By David Tetzlaff

For box store cornbread, this stuff was pretty tasty. I really am trying to lay off the carbs but in hunting camp I allow myself an indulgence or two. So when a box of the golden cakes caught my eye, I tossed it into the shopping cart Mark Nelson was pushing down the busy bakery aisle of the Cheyenne Wal-Mart. Midwest born but southern raised, a common sight in our home kitchen was Dad and I sitting down to squares of cornbread crumbled into bowls of cold milk. Two days later in an antelope blind, while enjoying my southern-style baked goods, I felt something small and hard tumbling around inside my mouth. Perplexed, my first thought was an uncooked kernel of corn. But I was wrong. I nearly swallowed a tiny piece of expensive porcelain perfection—a crown had popped off tooth number 17. Carefully, I fished it out of my mouth, grabbed a water bottle, rinsed it off, and dropped the crown into an empty Ziplock bag. A call to my dentist would have to wait. There were pronghorn to be hunted.

Camp Gear, From Scratch

This handsome buck the author photographed near the Medicine Bow National Forest whetted his appetite for the hunt.

Upon learning my draw for a Wyoming antelope tag was successful, Mark suggested that camping on the ranch would make more sense than a twice-a-day 50-minute drive from his house. Embarrassingly, I haven’t camped for longer than I care to admit. I’ve been rather spoiled lately. In north Florida and Arkansas I’ve bunked in the comfort of friends’ hunting cabins and found cheap motels elsewhere. My old Bass Pro tent had certainly given more comfort than its $100 price tag promised before it dry-rotted from neglect. The heavy old camp cot was a cumbersome effort to carry about and had found its way to the local Goodwill. It was time to fire up Google’s search engine. Soon, our overly-protective dog pack announced the arrivals of a new tent, cot, sleeping pad, camp table, sun shower, and solar charger at the front gate. On schedule, in mid-August, I pointed the truck northwest, leaving Florida’s sticky humidity in the rearview, looking forward to the promise of the West’s dry heat.

Unique rock formations like this one dot the landscape in the Medicine Bow National Forest.

Two thousand miles and too many fast food meals later, I pulled into Mark’s driveway. He had work obligations the following day, so I used the time to get a scheduled oil change on the truck, take a drive up into the Medicine Bow National Forest, and photograph a few accommodating roadside pronghorn. That evening, I helped Mark wrap up some packing chores and the next morning we headed out. He and his few guests are the only bowhunters permitted to roam a 60,000 acre working cattle ranch. The last two weeks of August are reserved for antelope but once the deer and elk season opens, Mark abandons pop-up blinds and windmill stands for spot and stalk bedded muleys and bugling bulls. Typically, camp is in a low depression near a shallow creek that avoids some, but not all, of Wyoming’s persistent winds. Mark had recently been gifted a new-to-him vintage canvas tent and brought it along for its prairie debut. Remarkably, the set up instructions had weathered the decades. The little cartoon camper guy depicted in the directions made it as if the rainbow of color-coded poles was a one-man task to frame into a large, comfortable homeaway-from-home in six easy steps. Predictably, that was not the case, but we managed and soon a 1950s-era tent arose from a tangle of aluminum poles and canvas. After we built our kitchen and shower tent, we sorted hunting gear and assembled our bows. On a sage flat above camp, it felt good to stretch my legs and bow arms after the long drive and shoot a judo-tipped arrow— which inexplicably, I lost 10 minutes later. A quick search still left my quiver an arrow short. But looking for an errant arrow was for another day; there was an empty pop-up blind out on the prairie that needed a bowhunter.