My 2018 Fall Hunting Season — Ryan's Tasty Critters

**The sun rising on a river of mist flowing through the San Juan valley, near Port Renfrew.**

In September, I started off the fall season with a trip to Ghost Lake, in the Cariboo region of BC with two of my cousins and my uncle. I had a bull moose tag I had been drawn for as part of a group limited-entry application. We took the ferry ride over from Vancouver Island, and drove up there for five days of camping, hunting, and fishing. It was great to see all the wildlife that I don’t usually get to see, because it doesn’t occur on the island. Things like mule deer and coyotes, which are probably common sights to most western hunters, but which are pretty novel to me. I’ve seen a fair number of mule deer over the course of various trips to the mainland, but there are usually spans of years in between those trips. It’s always eye-opening how much bigger mature mule deer are than the blacktails that I’m used to seeing. We never did get a shot at a bull moose on the trip; we saw only one, and a shot opportunity never presented itself. We did see many cow moose, though, and it was awesome to watch them. There are lots of differences, but there are a few similarities between the Cariboo and Vancouver Island, too. There are a ton of black bears in both places. And the ubiquitous rainbow trout in every little lake. There are a bunch of grouse in both places, too, but with a bit of a difference. Whereas there are ruffed and sooty grouse in both spots, the mainland also has spruce grouse, which are absent from the island. I love spruce grouse. Their go-to survival strategy when threatened is to fly up into the nearest tree and sit as still as possible. Usually at eye level. With no consideration as to whether there’s any cover in from of them or not. This dovetails well with my preferred method of bird-hunting, which is to shoot sitting birds out of trees at short distances.

We shot a couple dozen grouse over the course of the trip, and brought them back to camp every night for camp food. Combined with the rainbows we caught in the lake, and the wild blueberries and mushrooms we picked, we barely needed to have brought any food with us at all. Still, we didn’t harvest a big game animal on the trip. So it makes sense that the morning after I got home, I drove 30 minutes from my house, and shot a deer 15 minutes into a hike up a nearby mountain. The hunting gods are like that. You put in a bunch of work, planning and hunting hard for a long period of time, often in adverse conditions, and come away empty-handed. Then you go out the next time and get a gimme. The deer I got was a small spike buck that I shot with my Remington 870 12-gauge. It was in a zone where any deer, buck or doe, is open, but you’re restricted to archery equipment or shotguns with buckshot only. It was great to get that meat in the freezer. The rest of September I mostly spent trout fishing in the local lakes, jigging for rockfish, and crab trapping.

During the month of October, I hunted a fair amount, but most of those “hunts” could be characterized more accurately as long walks in the woods while carrying a gun. I went out on several early mornings and hiked for hours, sometimes until sunset, with the main goal just to be out in the forest. I’m never more at peace than when I’m walking in the bush, watching and listening, and switched-on to my surroundings in the wilderness. During the whole month of October, I killed a total of one duck and one goose. But that wasn’t really the point. Sure, I would have loved if a monster blacktail presented itself for a shot, or if I got a bag limit of grouse. But I had a great time just slowly walking along the overgrown old deer trails, and being out there. Climbing around and through the salal and the thorny devil’s club, and the massive, slowly-rotting trees that make up the forest floor. I don’t always need to have a plan or a destination; just large expanses of wild places to wander around in. It could turn into a deer hunt, or a bear hunt, or a grouse hunt at any moment, but it doesn’t need to. I just love the feeling of being part of the energy of nature, and of the possibilities that go with it.

The first week of November, I once again got down to actually planning a focused deer hunt. The plan was to kayak from Yellow Point, south of Nanaimo, across about a 7.5 km stretch of ocean over to Valdes Island. I made the same trip two years ago, and decided to give it another go, this time with more days available to hunt. The kayak is one of the best tools available to a hunter on the west coast. You can use it to access areas that are just not available to those hunting on foot or from a truck or quad. It’s perfectly quiet, and it requires no fuel. All it takes is a bit of an adventurous spirit, and you can paddle to some completely remote areas where practically no one else is going. A big ocean kayak has plenty of room for a few days’ worth of camping and hunting gear, and with a little bit of pre-butchering, you can fit quite a bit of meat in and on one, as well. I paddled across to Valdes on November 4th, in the evening, using a lighthouse and the lights of a big, anchored freighter as reference points to guide me across. That was the first time I tried kayaking in the dark, and it was pretty straightforward, if a bit spooky. I did have a GPS available in my bag, roped to the top of the boat if I needed it, but I managed to get across and land within 200 yards of where I wanted to be, without any assistance other than the aforementioned lights. I set up camp at Blackberry Point, and settled in with a delicious Mountain House freeze-dried dinner, looking forward to a few days of solo hunting adventure on the mostly unpopulated island. The first day of hunting, I hiked directly inward from the beach, to get to an overgrown dirt road that I had found on my earlier trip. This time around, I had committed the Google Earth satellite imagery of the island to memory. I had several promising spots I wanted to hit, but first, I had to negotiate my way around a large, sheer cliff that runs a good distance along the length of the island. The satellite imagery wasn’t too helpful with this, because any sufficiently steep slope just doesn’t really register on an overhead view. On the GPS, however, I could see a spot where the elevation lowered, and there might be a way through. I hiked up to the base of the cliff through a boulderfield of truck-sized rocks on a steep slope. I found a spot where a crack ran horizontally through the cliff wall, which one could climb up into and through, and come out on the other side able to get onto the top of the cliff. After navigating that tricky bit, which I have many photos of, posted on my instagram page, it was a simple matter of hiking through a thick temperate rainforest and trying to find a tiny, elusive deer. I hiked for ten hours that first day, seeing a handful of deer, mostly just for a fleeting moment, and mostly obscured by various obstacles. None appeared to be bucks, which is what I needed to find. Being conscious of the fact that I didn’t want to try to descend back to my side of the island in the dark, I got back to camp in a timely manner through the same crack in the rock that I had come up. For dinner that night, I tried a new brand of freeze-dried food that I hadn’t had before, Backpacker’s Pantry. I believe I sampled their kung pao chicken offering that night, and it was very satisfying indeed. Two thumbs up for the Pantry.

The next morning saw me doing the same as the first, waking up before dawn, eating freeze-dried food, and climbing up a steep boulderfield. This time, I started from a couple kilometres away from the crack in the cliff, and worked my way toward it along the base of the rock. This was based on observations I had made two years ago, where I had seen deer using the base of the cliff as a bedding area. They could sit facing outward, and see and smell everything coming up toward them, and have their back protected by the wall of rock. Turns out this was a great strategy on their part, because there sure were a lot of deer up along the base of that cliff, but I sure as hell couldn’t get close to them. I bumped about a dozen deer off the approaches to the rock face, and didn’t manage to settle a crosshair on any of them. I’m sure, given the opportunity to find a good route up with good sight lines and the least possible amount of forest debris to crash through, this could be a successful option. Not on that day, though, that’s for sure. So once again, I ventured up and through the pass in the rock, to the other side of the island. It was a virtual repeat of the previous day, walking for hours through soaking wet salal and hoping each step wouldn’t have my foot breaking through rotten wood and getting stuck up to my armpits in forest floor biomatter. This time, however, I got back to camp with enough time to have a quick meal and head back up to the base of the cliff for an evening hunt along its base. As previously stated, the hunting gods will often reward hard work with a gimme, and only a couple hundred yards from my camp, I spotted a deer making its way down toward the ocean. As luck would have it, the wind and rain had picked up considerably through the day, and weather that I had previously cursed gave me the advantage in this situation, and the deer couldn’t have heard me if I were ten feet away. I kept out of sight behind a tree, and waited for the deer to pick its way around and over some boulders, and present a broadside shot. In short order it did, and a few seconds later, I had a deer down just a short drag from camp. I spent another day and night on Valdes with the deer meat hanging in game bags from a nearby tree, while I waited for the weather to cooperate enough to paddle back across to Vancouver Island. Many more freeze-dried meals met their end. When the time came to leave finally, the deer packed nicely into the boat, and I enjoyed a triumphant, if slightly choppy paddle back toward home.

In the next couple weeks, I made a few trips up the Malahat on weekends and in the mornings before work. I flushed and didn’t get a shot at an alarming number of grouse during this time. I have a tendency where I can sometimes allow something like missing a grouse to stick in my head and distract me for the rest of the day. I have to remind myself to have a short memory, and not go stomping around the woods thinking about a bird, and chasing deer away. On one of these occasions, I had been climbing all over a ridgeline, from one side to the other, for hours in the wind and rain. I had found a little group of three grouse in this same area a few days before, and had flushed and lost the first one, then the second and third ones in quick succession, just through sheer impatience. I was thinking about finding more birds in that spot, and had not been successful yet. I was reminding myself to stay focused and work slowly. Then it started hailing. And there was thunder and lightning. I could not have been more soaked and frozen if I had jumped in a glacial lake. The weather report had only said there might be brief showers, and I wasn’t going to be out overnight, so I had some pretty thin gear on, and not all of it was waterproof. I got turned around while trying to drop down into a drainage and come up the other side onto the next ridge on my way back toward the car. In the ravine bottom, the vegetation was so thick, trying to find my way through ended up getting me pointed about 90 degrees in the wrong direction. So I ended up travelling way down-valley before popping back out the other side. When I got to the top of the next ridge and realized this, I just started trudging straight through everything, on a beeline for the direction of the trail back to the car, regardless of what that sent me climbing through. I popped out onto an old overgrown portion of a trail I didn’t previously know about, and promptly flushed a grouse straight down a hillside and into a stand of eight-foot-high evergreens. There was no way I was getting that bird. I could laugh about it at that point; it was so cold and wet it transcended miserable and went to kind of funny and ridiculous.

I trudged through the bush for another hour or so, and finally made it back to the main trail. After walking downhill on the relatively cushy trail for awhile, my focus drifted again. In my mind, I was already in the car, getting changed, warming up, and planning where to eat. Sure enough, back in the real world, I came around a bend in the trail, and there was a deer standing in the middle of it. The doe was as startled by this as I was, and stumbled as it started trying to climb a steep slope off of the side of the path. I had bird shot loaded in my 12-gauge, but I had a 00 buckshot shell in the side pocket of my bino harness, and a couple more in the various other pockets of my gear. I walked toward the spot on the trail where the deer had scrambled up, looked in that direction, and there it still was, 40 yards uphill, mostly obscured by brush, giving me the look-back that I had been hoping for. I was fumbling around with my wet, frozen fingers, trying to eject the #6 shot, and load a buckshot shell. Miraculously, the deer was still standing there when I got finished with that project, and I drew a bead on it. There was too much brush. It was no good. I tried to shift around and find a better angle, but the deer was already gone. I climbed up to where it had been standing and took a look around, and climbed around a bit on that hillside, but didn’t uncover any more sign of hoofed critters. Once again, I started back toward the car on the main trail, thinking that that would have been perfect; to get the last of my three-deer limit for the year right close to the car, after a long day of wandering in the rain. When I got to a fork in the trail where I had to turn left to get back to the road, I decided to turn right and take a quick look down a long, straight stretch of trail not far away. I figured I had a half hour of daylight left, and if that deer had been up and moving, there might be more doing the same. I might as well take a look. I rounded the bend and crept slowly toward the straight stretch. Two does ran from the left to the right across the trail, and disappeared into the bush at the bottom of a hillside. Well, I thought, they’re definitely up and moving, maybe I can make something happen after all. A second later, I spotted another doe standing near the edge of the trail, at the base of the hillside. She was looking straight at me from about 60 yards away. I raised the shotgun, and closed the distance to about 50 yards, with a little slow shuffle forward, ready to shoot if the doe gave any sign of bolting. At 50 yards with a broadside shot, I felt comfortable that I would get a pretty instantaneous kill, and aimed for the lungs and squeezed the trigger. The doe toppled over dead, and I marched toward it feeling pretty pretty darn good about the whole situation.

That was the end of my 2018 blacktailed-deer season, with three animals in the freezer. I’ve already enjoyed a some pan-seared backstrap with mushrooms, some grilled venison on the BBQ, and some sliced deer sandwiches with chipotle mayo and pickles. I’m looking forward to all the many more meals those deer are going to provide going forward. I’ve got plenty of meat now, and I won’t need to be in any hurry to go out early for the 2019 spring bear hunt. I can enjoy it at a leisurely pace, and have fun at it, as I should. All that there is to do now is try to get a few more of those pesky island grouse knocked down, and maybe get out for some cougar calling with the FoxPro. It’s been a great year of hunting and fishing in 2018. I learned a lot, had an incredible time on many different adventures, both solo and with family, and really enjoyed my time in the woods; I can’t imagine a life without it.