All beat up

This morning I feel as though someone worked me over with a metal pipe. Every piece of my body is sore, and my forearms are striped with red welts from wading through salmonberry and devils club thickets. I voluntarily did this to myself in pursuit of deer! Good thing we were successful, or this morning I'd be all beat up AND discouraged. Deer meat hanging in the shed is better than any aspirin.

Yesterday I went up into the mountains with Ray and Gregg. Ray is visiting Kodiak with his wife Julie and 2 kids. This is his annual 'fill up the freezer' visit to Kodiak. So we needed to find him some deer. And around about 11 AM yesterday things were looking pretty bleak. We'd seen about 30 does and fawns and no bucks. That's when Gregg, the true statistician, said - 'we're due for a buck; the next deer we see will be a buck'. And he was right - we spotted 2 big boys on the next mountain over. Unfortunately, to get to them we had to cross a HUGE ravine and do some serious bushwhacking. And then after we got one of the deer - we had to bushwhack and climb back out of the valley to get home. All in the pursuit of deer. Patrick