Charity's Bison

The alarm rang at 5:30 am. Up and eat, dress the kids, get them to the friends house, leaving later than we wanted to... that seems to be the way it goes. It was above zero when we left home, in Delta it was about -15 with 20 mph winds and horizontal snow. It was chilly! We spotted Bison about a mile from the truck. We had to skirt a long way around them to get down wind (about 2 miles). When we got down wind from them half of the bison moved to the back side of a hedge row and we couldn't sneak down the back side. We had to wait for the bison to all move to one side of the hedge row before we could sneak in. It was a cold wait! We were able to sneak within 100 yards of about 60 Bison (we could only see a couple however). Charity's Bison walked out into the field all by its self, after she shot it 60 other Bison came flying out of the hedge row. We had to yell at them to get them to leave before we could go near the Bison. She shot it around 2:30 we were able to clean it and paritally skin it before we had to go back to the truck to warm up (charity had on uninsulated cross country ski shoes). We were sure it was a cow before she shot but were super nervous until we were able to get up and confirm it for sure. Charity had a cow tag and if we accidentally shot a young bull we would have still had to cut it all up, but then we would have had to give it over to the wildlife trooper and we would have had a $200-500 fine for shooting the wrong animal. We were releived when we were able to confirm it was a cow. Charity was shooting at it and I was supposed to start shooting right after her first shot (they can go miles even with fatal shots) but my gun wouldn't fire so I just watched her shoot away. I checked my gun after I saw the Bison go down and found my firing pin was frozen. Good thing she didn't stop shooting till it dropped! It was 6:30 by the time we had it all skinned and quarterd. We were so worn out from walking about 8 miles in total that we could hardly pull the sled with meat in it. I was able to get ahold of a co worker who lived about 30 miles away to borrow a snow mobile. It took longer to go get the snow machine, load and unload it than it did to pull the meat to the truck. It was about 11:30 by the time we had the snow machine back to Jason's house and could head toward home. We crawled into bed around 2:30 am after stopping to pick up the baby. We are definately sore and tired today but happy to be done chasing Bison through knee deep half crusted snow drifts for miles and miles!

Charity had a cow tag. This was a really old cow, we are guessing atleast 6 or 7 years old.

The bison is massive. In all the photos we are leaning right against it, not sitting behind it a bit to make it look bigger. The rifle is about 39" that shows how thick it was.

This photo turned out blurry as did all the photos I tried to take with the timer. Charity wanted some pictures with her good looking guide! It was still snowing a little bit and pushing -30F by now so we were limited in how many pictures we could take before the camera would shut off and our hands would get cold. You can see all the frost on my face.

The horn on this side is perfectly round like a cresent moon, the other side was broken or worn down a ways and was more L shaped. One of the hardest parts was getting the rib cage and head & hide up into the back of the truck. I am pretty sore from pushing the bison up into picture pose postion and moving it over from side to side to get it quartered.

It was amazing how much fat was on this bison. It was a couple of inches thick especiall up on the hump area. You can see how frosty Charity's face mask is in the photo. The rib cage was still steaming about 4.5 hours after we had it quartered. The stomache meat is almost an inch thick. The meat in the diaphram was almost 1.5 thick. It is amazing how much meat is on it.

The two hind quarters and two front quarters were several hundred pounds. The rib cage (suprisingly) seemed to be almost as heavy as the 4 quarters together. The head was massive and with the entire hide attached probably was pushing 125 lbs.