The Four Deaths of Macho Mababi

In rural Sonora, whitetail deer hunting is more than meets the eye

by Andrew McKean                                                                                      Strung Magazine Volume 4, Issue 2 Spring 2022

The first time he died, the Mexican buck emerged from the shade of a manzanita bush just long enough for me to confirm five points on each antler and send 130 grains of Federal Trophy Copper zipping across the canyon. When I recover from the recoil and get back in the scope, the deer is gone.

I have a full hour to relive the rushed shot as Ron Shelton and I pick our way down the steep canyon, then shove ourselves up the other side, praying the withered branches of scrub oak will hold while our boots scrabble for purchase on the friable rocks. Between lung-searing pitches, Ron is consoling. He watched it all happen through his tripod-mounted binocular, and he says that on my shot the buck went down “like a bag of flour” in the head-high wild oats. He didn’t see it get back up, but neither did he see it roll down the slope, gravity replacing sinew and fear as the primary agent of propulsion.

“We’ll find him,” says Shelton, my guide on this hunt for Sonoran Coues deer, about 100 miles south of the Arizona border where he works as an agricultural inspector. The way Shelton says it, with no daylight for doubt, makes me glad he’s not going through my luggage with latex-gloved hands.

Only we don’t find him, not in a half-day kicking through the ocotillo and banana yucca, or even after Shelton traverses the canyon to guide me to the precise spot the buck was standing when I shot. Not a bead of blood or a tuft of creased hair shows itself where that Mexican deer stood as my trigger broke. It is as though the ground opened to swallow him whole.

Shelton crosses the canyon for the third time,

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