Deer Season 2014, Weekend 2

There are some photos in this post showing dead animals and field dressing and butchering. Those sensitive to such things might not want to look at the photos. I tried to keep the gore to a minimum and it is not gratuitous.

Butchering day was the 16^th this year, a Thursday. It was the same melancholy/happy day it usually is. This year Flopsy, the young bull, was butchered along with two heifers. All of these animals were good tempered and it was sad to see them go. As usual, I didn’t watch them get killed. At the same time, we procured our year’s worth of beef which felt really good. This experience is explained in more detail in my post, Butchering Day of 10/16 /13.

Now it was up to me to see if I could procure some venison for the year. I got out a few times during the week but didn’t see anything. I had been seeing lots of deer in valley but not many bucks. Some years a lot of deer and bucks especially hang out at higher elevations so decided to try a higher elevation area.

The spot I wanted to hunt was a place that I had been into in 2012 on my way into some ponds. I saw lots of deer sign in some older logging units and there were some new logging units since then. I had to walk about three miles in on abandoned roads to get to this spot.

This was a fairly long way in, though know of people who go much farther in to hunt. If I did get something, it would be too far to drag it out so I would have to pack it out. I decided to go in on Saturday so, if I got something, I would have an extra day to pack it out if needed. Even though I have hunted areas where I had to walk long distances in, I never got anything so I wasn’t very familiar with best way to pack an animal out, only what I had heard from other people who had done it. So, if I did get something, it would be a learning experience and probably wouldn’t be the smoothest operation I ever performed.

The weather Saturday was supposed to be showers and sunbreaks, good hunting weather, but when I got to my spot, it was all socked in with fog and I could only see a few yards. This was bad hunting weather. Many times in a pea soup fog like this I have heard deer run off before I even laid eyes on them because the fog was too thick. The wind was howling and the mist was swirling and eddying. I found a spot semi sheltered from the wind and waited half an hour to 45 minutes. The weather gradually transitioned from cloudy and rainy to rainy and sunbreaks.

Finally I was able to see several hundred yards which was perfect. It is best to approach an area you want to hunt from the downwind side so any deer there aren’t likely to smell, or wind, you. I have found that, in the mountains, this idea often works much better in theory than in practice because the wind swirls and changes direction so often that no matter how hard you try, you spend a lot of time upwind of an area. Sometimes I just ignore the wind direction and continue on in a way that is easier to travel and stay quiet and I have quite often had pretty good success with this method.

Saturday was one of those swirling winds days. I decided to take a route through the area that would cover the most ground where deer were likely to be. This would also be downwind of what the overall trend of the winds that day were but I would inevitably be upwind some of the time in the swirling wind.

Near the point I was going to leave the road and head down into the logging unit I saw three deer. None had antlers though I took some photos and, in looking at them later, I saw that the two smaller deer were tow-heads. So this looked like a doe and her twin buck fawns from this spring.

I continued on, easing down off the road and easing as quietly as I could through the logging unit. About a hundred yards into the unit I saw another deer. I spotted it's foreleg first. Deer are well camouflaged by the earth tones of their hair so one learns to look for shapes, mostly straight lines formed by their bodies, that aren’t usually formed by other objects. The back makes a straight horizontal line and the neck and legs make straight vertical lines. Sometimes you will spot the white throat patch, or, if you happen to look in just the right spot, the eyes or an ear or some other body part but the shape, more often than not, is how you spot an animal. I have employed the method of looking for shapes and forms to good effect while looking for other things like plants and mushrooms that don’t have colors that stand out.  

A quick look at its head told me it was a legal buck. I now had a choice. Most people, myself included, make better shots from a rest, a stump, a log, a hump of ground but there was nothing immediately at hand. There was a stump several feet in front of me but, quite often when you see a deer and stop and then start to walk again, they will spook and bound off and this deer was about two jumps from the timberline. I had stopped when I saw this deer and, as long as I stood there still, the deer probably wouldn’t spook immediately. But he knew I was there and probably wasn’t going to hang around very long either. 

So I needed to make a decision and make it quickly. I decided to make an offhand shot without a rest rather than trying to make it to the stump for a rest. I actually ended up in a kneeling position which is more stable than a completely offhand shot taken standing upright. I was on a sidehill though and it was still pretty awkward.

Then I misjudged the distance. I am a lousy judge of distance and I thought he was about two hundred yards away. I had sighted my rifle in for one hundred yards which would mean that, at two hundred yards, the bullet would hit low. So I aimed high to compensate and fired. The deer didn’t move. I knew that he wasn’t more than two hundred yards away so it had to be closer and I had shot high. I chambered another shell and, with an increased sense of urgency, adjusted my aim and fired again.

This time he went down hard but came back up again. I could tell I had made a solid hit but maybe not enough to keep him from running off where I couldn’t find him. Causing something to die a slow death was the worst possible outcome in my mind. I hate the thought of something suffering for a long time at my hands. Now I had to really fight to control a rising sense of panic. Panic only makes things worse, you hurry your shot too much and either miss or hit in a spot that doesn’t kill, causing the animal to suffer more and ruining meat. I chambered another shell, aimed and fired again. That shot did it. The deer was dead.

It wasn’t pretty but the job was done. It was over in less than 15 seconds and I don’t think the deer suffered too much. Not many animals die peacefully in their sleep in the wild, so this death at my hands probably involved a lot less suffering than under other circumstances. This didn’t make me feel any better though. I would have preferred a quicker kill with a single shot. I had a very similar experience with the deer I got last year. Obviously I need to practice more at my off hand shooting.

I approached the deer from behind, away from the legs. Even though it had quit moving, I wanted to make sure it was dead. Deer are amazingly strong and people have been badly injured or even killed when the deer they thought were dead suddenly got up and started kicking.

His eyes were open and glazed. He was definitely dead. My heart was heavy but this was mingled with a happy feeling. I had just killed a magnificent animal and this was a sad thing. At the same time, I admired his magnificence and I had just secured a whole bunch of food. The deer had paid the price for my existence on this earth. Someday something will kill me. Wouldn't it be ironic if I was killed by hitting a deer on the highway? I just hope I don’t have to suffer too much. I said a silent apology to the deer’s spirit for taking his life and thanked him for the food he would provide me and my family.

This deer appeared to be older. His muzzle was white and he had a notched ear. It looked like his antlers were beginning to regress, or get smaller and thicker with fewer tines on the main beams of antlers. This often happens during a deer’s declining years.

One of the surest ways to gauge a deer’s age is to look at the wear on its teeth. I am not familiar with this process but I know that in the past the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife set up data collection stations where hunters brought in their kills and data was collected for scientific studies and one of the steps in this data collection was aging the animals based on tooth wear. I also base some of my ideas about the age of this buck from information collected at these stations and passed on to me via people who had gotten a deer and gone to a data collection station.   

This deer’s neck was swollen in preparation for the rut and I could smell him when I got close, a rank, vaguely skunky smell. I heard my dad’s voice in my head, “Stupid kid, he’s too far in and he’s rutting”. Dad wasn’t a big fan of killing old rutting bucks, they smell bad and sometimes meat smells and tastes bad too and it is quite often tough. But this is the only time of year I have to hunt and it coincides with the start of the rut. As I stated in my previous post, I also prefer a younger more tender buck but I had to take what I could get legally, an older, rutting buck. The alternative was possible getting nothing.

The rut might actually be why I got this deer. He might have been after the doe I had just seen and didn’t want to abandon his pursuit. The urge to reproduce is a strong one and deer, even old cagey ones, get one track minds during the rut and act very stupidly quit often. I think this is one of the reasons Fish and Wildlife curtailed the late buck modern firearm season in some places. This season is during the height of the rut and deer are much easier to get because they are less wary and there was concern about over harvest in many areas.

The pause for reflection and a few photos over, it was down to work. There is an old saying that the work begins when you pull the trigger and this was very true for me this year. Last year I got my deer several hundred yards from my pickup, an easy drag. This year I earned the venison.

The first step was to get the carcass field dressed. Bacteria in the gut will rot a carcass from the inside out rather quickly, spoiling the meat. So it is important to get the guts out and get the carcass cooling off.

I saved the heart and liver for some friends who like it. Or I should say most of the liver. Part of it was damaged. The heart was interesting. It had some sort of bruise or what looked like bruise over one of the ventricles. Initially though I had grazed his heart but I hadn’t. The bruise looked older, like it was beginning to clot or resorb. Maybe this deer had heart disease. Or maybe the bruising was caused by the bullet that had damaged the liver. All I can say is that the bruise on the heart looked a little different than all the other deer hearts I have seen.

The next step was to skin the deer and cut it up into pieces that I could pack out. Before doing this, I retrieved my big pack that I had stashed about half a mile away. I had to do a lot of thinking while I was skinning the deer. I was trying to keep too much dirt from getting on the meat and hide. I was able to find the joints on the front legs and take them off without too much trouble and I used a small hatchet to cut through the breast bone, hind leg joints and pelvic bones.

While I was skinning, I noticed that there was another bruise on one hind leg that was beginning to heal. The blood of this bruise was beginning to turn yellow. This bruise was likely caused by a run-in with another buck.

Finally I had the hind quarters, or back half of the deer skinned. The deer was too big to pack out in a single trip so I decided to pack the hind quarters out first. This is the part of the deer that has the best meat so I wanted to make sure I got that out in case a bear or some coyotes came along while I was gone. I probably could have boned the carcass out and saved some weight but that would have taken more time. I thought that, if I hurried up, I could make two trips that day.

I got the hind quarters loaded in my big pack and started out. I left the front quarters and head along with my day pack and hatchet. I had also tagged the deer with my deer tag which was in my name. My hope was that, if anyone should happen to come across the carcass while I was gone, the presence of these things would indicate to them that I was coming back and that they would be honest enough to leave everything alone. Of course, wild animals couldn’t care less about any of the stuff I left behind. I did take my rifle out though.

All summer long I had packed loads of 65 or 70 pounds long distances and off trail so I was in pretty good shape but that pack with the hind quarters in it was, by far, the heaviest pack I had carried all year. It wasn’t to long before my shoulders were hurting and my legs were getting a little wobbly.

I had killed the deer at about 10:30 in the morning and got started out at about 1:00 in the afternoon. I didn’t get back to my pickup until about 2:30 in the afternoon. By this time my shoulders were aching and my legs were very wobbly. It would take an hour to get back to the deer, another hour or two to finish skinning and boning the carcass and at least several hours to get back, if I could even do it. I was already pretty tired and I didn’t know if I could do a repeat trip of what I had just done in the same day. If I did manage to pull it off, I would be getting home well after dark and Sacha would probably be very worried.  

I decided to chance it and leave the carcass overnight and come back for it in the morning. I felt pretty sure that it would still be there in the morning. I have seen many carcasses sit relatively untouched for several days. It seems like they really begin to attract scavengers after they start to decompose a bit and the smell gets stronger. Of course, I could be unlucky and have a bear or pack of coyotes wander through before I could get back and then the rest of the deer would be gone. I didn’t have any means to hang the carcass out of the reach of terrestrial scavengers or I could have done that before leaving. I would just have to chance it.

I got home with the hind quarters and washed them out and hung them and wrapped them in old sheets to keep the blowflies off. Then it was the long wait until morning. I didn’t sleep very well that night. As I said, I was pretty confident that the carcass would still be there in the morning but nothing is for sure.

I usually have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning but I didn’t that Sunday. I was up right at the alarm and had breakfast made and eaten and was out the door in less than an hour. I was walking up the abandoned road as soon as it was light enough to see, about half an hour or so before sunrise.

On the last quarter mile of road before I would head over the hill to the deer carcass I saw fresh tire tracks. This sparked a little panic in me but there was nothing I could do. Hopefully, if these folks saw the carcass they left it alone.

I started over the hill and hadn’t gone far before I heard the ravens. Then I saw several of them circling the area where the deer carcass lay. I was kind of hoping that they were going for the gut pile. There are a lot of highly nutritional organs in a gut pile and they are easier to get to than the meat on a carcass.

I finally reached a point where I could see that the deer carcass was still there. There were about half a dozen ravens in the area. They flew off as I approached and I saw that they had been working on the carcass. I had skinned out the front legs and they had gotten some meat off the ribs and one of the front legs. It wasn’t much though. I don’t mind sharing but next time I will take care to cover the carcass or not skin it out so much. They would have probably left it alone if they had had to peck through the hide.

Fortunately the ravens hadn’t drawn any large scavengers to the site. I bet this is a frequent occurrence and I hadn’t thought about it when I left the carcass. If I do more hunting like this in the future, I will have to take measures like covering and hanging whatever I have to leave behind for a second trip.  

I finished skinning the deer. I decided to take the front legs with the bone in, they detach quite easily from the rib cage, and bone out the ribs and neck. In the past I had thought that boning a carcass was rather wasteful but actually, what you leave behind when you do this is recycled on site through the scavengers that will finish off the carcass. If you take all of the carcass home and say, make soup, so you get almost every scrap of meat off the bone, most of the nutrients in that carcass that don’t go into your body will end up underground in a septic system or a sewage system and unavailable to be recycled. In a similar situation in the future, I may choose to bone everything out.

So I don’t think it is a terrible thing to leave a little behind to share with the other creatures in the area. It is important though, I believe, that you make an honest effort to make the most use you can of an animal you have killed. I don’t think it is right to kill something merely for a trophy and leave everything but the head behind.

My pack on Sunday was even heavier than on Saturday. Along with the front legs, backstraps, neck and rib meat, I also packed out the head and hide. I know people who will tan the hide and make good use of it so I thought it worthwhile to bring out. I also had to bring out my day pack and everything in it. The day pack wasn’t really heavy by itself but I was already overloaded.

I made it back without incident. My legs actually stood up to the pack quite well but my shoulders, back and bad hip were hurting. The work isn’t done yet though. We will cut up, package and freeze the meat on the coming weekend. See my Processing Venison post of 10/27/13 for an idea of that process. At some point we will be making sausage out of some of the venison which is even more work.  

Birch log covered with turkeytail fungus (Trametes versicolor). I saw this log while I was out hunting after work on a week day. Turkeytail fungus can be quite colorful. I also encountered some dyer's polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) looks somewhat similar to turkeytail fungus but grows on conifer logs later in the week but didn't take a photo. 

Shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus). Another find I made while hunting after work. These are edible and from, people I have talked to, quite delicious. I don't like mushrooms much. Sacha didn't want to try any because she had heard that some people have an adverse reaction to them. One of my references, "Mushrooms Demystified" by David Arora indicates that these may react with alcohol in the body causing a type of poisoning but makes no mention of problems when these are eaten without consuming alcohol. I see these mushrooms most often in the middle of gravel roads. 

Shaggy manes several days after emerging. Shaggy manes are in the same genus as inky caps (C. atramentarius) which can be used to make ink for writing when they begin to deteriorate or deliquesce. I appears most species in this genus deliquesce rather quickly after emerging. 

Mystery mushroom by the barn. This mushroom might only be a mystery to me. I am not familiar with it and didn't have time to get a spore print and identify it. Nonetheless, I thought it was pretty cool looking. 

Bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) blooming in a newer logging unit.  This species ordinarily blooms in the spring but the temperature and photo period (length of daylight) evidently was similar enough to spring conditions to coax these plants into blooming. The disturbance of the logging may have also had something to do with it. In my previous post, I noted that many plants seem to put on new growth after a disturbance when they would ordinarily be storing reserves for winter. I wonder if the same thing happens in naturally occurring disturbances like burns and flood tracks. I will have to pay more attention to these areas in the future. It isn't just plants that respond to the similarity between autumn and spring photo period and temperature. There have been lots of red-legged frogs on the road after dark, just like in the springtime and I frequently hear tree frogs as well. 

These blossoms probably won't produce seed. In the spring, after pollination, the weather would trend warmer, allowing the seed to develop. At this time of year it will only get colder. 

Evergreen violet (Viola sempervirens).

Salal (Gaultheria shallon).

Disturbances also allow exotic plant species (weeds) to get established as well. This can occur whether the disturbance is human caused such as logging or construction or naturally occurring such as in burns and floodways. In this photo are three exotic species, oxeye daisy (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum), wall lettuce (Lactuca or Mycelis muralis) and Stinky Bob or Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum).

Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), another exotic weedy, or not so weedy, depending upon one's point of view,  plant of disturbed areas. 

View from a spot I hunted after work one week day. 

Angel wings (Pleurotus porrigens) this edible relation to the oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) grows on rotting wood of coniferous trees. Oyster mushrooms tend to grow on hardwoods. 

The scene when I arrived at my hunting spot on Saturday morning. I could see barely ten feet through this. Though it may look calm, the wind was blowing and swirling hard enough to make my eyes water. The mist was swirling and eddying with the wind though it doesn't show it in this photo. 

After hunkering down for half an hour or 45 minutes, the fog began to lift and I continued on. 

I saw these three deer first. The one in the middle is a doe and the two on either side are tow-head bucks, probably this year's fawns. If one looks closely, (I don't know how much people's browsers will allow enlargement of the photos) you will see light patches on the heads of the two little deer, just inside the ears. 

Success! Unfortunately I didn't have time to take any photos of this guy while he was still alive. I took this photo after approaching from behind and cautiously circling around, keeping my distance until I was sure he was dead. 

This buck is what is called a 2x3 with eyeguards (two-point by three point with eyegurards) under the western count protocol for describing sets or racks of antlers. This means his rack has two points on one side and three on the other. The eyeguards are lower down, near the base of the antlers. I doubt that they actually guard the eyes and I don't know if they are that important for fighting from an evolutionary standpoint since many deer don't have them. The eyeguards count as a point in determining if the buck is legal to take in a given area. In other words a two point with eyeguards is legal to take in a three point minimum area. For this reason many people have taken to counting the eyeguards when describing the antlers, in other words, they would call this buck a 3x4. Under the eastern count protocol for describing antlers, this buck would be a seven-point. I like the original western count method because I think it gives the most accurate description of what the antlers look like. The variation and combination of points on racks is probably endless and I think this only adds to the beauty of these animals. This deer is older. The antlers are pretty thick or heavy and his muzzle from the nose to the forehead patch is solid white. 

Hind quarters packed and ready to go. I wrapped the meat in old cotton bedsheets. This allowed the meat to get air and cool off while limiting the amount of blood that got all over the pack. If I had put the meat in plastic bags, the bags would tend to trap the heat and increase the chance of spoilage. This is a different pack than the one I use for summer hiking. When just hiking, I usually only go armed with a hunting knife I don't want the attention a lot of blood would draw from predators and scavengers. I wasn't sure If I would be able to get back to get the other half of the deer that day so I chanced leaving it. The hind quarters have the most and best quality meat on the carcass so I figured if I was going to lose part of it, I wanted the better quality meat. I left my day pack behind and I had my tag on the deer carcass in the hopes that if anybody found it while I was gone, they would leave it alone because it would be obvious that I intended to come back. Of course, any wild animals that came across the carcass wouldn't care about the things I left.  

Sunday morning. The ravens got to the carcass while I was gone. I had hoped they would concentrate on the gut pile which would be easier pickings but several hit the carcass as well. I probably wouldn't have had this problem if I hadn't skinned it out so far, making it easy for the ravens to get to the meat under the tough hide. I could have also covered it better before I left. I was lucky the raven activity didn't draw larger scavengers to the site. I got a very early start because I was worried about just such an occurrence. The longer I left it lay, the greater the chance something big enough to carry the carcass off would come along. 

Close up of meat scavenged by ravens. I didn't lose too much meat. I took the front quarters home and put them in the freezer. I will thaw them out just before I cut them up. The scavenged area will be washed and the scavenged meat trimmed away. My main concern is of birds that went from the gut pile, which would have a lot of bacteria in it, to the carcass, spreading the bacteria to the carcass. The washing and trimming should take care of this issue. 

Front quarters, head and hide packed and ready to go. It looks like there is a lot of meat left on the remaining front part of the carcass but there is only a thin layer intimately wrapped around bone. This will be recycled into the soil of the area via scavengers and decay. The nutrients in the parts that I pack out will most likely end up in someone's body and underground in septic or sewage systems where they will be mostly unavailable for uptake by plants and other organisms for recycling into the system. So I don't feel too bad about leaving a little behind. I don't condone killing an animal for fun or merely for a trophy. 

It is best to have the antlers sticking down in an unnatural position if you decide to pack them, or the head, out.  I have heard of several instances where someone has almost been shot because somebody else can only see the antlers in their pack sticking up above a wall of brush or a log, giving the appearance of a live deer walking along behind whatever is obstructing the view. I couldn't get the antlers pointing down so I did the next best thing and hung my blaze orange vest over them and my pack. In most situations, anyone who saw the antlers would also see the blaze orange and hopefully be smart enough to realize that deer aren't blaze orange in color. 

The Twin Sisters on my way out. 

A tiny forest of Pacific silver fir (Abies amabilis), shorter than the forest of cone bearing stems of the running clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) that is growing between them. 

Glacier Peak and Whitechuck Mountain on the way out. There was a spectacular sunrise here on my way in but I had left my camera in my pack with the deer carcass. I probably wouldn't have stopped to take photos anyway because I was anxious to get back to the carcass. 

Vashti examining the deer head and hide. She had a lot of questions. "Why are his eyes closed?" Why is his tongue out?" "What does he say?" etc. The transport tag on the antlers has dates that can be notched for the day of harvest. It is illegal to transport or move a deer without a properly notched tag. Once the tag is notched, it can't be used again, helping to ensure people don't kill more deer than they are allowed in a year. In this case, I was allowed one. I will have to call in a hunter's report to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In the report, they collect data on your hunting activity and the deer, if any, that you harvested. They ask where the deer was harvested and how many antler points on each side of the rack. This is a good way and probably fairly cheap way to collect a lot of data on deer populations. The check stands where the check the teeth to age animals and collect other observations about the deer carcasses get more precise data but are more expensive because people have to be paid to staff the check stands. 

I don't know if Vashti will grow up to be a hunter. It's okay if she doesn't. I do hope to help her understand how the world works though. There is no free lunch and no way to live without impacting other creatures. Organisms on this Earth interact with each other in intricate ways while living their lives. Many other organisms pay the price for our existence, even vegetarians have an impact. And we humans sometimes pay the price for some other organism's existence. At least from the standpoint of the resources we use and things we can control, the key is, to the best of our ability, strike a balance and respect and not over harvest any given resource.