January 10, 2015 (transcribed from a notebook dated
December, 2001)
Joshua and Shep hunt deer.
Excerpt from this
journal
We looked for blood
near a big ponderosa pine and then with a slight air of triumph I showed Josh the
crimson red spatters in the brilliant white snow. Crimson red blood on brilliant white snow is
a striking visual image. The impact can
be described to anyone willing to listen.
But to really burn the image into your mind forever you have to see it. The stark image produces primitive feelings
in one’s mind that produce more than a few contrasting emotions. There is triumph, blood lust and a touch of
revulsion. Fresh blood on snow is
palpable. It is vitally real. It provokes a timeless twinge that sails through
your body, a mild shock running stem to stern.
The feeling the image provokes has to be as ancient as our paleo diet
and the group comradery that the hunt produces.
This seems to be a story about an elk and deer hunt. The
only date I can find is December, 2001. That is 13 years ago. There is also
reference to an issue of Field and Stream magazine, dated November, 2001 that I
stumbled on at the library. Only article which seems to be titled “railroad
elk” – you guessed it. The article was written in a style that the macho
hunters like. If you want to write for an outdoor magazine you must write a
macho style.
Oh, but I mentally wander too much. The first day of the
hunt only teased us. Just about evening, our physical wanderings brought us to
a long flat ridge at the crown of two fairly deep drainages. The North side of
the hill was heavily timbered and in the first days of December also held
substantial snow. The South side was bare and windblown. The top of the ridge was covered in deer and
elk tracks. We took a stand toward evening and steeled ourselves for the ever
penetrating cold. Nothing – nothing. Then came “Pinkage.” That’s a funny term
and neither Josh nor myself ever heard anyone else comment on pinkage. Over the
years we noticed that the bottom of the scattered clouds, in the dark days of
winter, always turn pink about 10 minutes after official sundown. The times are adjusted for a baseline east or
west of the official sundown or sunrise times as listed in the hunting
literature provided by the state of Colorado. These daylight times are so
important to the state of Colorado that they are also listed, in detail, on the
back of all of the hunting licenses. It’s
uncanny. Now that we have the GPS device it proves to be right on, exactly, because the GPS gives official sunup to
sundown times adjusted for latitude and longitude.
The next morning after a comfortable night’s rest in a house
in Fort Collins, we were in the right spot. We were in position at daybreak.
The wind had picked up and the temperature was warming. We ascended the ridge
side-by-side, each of us insight of the other. We were 30 yards apart.
Conditions were perfect. Every once in a while a game trail which most of the
time follows the course of least resistance would lead Josh and me together and
we would pause to quietly chat. So much of the hunt is dependent on lady luck,
good fortune, and providence, whatever you want to call it. Nonetheless, smarts
and common sense tied the package of luck together with a nice ribbon. As we
paused at one of our junctions we stood in plain sight, yet unseen and unheard by
a heard of about forty magnificent Elk. They were headed our direction at a
leisurely pace. We had no elk tags. We were lucky to draw deer tags. Even
though we had no elk tags we felt that we had outsmarted the Wiley beasts by
virtue of the fact that we were in the right place at the right time and not a one
of them knew we were close enough to make a good shot. We had the right guns
and ammo. Our Remmington 30.06 rifles
with 180 grain bullets could easily bring down any animal we choose to shoot. As they passed us at a slow
run they caught our scents and broke into a loud crashing run straight into the
nearby timber. Josh and I had
experienced something similar on a fishing trip hike on the Grand Mesa about
eight or ten years earlier. We had walked
through a heard of elk that were bedded down for the day when they erupted all
around us. We were damn near run over by
several of the giants.
(Couldn’t quite read my notes here, sounds like or looks
like) Fifteen minutes past as we waited
for the heard to pass unmolested and unhurried. We sat down on the hillside
enjoying the spectacle. Just to the south of us were the ragged peaks of Rocky
Mountain National Park. Far below us on the south flank of the drainage we
watched a buck deer walk into a meadow, then another, then a few does. They
were all big healthy animals. No hint of wasting disease here. Josh got into
position, took careful aim and ever so gently, between the beats of his heart
the rifle went off. The animal was hit, but ran. By now, we both know enough to
control buck fever, the overpowering stage fright – but sometimes the distance
is simply too far and there is too little time to wait for the perfect shot as
the animal turns to walk back into the forest.
The otherwise perfect shot at 200 yards was less than perfect. A fine
line exists between taking too much time to squeeze off a round and letting the
animal walk away and rushing the shot and missing altogether.
Joshua was a State finalist high jumper in high school. He knew as well as any successful athlete
that much of the success of an athletic move was in one’s own head. An adversary the same size and strength could
be bested by a man who could get his head under control when the competition
got tough. Hunting and being successful
demands that everything come together at the right instant in time. A well-executed Fosberry Flop and a smoothly
pulled trigger had a few items in common.
Picture the fluid movement of taking a position, breathing
deeply in and out, in and out. Once the
animal is in the crosshairs begin to pull the trigger ever so gently, then with
greater and greater pressure. You really
don’t know when the firearm will go off.
The kick and noise should almost come as a surprise. It’s all a great recipe for meat in the
pot.
If we shot an elk, the rest of them would be in the next
county in a few moments. Deer are
entirely different. They never go very
far. If you have a companion with a deer
tag the remaining animals won’t be far away.
That’s mule deer anyway. Don’t
know about white tail deer.
We walked down the side of the grassy hill knowing that
another animal could appear at any moment.
I had visually marked the spot on the terrain where the Mulley was
hit. I was certain I knew where it went
down. The guy pulling the trigger often
doesn’t know where he shot. There’s too
much excitement.
“I think it’s over here somewhere,” I said.
Joshua looked at me and said, “no, I think it’s over in this
direction.”
We looked for blood near a big ponderosa pine and then with
a slight air of triumph I showed him the crimson red spatters in the brilliant
white snow. Crimson red blood on
brilliant white snow is a striking visual image. The
impact can be described to anyone willing to listen. But to really burn the image into your mind
forever you have to see it. The stark
image produces primitive feelings in one’s mind that produce more than a few
contrasting emotions. There is triumph,
blood lust and a touch of revulsion.
Fresh blood on snow is palpable. It is vitally real. It provokes a
timeless twinge that sails through your body, a mild shock running stem to
stern. The feeling the image provokes
has to be as ancient as our paleo diet and the group comradery that the hunt
produces.
Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso take their best work from
Paleo emotions. For an art gallery patron in Manhattan red on white can be
visceral. A good looking woman, a lady
perhaps, dressed in a mink stole with Fee Fee the miniature poodle tugging at its leash on Madison Ave is not as
far removed from the red on white carnage as she might suppose.
We are on the trail.
We are in pursuit of our wounded game.
The ethical duty to hunt our prey to the end has engaged. We follow the spatters of crimson downhill
into the tall timber. Just at that
moment, as the blood held our attention, another doe bounded over the edge of a
hillock and just as I tried to put the scope on the animal I realized my
partner was in front of me and only 30 degrees to the right. A shot would be foolhardy and would label me
as no one to hunt with in the future. As
the arc between animal and Josh widened, thirty, sixty and ninety degrees I
rushed the trigger pull on my fast moving prey.
The animal would live to graze another day after it bounded deep into
the forested canyon.
Five minutes later we had the first animal and dispatched
her with a knife to the jugular. Somehow we have come to praying over the
animals we harvest. I had some Indian
friends once who insisted I adopt this practice. My Lakota, Dakota and Ute friends
were kind enough to have me join them in a sweat lodge one sunny fall afternoon.
It was a broad daylight trip into the
pitch dark underside of the world. It
was a profoundly spiritual trip built on trust and mild insanity. I tie
the images together. Even if a person is
an atheist the animal must be prayed for.
Permission must always be sought for it to enter the hunting grounds in
the afterlife. This is only common
decency. Cornmeal for the journey should
always be thrown into the sky as the animal’s soul leaves the carcass.
Josh began gutting and I backtracked to make sure the animal
I had shot at was not leaving a trail of blood.
No luck for me. I did a carefully
expanding contour search and after finding no sign I returned to the site of
the butchering. The animal was a big
one.
We like to gut and skin the animals where they fall. It takes some time, but we haven’t ruined any
meat and we’re proud when we serve it up to family and friends. Josh was a biology major and gutting and
skinning an animal is always a bit of scientific enquiry for him. The process
for Joshua is more than a necessary part of the kill and preservation of the
meat.
Here is where the advance in technology comes in. I suggested to my son of twenty-five years
that he mark our spot on the handheld GPS system. Then he walked up the mountain toward the
truck which was a good mile and a half from our butchering site. I stayed behind. I hoped the road that we passed earlier
skirted somewhere near the kill site so we wouldn’t have to lug the animal over
a mile to the truck. Someone had to
protect the kill from marauding bears.
Of course that was me. A smile crosses my face at the mere thought of a
marauding bear. After an hour Josh,
almost as if by a miracle, walked out of the woods and directly toward the
magical mark on the GPS device. By that time
I was sheltered comfortably from the wind and cold by my trusty old blue poncho
tied between two aspen trees. He came
from a direction that was totally opposite the direction he had walked an hour
earlier. He handed me the GPS and I read
0.17 miles to the truck.
Our next move may have been a mistake. We tied the hooves together and inserted a
long aspen tree snag between them. Seems
I had seen this done in an old movie and if memory serves it was about the
Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1806. I could
swear there was a scene with several Indians effortlessly hiking to their camp
with a deer hanging from just such a pole.
It looked entirely easy-breezy.
Well, we tried it, just like the film footage. The long pole cut into my shoulder like a sharp
implement. The tiny 0.17 mile hike to
the truck wasn’t easy at all. We stopped
several times. That big ole doe was
still heavy, even without its guts and hide.
Christmas was just fourteen days away. We wanted to bring the animals head into town
for CWD testing by the Division of Wildlife.
We had another use for the head.
We told Bree, Josh’s wife, that we were going to bring the head home and
paint it’s nose red so it might prove useful to Santa in some macabre way. She saw no humor in this.
To the contrary. We
arrived home after dark and carefully covered the animal with a tarp so that
neighborhood children wouldn’t see it.
We butchered this one ourselves. I’m not good at this, but
essentially if one just follows the musculatures natural course some nice
pieces of meat can be had.
Years ago, I shot a few mule deer around Dove Creek,
Colorado in the pinto bean fields. The
lessons of proper meat preparation stuck with me. Either do it right or the meat isn’t worth a
damn.
I hope I get to hunt for another twenty years. But, if Josh is twenty-five years old in this
hunting journal story that means I am fifty-six years old in the year of this
hunt.
Here I am at the age of sixty-nine. I found the well preserved poorly handwritten
account of this hunt in the basement just this morning. The act of transcribing it brought all of the
images, smells and the great feelings of camaraderie with my middle son back to
life. I am ever so grateful that
Benjamin decided to join us in our hunts.
I hope we have a few more big game hunts together before I join the corn
meal and the soul of the Mulley on the way to the Ute hunting grounds.
