One Heck Of A Ride

41 us passed the time playing cards and swapping stories. Thanksgiving was several weeks away, but Ron had brought a turkey and cooked it for us on a Coleman stove. It was a meal to rival any five-star restaurant’s cuisine. When the weather cleared enough to go out, we left the camp in pairs in three directions. Ron said we needed to use the buddy system. When we shot a deer, one man would gut and skin it while the other would stand guard. Gunshots during the island’s deer season were like dinner bells. Bears knew they meant gut piles and meat, he said. More Antlered Game There were plenty of deer. Bud and I had climbed only about a third of the way up the side Author’s salmon helped feed the camp Before their hunt ended, the six hunters had taken nineteen bucks. The limit was five and there was no shortage of deer on Kodiak Island, but author chose to take only three mature bucks. of the mountain across the lake from our camp when I shot a buck. I quickly got its edible parts, cape and head strapped on our packboards and we started off the mountain. The terrain and brush got rougher, steeper and thicker as we approached the lake and we reached the water maybe a mile from camp. Instead of packing the deer all the way to camp that day, we decided to leave it and return with Ron’s inflatable Zodiak boat the next morning. First of three Sitka blacktail bucks author shot on Kodiak Island, Alaska 1988 . The bear that carried off the meat during the night left plenty of tracks, and they were huge. After that, we left nothing out overnight. Before our hunt ended, the six of us had nineteen bucks lying next to the cook tent. I shot two more bucks (a big three-by-four and a four- by-four, both scoring in the mid-eighties using the SCI measuring system). Bud shot four bucks