Slept in a little bit this morning, but I got up before sunrise to watch Chris preach at Broadstreet Methodist Church down in North Carolina, where he’s subbing for a pastor. Glad to hear him again. I miss his sermons but glad he’s retired like me and can really enjoy his kids and grandkids.
I took my time to get my gear, food, and clothing together, then headed down to the boat mid-morning. I took off about 10:45 from Craig, headed out to an anchorage I found this summer. It’s a good 3-hour run from town in my boat. I figured no one else would be coming out here, and the muskeg I can see on OnX works for the north wind that’s in the forecast for the next several days. It looks like I finally got the battery system on the boat dialed in. We’ll see how everything works, with the heater on at night and that kind of thing. (I saw a You Tube later in the week, by chance, that showed me one last adjustment to the battery charger that finally solved the problem of low charging through the charger from the tugs adequate alternator).
I got to the anchorage about three and a half hours out of town, dropped the hook, and launched the punt. I put the little electric outboard on that I bought several years ago and I just love it. The outboard (EP Carry) plugs into a removable little lithium battery. The motor only weighs about 15 pounds, and the battery weighs about 10 lbs. It’s great for motoring back and forth to the beach.
I got some lunch on with some deer breakfast sausage and mushrooms and a few peppers. I threw an egg on top of it when it was all cooked down, and then I made a burrito for lunch. A few hours later, I had left overs of it on a salad for dinner.
I listened to the Packers give the game away to Detroit, and thought well, it’s still light out and still warm in the wheelhouse, as the sun was beating in and the solar heat was nice. I found my friend Don Jackson’s new book. I hadn’t started reading it yet, and thought – this is perfect book for this trip. I think there’s 24 short stories in it, so if I limit myself to six stories a day, that’ll get me through my four days of deer hunting.
The sun got down over the trees, turning off the free solar heat, and I turned on the diesel heater. The clear days and nights would bring temperatures down into the 30’s at night. I check my new house batteries, and things look good. The starlink mini is running great, and I enjoy drinking coffee and listening to the evening Seahawks game.
I was up well before first light. Jesse and I went up to this spot when he was here in August fishing, and I called in a couple does. That, and the numerous deer tracks on the beach, and a deer sighting on the beach this summer, indicated this island was, indeed, large enough to hold a few deer. At first light, I took the punt to the beach and headed up to the muskeg. I found a perch on a rock outcrop on one side of the muskeg, and settled in for 15 minutes or so. I’ve taken to timing my calls at 15 minute intervals on my phone. It’s forcing me to be more patient. Then I blew the call.
A few minutes after calling, I see a large buck on the opposite side, coming my way. It looked like a 4 point, although I could only see the antlers from the side. It had a huge body. The wind was blowing from him to me (perfect) and the sun was behind me, in his eyes (double perfect). He could not see me in my position (triple perfect). And then he held up on the other side of the muskeg – I’d guess 150 yards away. He turned and trotted up into the woods on his side. Maybe he didn’t like the stiff breeze. I called again when he got to the woods. He stopped hard and looked back at me, but it was too far of a shot for me in too short a time. But oh, how exciting on the first few minutes of the day and the first buck of the season.
As would happen every day of this week, the skies were clear and sunny. Easy to sit in the sun and just see what happens, rather than eventually getting chilled and wanting to move on. This muskeg was big enough to call in two or three spots at most, so I knew I could make a morning of it in this spot. I enjoyed the sunshine and called every 15 minutes. A small flock of Canada geese flew by in a V, right overhead, within shotgun range.
About an hour later, here comes another buck on the other side, on the same trail the first buck was on. I don’t know if he was just wandering around looking for love or coming to check on the call. He didn’t seem to want to come over to me for a shot, but he didn’t leave, either. I’d see him now and again through the bullpines, ground cedar, and stunted hemlocks in the muskeg and the timber above it on the other side. I changed my tone on the call, and that seemed to do it. The buck came my way. And like I seem to do on every first deer of the season, I wasn’t patient enough. The buck was out there maybe 75 yards. Coming straight to me. I had a clear, head-on neck shot. But most importantly, I didn’t have a good rest, and shot from my sitting position. I rushed two shots. Both clean misses. And he just turned around and walked back into the brush and out of my life. You’re never too old to repeat the same mistakes, it seems. Shoulda waited til he was closer. And shoulda set up where I had a good rest. Same old sad story.
Didn’t see another deer that day. Or the next day. I had to go back and try again after seeing 2 bucks, but didn’t see a thing in the gorgeous sunny fall weather.
I moved that evening. I decided to run to the next island over. I went the long way around to the anchorage, because I remember going in the nearest entrance to the channel between the two islands seemed very sketchy when I went through there with Pat and Sean in August. I bucked the northerly getting over there, but nothing too bad. I anchored behind an island in the channel, and got ready to go hunting in a brand new (to me) spot tomorrow.
I found my way up to a huge muskeg complex. There was lots of ground cedar and bullpine and rock outcrops and brush. Lots of places for deer to feel like they have some cover if they come to investigate a fawn bawling.
I a deer working off to the left of me, just as I got to the muskeg proper, coming my way, on the move. Looks like a doe. Then it turned it’s head….oOoOO! a buck! I nice medium small fork horn. I found a tree snag for cover and a rest, duffed my pack, chambered a round, and watched. He’s still coming my way, off to my left. I blew on the call….here he comes!. I get a rest and wait for him to emerge up the slight incline through some brush to me. Wind is blowing in my face. Sun is at my back…. And he never showed. He must have kept going and got behind me into the heavy brush to get downwind. He was the only deer I was to see today. The muskeg was spectacular in fall colors in the sun, but walking in the ground cedar and muskeg really wore me out.
After not seeing anything on the first island when I hunted a second day, I decided to head to the next island over, rather than hunt here a second day. I got down to the beach at about high tide – and the tide was a neap tides, so extra high. I realized after I anchored yesterday that I’d recorded my track on the chartplotter out the channel entrance with all the rocks when I went through here in August with Pat and Sean. So, with the extra high water and a track to follow, I felt a little better motoring the short distance out into open water, and made it through without incident. I drank hot coffee left over from the morning in the big thermos Julie thrifted for me. It’s so big it holds the whole lot of the coffee in the percolator. Nothing like hot coffee at the end of a long hike deer hunting. I paired the coffee with a bowl of raisins and almonds and a few chocolate almonds.
I ran way up into a bay of the next island, where a point of land divides the upper reaches of the bay into two smaller bays. A muskeg parallels the two bays, and I could anchor on either side. I chose the left bay, as I thought it provided a little better break from the north wind. I will try the right side next time, as it’s about half the distance to hike into the muskeg from there. I got anchored, read a few more chapters of Don’s book, and hit the rack.
The next morning, I went to the beach a tad later than I had the first 3 days. The woods looked pretty dark at first light, so I let some more sunrise happen. Then up the hill I went. The going wasn’t particularly nice, but it rarely is. Patches of nice open old growth rainforest with periods of deadfalls and brush in between. I got to a spot in the big woods below the muskeg, and thought I’d try calling here for a short time, as I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of deer out in the muskegs so far. Nothing showed.
I hiked on up to the big muskeg. It was another great complex of bullpine and ponds and muskeg and stunted hemlocks and dead snags, with substantial timber parallelling both sides of the muskeg. As I got into the muskeg, I saw the ground frost was still present where I was, out about 75 yards, and there the frost had melted as the sun was up that far, and the muskeg was in full fall colors. A pretty scene. I was in the shadows and upwind, although there was very little wind today for a change. Before I started calling, I picked some cedar bows, crumpled them in my hands to release the fragrance, rubbed it on myself from head to toe, then put the bow pieces in my pockets. A little cover scent couldn’t hurt.
I waited 15 minutes for things to settle down, and then called. A doe popped out to my left, coming from back in the frosty shadows. Why wouldn’t she want to be out in the sun? She came right up to me to investigate, decided I wasn’t a fawn and wasn’t a threat, and then slowly walked back out along the other side of the muskeg. I waited til she was out of sight. I checked the clock. Thirteen minutes had passed since I’d called. I waited two more minutes and called again.
This time two does came in from the same side of the muskeg as the first doe, but from further out in the muskeg where the sunshine was. They did the same routine as the first doe, although they did not come as close to me, then wandered back out along the timber on the other side of the muskeg, just like the first doe did.
I called a couple more times over the rest of the hour+ and no more deer showed. I moved on to the next muskeg section. The overall muskeg was broken into 3 or 4 sections, with some timber in between the sections.
I set up in a tighter spot than the first muskeg. I was on the edge of the timber to my left, with brushy areas that stretched out and down the muskeg. I could see distances from about 40 to 100 yards. I blew the call and waited 15 minutes. Nothing showed. I blew the call again, and here comes a deer out of the brush. And it’s a buck. Having learned my annual lesson earlier, I was set up where I had a good rest against the trees I was hiding in. The deer sensed my movement when I raised my gun, and it quartered and started walking away. He stopped and looked back at me from about 30 yards. I didn’t think much. I just got his neck in the sight picture of the scope hairs and fired. After the recoil I looked up. Nothing. Uh oh. I hope he’s down over there in the high grass and brush. In an adrenaline rush, I started gathering up my pack to walk over there and here comes a doe, right by me. She was with the buck, but not in the lead. Just like two of the bucks I harvested last year.
I let her get on by and then walked full of anticipation and dread over to see if I had hit the buck. He was right there in his tracks. He was dead when he hit the ground. A perfect shot right through the neck. A quick death. Little suffering, I hope. It was about noon.
I got my deer tag out and punched it. Then got all the gear out of the pack to field process. First I cut off the forelegs at the knees, and made slits under the hide from the knees to the center on the fore and hind legs. Then I cut a ring around the neck, right under the chin. I have a knife that has both a regular knife blade and a gutting blade. The gutting blade allows you to get under the hide and not cut the muscle when skinning, and allows allows you to cut through the thin muscle over the stomach, without puncturing the stomach, when removing the innards.
The tool is super lightweight and inexpensive. It replaces a somewhat dangerous job of cutting around the anus to remove the intestine. It actually works, every time. I tried it on a moose once, though, and you need a bigger one for a moose, which I don’t know that the company makes. I’m sure I could make one, but don’t get enough moose to worry about it.
I slit the hide from the butt up the center of the chest, connecting the two slits I made between the knees to the center of the chest on the rear and for legs. I go back and make a slit between the thin muscle covering the internal organs from the butt up to the chest, then roll out the guts and move them to the side of the carcass. Next, I cut through the diaphragm and cut out the lungs and heart. I find the heart in the pile, and put it in a bag.
I then put my 4 pulley hoist up in a tree. It always takes a little more time to sort out the hoist lines the first time I use it each season, and I eventually get it set up. I put the loop of soft halibut gangion line hanging from the lower double pulley around the antlers, then pull on the line coming from the top double pulley, and hoist the deer, little by little, till it’s hanging at a good working height for me. The hoist system is physics magic at work. I can lift the largest deer I’d ever get here with it alone, and with not alot of effort.
I start skinning the buck at the neck and down to the shoulders, which takes a bit of cutting the hide away from the muscle with the knife. From the shoulders on down the rest of the way is mostly pulling with one arm while using my fist where the skin meets the muscle to push the hide off. I harvested this deer several weeks earlier than the deer I got last year, and it has a nice layer of fat. The bucks I took last year had little to no fat, as they were full on into the rut.
The hide comes off in a few minutes, and now I pull up a game bag up around the carcass. Somehow the deer doesn’t fit in the bag like it did last year. I have a cheese cloth type, store bought bag, rather than my homemade bed sheet bags. I lower the whole deer on the hoist into my pack. I lower a little, then pull the pack up around the deer a little, until I have the deer into the pack. I can’t seem to get the deer down into the bag and into the pack right. Alot of the neck is still above the top of the pack, and the bottom legs are not folding to let it settle into the bottom. When the deer is in the pack as best I can get it, and it’s sitting on the ground, I cut off the head using a small saw to get through the bone, and my knife to cut the muscle.
I get the deer cinched into the pack, get all my gear back into the pack, and then try to lift the pack. It doesn’t take long to say out loud: “Mark, this ain’t happenin”. The pack is way too heavy to pack down the hill through the toolies.
I put the hoist back up in the tree, pull the deer carcass back up off the ground with the hoist. I remove the front quarters and the neck and put those into pillow case game bags. I lift each of the bags and think: much better.
I hang the front quarters and neck in the heavy cover of a cedar tree a ways away from the gut pile, make sure the spot is marked on my OnX, and then place the deer head in the tree I hung the deer from as a visual marker. I’ll come back for the bag of meat tomorrow, and hunt my way here.
I hike straight down to the beach from my location, rather than back tracking to the first muskeg and down the hill. The distance negotiating the woods from the muskeg to the beach would be shorter that way, but overall, the distance directly to the beach from here is shorter, so I chanced it.
About half way down, I came to a spot deep in the timber that had about 10 piles of black bear scat, all in a 5 yard circle, under a tree. Most of the scat was red berries – huckleberries, which were still around – and one pile looked like skunk cabbage roots. None of the scat looked like recent deposits. I walked a few steps further to the other side of the tree, and there saw three or four huge piles of scat. The piles were about 18 inches wide by 8 inches high. And this scat was fresh – containing salal berries – which were full on in season now, and I’d been grazing on them all week. That sight was enough to make a guy with a packful of meat on his back a tad nervous.
I got to the beach without incident, other than a few hard falls. I sure am glad the rainforest floor is mostly soft. I was a good distance down the beach from the punt. and the tide was so high there was no beach to walk back to it. So, I put my pack and gun where I stood, and hiked back through the woods on the beach fringe back to the punt, and motored over to retrieve my gear.
Back at the tug, I tied a line from the galley roof handle down to the stern rail across the back deck, and hung the sack of venison to cool overnight.
The next day, I got going a little earlier. I beached the punt and carried my gear up into the beach fringe to change out my boots. I looked down at the punt and realized I forgot to bring the tie-up line from the punt up the beach and tie it to a tree on shore. Yikes. What if I forgot. Too far to swim back to the tug if the tide took the punt away. Note to self: tie the tie-up line to something you have to take to the woods so you don’t forget. Dang.
I got up the hill. No deer in the first muskeg where I saw 3 doe yesterday. Alternative entertainment included a Stellar’s jay that landed right near me in the brush, then a woodpecker put on a show out in front of me for awhile on snags in the muskeg.
I worked my way to the second muskeg, got off track. I realized I needed to get back over to my left more. And, I finally got tired of my underwear falling off from my weight loss, and it’s a chore to keep pulling them up under my layers of rain bibs over my Carhartt overalls. I stopped in the sun in the muskeg, removed the underwear, and continued commando up into a really nice muskeg I hadn’t hunted yesterday, thanks to going off course today.
I got to a place in the muskeg where there were woods on 3 sides of the field, put my pack down to call, and…..WHERE’S MY GUN?!?. I left it at the changing room! First a heart attack, followed by panic. Could I find my way back there? Luckily, I remembered that I stopped in a little depression on the edge of the woods before I came up to the muskeg, about an eighth of a mile or so back. I marched back that way double time. There was my gun against the tree, right where I left it. I immediately turned on the tracking tool on my OnX app in case this happened again. I recapped the day so far: first, I almost lost my punt from not tying it to something on the beach, and second: I lost my gun. Yikes! Age 63 is almost here.
I returned to the muskeg, and called in the sunshine for half an hour or so. Nothing. Wow, this looked like a good spot. I headed out of the muskeg back towards where the meat was hanging, and ran into a doe in the section of muskeg that was behind me when I called She wasn’t overly alarmed by me as I walked by her at about 30 yards. As I continued up to the other muskeg, there she was again, parallelling me. Almost like she was following me. I didn’t see her after that.
I’d come to the end of this huge muskeg complex. This was the last third of it. I set up and called in the midday sunshine. A doe charged in right away from the woods to my left. She came over and checked me out, then wandered back where she came from and out of sight. I called again when she was gone, and another doe charged over. At least I think it was a different doe. And this time, I saw another deer behind her that held up, right at the edge of the woods. I thought that was Mr. Buck, but it was another doe. I let the doe check me out. It gave off one snort as it turned and trotted off. Sometimes the doe snort and snort and run all around, sending warning out to all in the area. This this one just gave the one quick snort and that was it.
When she and the other doe went back into the woods, I called again, and now the same deer came back. This time she came right over to me, trying to understand what, exactly, was the problem with this creature that sounded like a fawn bawling, without any underwear, mind you, but which did not look or smell like a fawn. Eventually she went back out the same way she came in. I left her alone after that and hiked to yesterday’s kill site.
Everything was as I left it. Even the liver in the gut pile had not been found yet. I usually worry that a marten might get to the meat overnight, rather than a bear (I’ve never heard of wolves bothering meat), but nothing – not even the birds – had even started in on the gut pile.
I pulled the deer head down from the tree and placed it alongside the gut pile and the hocks. Then I walked over to the meat sack, got it into my pack, coiled up the hoist set up, and off I went.
I went back towards the first muskeg this time, rather than heading straight down, after seeing all the bear scat on that route yesterday. I got down a little easier than yesterday, I think, but still with some hard falls as usual. Neither the replaced hip nor the replaced shoulder seem affected by the falls. What a time we’re living in.
I got back to the tug and decided to head to town, since I hadn’t seen another buck here. I could have stopped at spots between here and town, but I like to leave the spots closer to Craig for the hunters who still work for a living and only have the weekends off.
I pulled up the marine weather on my phone and saw a big blow was on its way tonight! Dang. I didn’t see that coming. I had only checked on the rain forecast recently, and not the winds. I coulda been stuck out there for a few days, which wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.
It took about 4 hours to get to town. As I turned the corner at Fish Egg Island for South Cove, I was completely out of daylight, and lucky to have the Craig City lights to help see on the last 20 minutes of the run to the harbor.
I got tied up in South Cove, and offloaded my gun and a few other things to fill the folding cart up, and headed for the car. I’d get the rest of the gear and the meat, which I’d put in a cooler, tomorrow.
First thing I did at home was to weigh myself. I dropped another 5+ pounds. Nice. That takes me to about 80 pounds lost since end of January 2025.
Then a hot shower, and a feast of canned deer burger, onions, mushrooms, Mama Lils and my favorite Kirkland Coastal cheese I cooked together and then put that on several tortillas with salad left from the boat and sour cream I bought on the way home. Then I hit the rack. Best sleep I’ve had in a long time.
