through the tall grass, up through the boulders.

I came to a fence and slid beneath the barbed wire and coming to a knee, saw three does skylined. I waited till they fed out of sight and moved 200 yards up the slope. The more yards I could gain, the closer the shot.

The big buck had, of course, vanished back into the trees, but this was magic hour and anything could happen.

I looked to the rifle with the .270 150-grain AccuBond in the big 27 Nosler case and dialed the scope to 15X, anticipating a long shot on my belly. Off to my right, I heard mule deer hooves sliding in shale.

How many times have I heard that before? Bucks just sound like bucks. A solid 3×3 and a tall 4×3 topped out on the hogback at a slight angle below me. The bigger buck turned quartering away. Two-hundred-seventy yards with the rangefinder. The grass and the gravel were angled wrong for a prone shot, so I knelt, propped an elbow on an unsteady knee — too much wobble in the crosshair — and dropped into a sitting position, anchored both elbows, offed the safety, stroked the trigger and felt the rifle buck. The two deer ran into the next canyon and the one on the right peeled away and spun in a half-circle and went down.

Almost 20 years ago now, I spent a lot of hours with John Nosler, the founder of the Nosler Partition bullet, and we spent a long time on those afternoons talking about rifles and mule deer and elk hunting. He particularly loved the desert hunting, walking the canyons where deer bedded. His favorite shot, he told me, was when he could just sit down against the slope behind him and gather the rifle to his shoulder, elbows anchored against the knees. I thought of him while I walked down to that buck.

Knelt down next to the deer I wondered if this was one of the smaller bucks I passed up last season. Light was going away fast and I set my camera on self-timer and leaned in for a picture. A waxing moon broke over the ridge while I bent to the knife. An hour after moon-rise, I bound the meat into the pack on the slope above me then backed up to it and shrugged into the shoulder straps.

Standing up, I slung the rifle and grabbed the deer head for the mile hike to the road in the moonlight where my dad waited with the truck.

Sea-run cutthroat, summer steelhead, smallmouth bass and Deschutes redsides. They get big eating crawdads and although crayfish start making themselves scarce in November, the fish still go for them.

The Crazy Dad Orange is a Shane Stalcup pattern that works because it rides hook up and the legs shimmer and the body moves as the artificial scoots “backward” on the retrieve. Fish it deep, right along the bottom, using a stout leader and a sinking or sink-tip line.

Tie the Crazy Dad Orange with rusty brown thread on a No. 6 Daiichi 1270 hook. Start by tying in olive/orange-tipped Crazy Legs. Add lead wrap (optional) to the shank, and build the body with rusty orange dubbing. Now tie in heavy brass finish lead eyes and finish with an orange bucktail underwing trimmed out over the eye of the hook.

—Gary Lewis, for The Bulletin