Fall is in the Air

Lately it's begun to feel like fall. All the pushki has bloomed and are dying off, the leaves are turning in Bells Flats, and the fireweed is beginning to 'sprout cotton'. Today it is raining hard and blowing almost 30 out of the Northeast. The first big storm of the fall? It certainly feels like it. Soon the hills will be brown and we'll be getting our first frosts, and I'll start thinking of ski season. But first there is still some hunting to do.

On Saturday I got up at 4 AM and climbed up to the alpine with John Barklow. A chilly (42 degrees in town!), spectacular morning. We started our hike through a spruce forest in the dark with stars above. The occasional murrelet winging by on his way to the sea to feed. Once we got above the trees, the sunrise lit up the mountains with pink. Not a breath of wind, everything soaked in dew - a great day for deer hunting.

In the first bowl we came to we counted 7 does and 8 fawns. No bucks but it certainly seems like the deer survived the winter in fine shape. We made our way to another bowl where I had spied a herd of deer from afar while hunting 2 weeks ago, and we found a bachelor group of bucks hanging out in the same spot. At this time of year male deer like to hang out in 'bachelor' groups in the alpine - later on the groups break up and the individual bucks get more territorial. But for now it's 'guy time' in the alpine while the does and fawns hang out in the lower bowl 'nurseries'.

John hunts with a bow which means he has to get within about 50 yards of a deer before shooting. This is no easy feat on the wide open alpine tundra. On Saturday John snuck down a steep (he measured it at 40 degrees) slope to within 21 yards of a deer. I was a lot less sporting and used a rifle at 220 yards to harvest my deer. As you can see we are both very happy with the deer we got. Later on we had to hike 2 1/2 hours back to the truck with very heavy packs. At one point John remarked that when he thinks back about hunts he always seems to forget about the agony of the back pack out. And he's right - by the time I had my deer hanging in my shed and went for a walk with Nora, the pack out was already a distant memory. My memory of the hunt is the deer in the bowls and the pink light on the mountains. Patrick