LAST CHANCE

Sweeney already has his deer, a beautiful, thick-shouldered, forked-horn he shot on the first day of the season. This little venison-craving piggy has none. In an obvious attempt to reduce the amount of meat I’m going to “borrow” this winter, Sweeney suggests we hunt the last day of the season together. And since he’s already tagged out, I will be doing all the shooting. Sounds good to me. Two sets of eyes and ears beat one, and if nothing else, it’ll be a good excuse to hang out together and spend some time in the woods. With another storm headed our way, conditions couldn’t be better. We should get our deer.

Fact is, I haven’t been deer hunting in more than 20 years. Last time I went, my buddy, Nate, and I spent a foggy afternoon on a steep coastal hillside glassing the valley below. Late in the day, when the fog cleared, we spotted two does and a nice buck. Between us and the deer lay 200 yards of near-vertical, blackberry-covered slope, littered with old stumps and blowdowns. I put the crosshairs on the buck’s shoulder, steadied my breath…and couldn’t squeeze the trigger. I’m not sure why. The rough terrain provided a good excuse – neither of us wanted to haul a deer up that hill, especially in the dark – but there was something else going on. I just didn’t feel like killing a large animal anymore.

In the years since, though, my taste for venison has grown. And grown. To the point where my mouth waters while chasing tame local deer from our garden and I feel hunger pangs at the sight of road kill on the highway. Fortunately, I have enough friends who are hunters that I can usually beg, grovel, and trade for deer meat to take the edge off my craving. I have traded everything from smoked salmon and chanterelles to firewood and even writing for deer.

I’m not picky, either. I like it all. The pungent gaminess of our small, forest-dwelling western Washington blacktails; the tangy sage flavor of high-desert mule deer; the tender, marbled flesh of wheat-field whitetails…to me, it’s all good. We marinate thick rump steaks in olive oil, garlic, and rosemary, then sear them rare in a hot cast-iron pan. Scraps – usually labeled “stew meat” – are never wasted on stew in our house, but instead skewered and quickly charred over white-hot coals. Sausage patties, well-seasoned and mixed with pork fat and apples, have become our favorite breakfast meat. And the coveted, melt-in-your mouth backstrap that nobody ever wants to part with…well, the only problem is, nobody ever wants to part with it.

My feelings about killing a deer are changing. Not back to the pure bloodlust I felt when I was younger, or because of my current yearning for venison, but somehow connected to having children. Part of it is a concern for our health that has grown with our awareness of the antibiotics and growth hormones used in industrial meat production. But there’s also a sense that we, as carnivores, should participate – at least on some level – in procuring the meat we eat. There’s really only one solution: Go get my own deer.

Two hours before dawn, Sweeney and I pull into a gas station convenience store for coffee. The rising wind swirls dry leaves through the halo of white fluorescent glare around the pumps. A neon sign in the window advertises BEER BAIT AMMO, and the parking lot bustles with hunters packing two of the three items out to their trucks by the case. Nobody’s going fishing, either. Business is booming, and with good reason – we are just outside a vast private forest that produces one of the highest deer harvest rates in western Washington. The timber company that owns the land manages it for maximum lumber production, with a byproduct of exceptionally robust deer numbers. As a gesture of goodwill – or shrewd public relations – they open this parcel to the public during deer season, and hunters respond by converging en masse. We won’t be alone in the woods today.

When I express some concern about the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms crowd running through the forest fully locked and loaded, Sweeney says it actually works in our favor. “With all the people and this wind, the deer’ll have to keep moving. We should see a lot of deer.” I pull on my fluorescent orange vinyl “hunter safety” vest in the parking lot, wishing it was Kevlar.

We turn off the paved road five miles beyond the gas station, pass through an open gate, and start up a winding, muddy two-track in pitch-black night. Sweeney stops to lock the hubs on his old black Chevy truck and gets back into the cab soaking wet. “Weather’s perfect,” he says, without irony. Worn-out wiper blades chatter across the windshield and I can hear wind whipping through the trees.

Halfway up the mountain as the truck crawls along in four-low, a big doe streaks through the headlights and disappears into a wall of sapling firs. A few minutes later, another deer, possibly a spike, bounds across the road. A good sign, but the reprod – reproduction timber – planted along the road for future harvest is too thick to hunt. Hell, you couldn’t walk through it sideways. The density of wrist-thick trunks and brushy foliage, grown in typical monoculture style, is no accident. It’s designed to block sunlight and suppress the growth of any less profitable vegetation. During hunting season, reprod also provides ideal refuge for the deer. Shooting time won’t start for another half hour, so we continue up the increasingly steep road. It could be the convenience-store coffee, but my heart’s beating a little faster now.

We park the truck on the edge of an apocalyptic landscape. The clear-cut stretches out below us, 100 acres of treeless earth, the ground shredded by heavy equipment and littered with piles of stumps, root wads, and branches waiting to be burned. To anyone other than a deer hunter (or timber corporation accountant) it would be an atrocity…but today, we’re looking for deer, not beauty. And this is prime deer habitat. The ravaged ground, newly open to the sun, grows thick with young shrubs and tender, sweet grass. A deer feedlot. Without trees to obscure our view, we have clear sight lines all the way across.

We pick our way through discarded slash, tripping and sliding, to an enormous stump we can lean against and have a commanding view. The rain has quit, but the icy north wind is rising. Sweeney starts glassing from the right edge, sweeping his binoculars slowly in a grid pattern. I have the rifle cradled in my lap and scan with naked eyes from the left side, searching for movement. I catch a brief flicker of something – an ear? A tail? – way down on the far edge where the uncut timber starts. I try to focus, squinting my eyes until I spot the blue and black Stellar’s jay hopping along a fallen log.

Gradually, a deep chill sets in, the kind you only get from sitting on cold ground for a long time without moving. The wind blows harder, trees sway and thrash, and yet we see no sign of deer. They should be here, seeking fuel to keep warm, or moving through ahead of the lunatic crowds. At some point, a lone doe steps cautiously out of the forest and picks her way through the slash. My pulse quickens. We watch for the buck who’s surely following until it’s apparent she’s traveling alone. My excitement fades, and with it, the last of my warmth.

Rigor mortis sets in. When I try to stand up, my knees can barely unfold to climb the hillside and my lower back tingles as though any sudden movement might trigger a blowout. In this ossified state, slipping and crashing our way back to the truck, we stumble upon a big three-pointer bedded down behind a root wad. It leaps to its feet, looks directly at us, and calmly angles away through the brush. I’m so surprised, I never even unsling my rifle.

The buck reappears in a small clearing about 300 yards downslope, looks back over its shoulder, then slowly browses its way out of sight again. We hold still for a few moments, and without speaking, start working our way down. There are tracks in the loose dirt where he last appeared; calm, evenly spaced hoofprints, headed toward the creek bottom. We follow with as much stealth as we can muster, which means only a few dozen loudly snapped twigs and the occasional hissing call of “Hey, you see anything over there?”

But now, with prey nearby, I’m hunting, my senses taken over by a strange, heightened awareness of surroundings, sparked, perhaps, by latent predator instincts. I can smell wet moss growing on rocks along the stream. A pair of silver salmon spawning in a shallow tailout catches my attention. The bright, ruffled edge of a hidden chanterelle peeks out from under deer-trampled sword ferns. Half a hoofprint, barely visible, appears clearly to me in a muddy seam between rocks. When the wind shifts, I catch myself inhaling deeply, searching for a scent of prey with an olfactory sense no longer sharp enough to do the job.

My old friend Andy Landforce, renowned Oregon steelhead guide and a man more in touch with the natural world than any I’ve known, would track this deer until he caught up with it. When I was a kid, I followed Andy into the woods and watched him slowly, methodically chase down a buck, my skepticism shot down by the sharp crack of his rifle at the end of the stalk. I know it’s possible. But not for us, not here. We stay with the tracks until they meander into impenetrable reprod, and unable to follow, we reluctantly give up the chase. This deer, at least today, has reached safe haven.

It’s a long hike back. Uphill, rough, and no longer eased by the rush of adrenaline we had on the way down. By the time we reach the truck, I am sweat-soaked and chilled from the cold wind. “Man, that was a good hunt,” Sweeney says, then adds, “but I guess you can’t eat good hunting.” We laugh. It feels good to climb into the truck and sit down. It feels even better when the engine warms up enough to turn on the heat. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be this year. Going out on the last day expecting to bring home a buck is a sure sign of either optimism or ignorance. And I think we’ve already established what kind of optimist I am.

The back way off the mountain is more a random collection of gaps between trees, monster potholes, and washboard turns than road. Around a sharp, descending bend, a clogged culvert overflowed during the last big rain, creating a nearly impassable washout. The road’s too narrow to turn the truck around, so I walk ahead to guide Sweeney as he picks his way through the gullies and rubble. When our path resembles something close to a road again, I climb back in, and we rattle and bounce downhill through grainy, failing light. It’s getting dark early these days.

Heat blasts from under the dashboard now, warming my feet and lulling me into a drowsy half sleep. We’re already making plans for next year. We’ll hunt together from Opening Day, really make a season of it. I wipe condensation off the side window and glance down an old, overgrown spur road. There’s a nice forked-horn standing at the far end, head down, feeding on grass growing through the gravel. Maybe the season isn’t over yet. “Did you see that?” I ask. “Yeah,” Sweeney says, “but if I stop the truck, he’ll take off.”

“Okay,” I say, “just keep going slow.” Another 100 yards down the road, I grab the rifle, slide the door open and quietly roll out onto the muddy road. For some reason, “Ride of the Valkyries” thunders in my head. Sweeney keeps driving. Knowing the buck won’t want to move toward the main road where the truck just passed, my plan is to drop below the road, work my way back toward the spur, and come up right where he was feeding.

Great plan. Only the hill below the road is a little steeper and the brush a lot thicker than it looked from up above. I step down into a mass of head-high salmonberry, trip over something and slide about thirty feet with thorns and branches tearing at me the whole way. On the upside, it’s a relatively quiet fall. And I end up about where I wanted. So far, so good.

I regain my footing and attempt to bust brush silently back toward the spur road. It’s not easy. I take one step, bend branches and pull vines off my clothes, then another. Somehow, no twigs snap, and I remain vertical. But the pace is agonizingly slow, and it’s tough to quell the urge to hurry, to get there before the deer wanders away on its own. One step…pull blackberry thorns out of my neck…another step…pull blackberry thorns off my leg…

When I finally reach the base of the spur road, I pause to catch my breath and plot the quietest path up the steep slope. There isn’t any kind of trail, but I can see a slight opening in the salal to my left, then a fern-covered clearing leading to a huge, rotten cedar log that angles up toward the road. From there, I should be able to see the deer.

I make it through the salal and shuffle up through the ferns. At the downhill end of the log, I lie on my belly and start a weak imitation of the Marine Corp training crawl, elbows in the mud and my rifle held up in front of me. When I reach the top end – the last of my cover – I roll onto my side to get some circulation back into my arms and calm myself.

I flick off the safety and come up over the end of the log, already raising the gun to my shoulder, and…he’s gone. I scan the brush and dark hillside in every direction, already knowing I’m too late. There’s a hollow feeling inside my chest where just moments before my heart was hammering. Was he really even there, or did I imagine the whole thing? I walk out to the main road in the murky light of late-autumn dusk.

Sweeney’s waiting a quarter mile down. I get into the truck, and he starts for home. There’s not much to say. The season is over.

The Sweeney house is filled with the delicious scent of slow-cooking venison. Mia has a magnificent pot roast from Sweeney’s Opening Day deer just coming out of the oven, and I gratefully sit down to dinner. Maren and Laine talk about school and friends and basketball. Mia fills Sweeney in on the day’s events. And I consume three helpings of succulent pot roast, mashing my potatoes into the braising liquid and cutting tender carrots with my fork.

“Why don’t you take some of this deer home with you,” Sweeney says. “We have plenty, really.” I have to force myself to politely refuse. “Nah,” I say, “you need the meat, keep it, we’re good. Thanks, though.” Looking relieved, he excuses himself and goes outside to unload the truck. I have another helping of pot roast.

On my drive home, I am haunted by the image of the buck standing there on the spur road. Next year, I tell myself. Next year.

It’s late when I pull into our driveway. I’m so tired, I sit for a long moment, not moving, listening to the tick-tick of cooling engine metal. I reach into the backseat to grab my gear, and hidden under my jacket I find a stack of packages neatly wrapped in butcher paper. I switch the dome light on and read the labels written in Sweeney’s hand: Roast. Shoulder steaks. Sausage. Stew meat. Backstrap…

Inside, Stacy is curled up on the couch by the woodstove, deeply immersed in the latest composting literature. “Well?” she says, looking up, “how was it? Did you bring home the bacon?” I’m not quite sure how to answer.