Getting Big Brother's Goat - Part II: The Hunt

No lesson here – Tyvek is GREAT goat camo.

Predawn gloaming and we are up and cooking breakfast. Freezing cold, but Orion’s Belt hangs above us, and there is the promise of blue skies above. The expected storm had held off for another day! High level of excitement – we will get a goat today. My brother dons his white tyvek goat camo and along with his 30- 06 the mood is complete; he is so much the goat hunter that Scott and I can’t help but laugh. The white camo is somehow incongruous and hilarious. We opt not to take the skiis and head out in ski boots with our packs to harvest a goat. We figure they’ll still be just at the other end of the lake.

Goats do roam.

After much excitement and low-profile creeping through the boulders to where we saw the goats the previous evening we determine that I was wrong, and that, just perhaps, goat do travel at night. There are no goats on the far side of the lake. We contemplate our next move and watch a bear approach our camp far below and on the far side of the lake. Do we need to beat feet and defend the homeland? But as we watch through binoculars the bear winds our camp and walks precisely around the perimeter – avoiding our camp altogether. We decide to leave the goatless immediate area, and opt to go to where we saw the herd of goats from the plane. To do this we need to cross a valley, climb a mountain and cross a glacier. It’s already late morning – time to get cracking.

Good choice – we would never have got a goat if we had gone back to camp.

So we cross the valley and climb the glacier, and then climb down 1000 feet on the other side to a bench where we hope the goats are located. It’s already early afternoon and we need to turn around and get headed back to camp soon. We reach the critical spot near where we saw the goats the day before from the air and Dicky creeps ahead alone to find the goats. Scott and I joke and watch Dicky do his thing in white camo with a gun. Meanwhile the two of us spot a lone goat sleeping on the flats at the base of the cliff below. A little later Dicky comes back making hand signals which Scott and I do not understand – then talks loudly when he gets near us to explain what he tried to signal. Turns out he has not seen anything. We quiet him quickly and point out the goat.

The fun is over once the goat is down.

Decision time – do we shoot the goat? The goat is another 700 feet below us at the base of a very steep slope, it is getting late and we are a long ways from camp. We consult the map and determine that the goat is just barely in our permit area. Not much of a decision – of course we will shoot the goat because that is why we are here. So Dicky creeps off down the cliff and Scott and I kill time while surreptitiously watching the goat and Dicky on his vector course. Scott and I are totally paranoid about spooking the goat and are afraid to even show the tops of our heads. For us the stalk is painful, we are sure the goat will suddenly wake up and then bound away. And he does sit up. Oh where is Dicky! And then the shot; the goat is dead! And then, as Scott put it so eloquently just after we watched Dicky shoot the goat, ‘the fun part is over’.

Goats can be big and heavy.

In its death throws the goat managed to get with about 5 feet of the permit area boundary. And it is a huge goat. We had read all the literature and expected something on the side of a ‘big deer’ – according to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game the average nanny goat weighs 160 lbs and the average Billy goat 200 lbs. The goat we found on the ground was more on the scale of small white cow - 350 rather than the expected 200 pounds. And we have a 1500-foot cliff to climb. On our return to Kodiak we discovered that Dicky had shot the largest goat ever harvested on Kodiak Island. Big enough that it is even mentioned to this day on the ADF&G website on their section about hunting mountain goats (http://www.wildlife.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=goathunt.kodiak). We would also later discover that 12-year-old Billy goats are tough as leather and taste like old tires (normal sized goats are about the tastiest meat to be found on Kodiak).

Always keep the goat hide – you’ll appreciate the extra effort later.

We slowly came to the stunned realization that maybe getting this thing cut up and back to camp would be difficult. Slightly panicked, I immediately declared that we would not keep the hide – only the meat. I figured that this would reduce the load from about 200 lbs to 150 lbs. I was also worried about the time, and had never skinned a goat. It intimidated me. But Dicky wanted to keep the hide – he had visions of a goat rug in front of the fireplace. So with Scott keeping watch for bears and Dicky as assistant surgeon, I figured out how to butcher the goat and keep the skin intact. We actually did it rather quickly, finishing in an hour and ten minutes.

Good frame packs make carrying a heavy load of meat easier.

So we packed up the meat and hide. All the gear went into Scott’s internal frame pack while some goat meat and the hide went on a small external frame and then the remaining 100 pounds or so went into a large, yellow dry bag that had no frame at all – just straps. Humping the yellow dry bag was so bad that Dicky and I had to alternate carrying it. Climbing up the cliff was truly the Hump from Hell. And scary too, at one point we traversed a slippery ledge above an enormous chasm. The steep part ended, but then we had to trudge up the snowfield for what seemed like forever. I’d look back and see Dicky head bent grunting it out, and realized that for me, it was no better, just one step at a time, and agony always. We’d both look up and see Scott far ahead peering back and waiting for us. After the agony of the ascent we had a steep descent that worked entirely different muscles. To make matters worse, the external frame pack started to come apart. But we got across the valley, climbed the glacier we had skied on the day before and got to camp just at sunset. Totally whacked, we barely had enough energy to cook dinner or even drink whiskey.

Patrick