2019 Fall Hunting: Island Black-tails, Small Game, and a Terrible LEH Draw

My 2019 deer season started off with some local hunting.  I usually go out to the same few spots up near the Malahat every year in September.  It’s the closest high-elevation area to Victoria, and it’s got tons of small black-tails.  I really enjoy the short drive up in the dark, before the sun rises, and before anyone else is up.  It feels like you have the world to yourself.  The first morning of the season, in particular, feels fresh and exciting.  Like anything is possible.  Like deer are going to be popping out from behind every tree the moment you put your boots on the ground.  Some years, they practically are.  I shot my first deer of the season in 2018 fifteen minutes into my first morning.  In 2019, however, opening day came and went without much happening.  I did manage to shoot a cottontail rabbit on my way back to the truck that morning, which was very welcome.  After that, several more hunting days passed in much the same way.  In the deep, wet bush on Vancouver Island, you can often hear deer around you well before you see them, if you see them at all.  Almost every deer encounter is in close quarters, and I’m often within 30 yards of deer when I first become aware of them.  But going from hearing, to seeing, to seeing with no obstructions, are big leaps.  I might hear ten deer in an average morning, but only see one, and only for a second.  As it turned out, the first deer I shot in 2019 was only 200 yards from my vehicle.  A few weeks into the season, I went out for a typical morning of hiking up and along ridges, and through ravines, and beat the bush pretty thoroughly for about five hours.  I ran across a ruffed grouse along the way, and as luck would have it, the bird waited cooperatively while I switched from 00 buck shot to no. 6 bird shot in my 12-gauge.  With the grouse in my bag, I soon started back toward the road.  An hour later, and just a couple minutes from my destination, I walked up on a bedded doe ten yards away to my right.  It got up and started to saunter off back down the trail it had come in on, and I walked backward up the trail that I had come down from.  The two trails paralleled each other, and as I was hoping, I got a glimpse of the deer through the brush between us, and found a window big enough to shoot through.  There was no lag between shot and kill, and it was great to have that doe down, and with a short pack-out, to properly start the season.

Soon after that, I went on a big trip to the interior of BC with my cousin and my uncle, for a limited-entry cow moose hunt.  As it turned out, a work camp had been set up in the middle of the unit we had been drawn for.  When I checked it out on Google Earth before applying, the unit looked great.  No work crews or construction in sight. Unfortunately, in the time between that image being taken, and when we got there, a lot changed.  There were seemingly hundreds of workers cutting and burning to widen the access roads, and set up temporary buildings.  18-wheelers were driving through constantly, 24 hours a day, with supplies.  No one would tell us what they were doing, but we found out later from googling the names of the contractors that they were working on a gas pipeline.  We made a valiant effort to hunt whatever parts of the unit were least affected by the work, but it was tough going.  At one point, my cousin and I walked up a partially-frozen stream, breaking through the ice with each step, for several hundred yards in order to try to access a marshy area near a lake that we hoped hadn’t been disturbed by the work.  In the end, we found a couple promising areas that could maybe have worked out if we had more time.  We found a bull moose, which was not a legal animal for us, and had one other sighting of what appeared to be cows moving away through the trees near a swampy riverbank.  It took us a week to find spots that still held animals, and if we had another week, we might have been able to make something happen.  But we didn’t. 

A couple weeks later, back on the Island, I made plans to do a kayak trip for deer to Valdes Island again.  I’ve done this trip twice before, and the third time was pretty similar to the first two, with a twist or two thrown in.  The first week of November, I put my kayak in the water at Yellow Point, south of Nanaimo, with enough supplies inside to last about three days.  I paddled across the channel the 8 kilometres or so to Valdes, and set up camp near the beach.  I arrived in time to do an evening hunt after getting set up, and nearly got lucky on a small buck close to camp.  The deer was behind a very large fallen log, with only its head and shoulders, down to about the mid-point, visible.  I decided there was enough showing to shoot for the shoulder.  Shooting off-hand, I missed low, drilling the log.  It would have been nice to get that deer the first night, but that would have meant turning right around in the morning and paddling back, without even spending a full day on the island.  Instead, the next morning, I ate some Mountain House and set off in the dark for what I planned to be a five- or six-hour hike.  I reached the rocky spine that runs along the west side of the island as the sun rose above the horizon.  I found a few steep little breaks in the rock wall, where there was lots of evidence of animals using the small passes to get through.  I set up on a couple of these spots, spending about a half hour in each place, just sitting as still as possible and watching.  Nothing came of that, as I was probably a little late for the bulk of the deer traffic coming through that morning.  I crossed through the rocks to the upper part of the island, and started still-hunting first along the edge of the cliff, then outward toward the east.  Once I was satisfied with the morning’s scouting, I started to walk back to camp for lunch, climbing through the thick, steep terrain in as direct a line as I could toward my beach.  As tired as I was at that point, I didn’t want to go back the way I’d come.  As I wound my way around some of the larger boulders and obstacles, and crept up the steep, wet, mossy hillsides, I was quite satisfied with my ability to navigate without the use of a compass or GPS.  I thought to myself how fantastic my sense of direction was, that I rarely relied on those tools to find my way.  It was about three hours later that I realized I was standing in the same spot that I had been standing when I first made the decision to turn around and go back. 

I had spent enough time under the canopy, with the sun totally obscured, and circled around enough boulder piles at the wrong angles, that I had managed to do a complete loop without realizing it.  Never in my life have I made quite such an embarrassing navigational mistake.  With that extra time tacked on, my morning hunt ended up totaling ten hours.  I got back to my tent at four in the afternoon, and I could not wait to get a Mountain House meal into me.  As dehydrated as I felt, I was surprised that I didn’t get any cramps on the hike back to camp.  Those would come, though.  After eating, and drinking a ton of water, I went out for an evening hunt within a kilometre of camp.  My mouth felt like it was burned, but I thought I had let my food cool enough before eating it.  About twenty minutes into my evening hike, the cramps started in my legs, and I got them in both my hamstrings and my calves.  I had to sit down a couple times to stretch them out.  Right at dark, I had a chance at a doe, but by then there was so little light, I couldn’t find the deer’s shoulder in my scope.  I hobbled back to camp, and had ample time to lay in my tent and think about what a goof I had been that day.

The next morning, I got up an hour before sunrise, and ate breakfast.  Once again, it felt like my mouth had been burned.  I walked up to the area above my camp where there was a large concentration of game trails heading out of the bush, and back up toward the rocky spine.  I waited near one, hoping to catch a deer walking out of the salal patches, and back up to the protection of the cliffs.  Just as there was enough light to see, I heard a rustling to my left, and a doe followed the script perfectly.  I was left with a shot that couldn’t have been more than five yards.  The deer was dead instantly, and I gutted it before packing it back to camp.  My legs were still short-circuiting with cramps at this point, which I thought was a little strange.  I was very happy to have a deer down, though; a nice doe that would fit well into the kayak.  I cut meat for the first part of the morning, then took down my camp, and packed it all into the boat.  A pretty tight fit, with stuff crammed in behind my seat and down by my feet as well as both hatches full.  I took a look at the ocean, and wasn’t super impressed with what I had to deal with.  I had looked at the weather reports before leaving on this trip, and they had all said a rainstorm was supposed to come in on the fourth day.  It was supposed to be partly cloudy with some showers for the first three days.  I might as well have not bothered looking at any reports, because one day in, it poured rain, and the wind came up overnight and never died down again.  The water looked about as bad as it could be and still be do-able.  The paddle back to Vancouver Island should take a little over an hour with a heavy kayak.  However, once again, just like the last two years I did this trip, the wind and waves were brutal for my return, and it took three hours.  If I stopped to rest, I almost immediately started losing ground and getting blown backward.  The wind and spray had me wishing I brought some goggles.  When I reached Yellow Point on the other side, I must have looked like Robinson Crusoe after being lost at sea for years.  People were merrily walking their dogs in the little park at the point, wearing their rain slickers.  And here I was, emerging from the sea with a wild look in my eyes, face red and chapped, thrilled to be standing on land, and pulling bags of meat out from every nook and cranny of my kayak.  For days after I got back from that trip, my mouth burned every time I ate something, and it throbbed so bad at night when I laid down, that I had to take tylenol to manage it enough to be able to sleep.  I could feel with my tongue that the roof of my mouth was swollen.  I found out that along with cramps, a sore, swollen mouth is a symptom of extreme dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.  It took about a week to fully subside.  But, all in all, it was another great outing.  Productive from a meat perspective, and a good learning experience for someone who sometimes gets a little too comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Looking forward to a great 2020, filled with good hunting and fishing.  Luckily, those are two of the only things that are currently still normal in BC in this crazy year so far.  I’ll be starting things off with two black bear hunts almost back-to-back, in late April, and again in late May.  I’ll try to get some video of one or both of those, as well.