Find your kind of country.

Five days. One guide. A lot of glass.

Coues deer are not hard to kill. They are hard to find. A mature buck lives on about four hundred acres of oak, manzanita and catclaw, he weighs less than a hundred pounds, and he is the exact colour of the hillside behind him. You do not walk him up. You sit down before light, put big glass on a tripod, and take a mountain apart square by square until something moves.

We hunt the January rut, when bucks that have not shown themselves since August start following does across open faces in the middle of the day. Mornings start at 4:30 and are cold — high twenties, sometimes ice in the wash. By two in the afternoon you are in shirtsleeves. Most shots happen between 250 and 450 yards, off a pack or a tripod, and we spend an afternoon on the range before the season opens making sure that number is real for you.

A hundred-inch Coues buck is a genuinely rare animal. We do not promise one. What we will tell you honestly is what we have been seeing on the trail cameras since September, which bucks are still alive, and where we think they will be when the does come in.

Open country, and a nine-day rut.

Desert muleys live where the oaks quit and the saguaros start. It is open country, which sounds easier than it is: you can glass six miles of it before breakfast and see nothing but does, then find the buck you want bedded under a palo verde at eleven in the morning with no way to get inside 600 yards without crossing a flat.

This is a rut hunt. We run it in the second half of December and the first two weeks of January, when heavy old bucks that spend the rest of the year in the thick stuff come out into the open behind does and stay stupid for about nine days. The mornings are spent on ridgelines behind glass. The middle of the day is spent making a plan. The evenings are spent executing it.

A good desert buck out of this country goes 150 to 165 inches with heavy, dark, short-tined antlers. We take one or two a season over 175. It is a different animal from a Rocky Mountain mule deer and it is worth understanding that before you come — you are buying the country and the rut, not a number.

Two deer. Nine days. Four thousand feet.

If you draw both tags in the same winter — and a handful of our hunters do every year — we run them back to back. Five days in the oak country above Aravaipa for a Coues buck, a night to do laundry and eat something that is not out of a pack, then four days down on the bajada for a desert muley.

It is the best way to understand this part of Arizona. You will spend the first half of the week glassing hillsides at six thousand feet with frost on your tripod, and the second half in a t-shirt looking across saguaro flats. Same state, same month, two entirely different hunts.