Hunters: Charles and Kail Larsen
Story by: Kail Larsen
Species: Sitka Blacktail Deer
Location: Kodiak Island, Alaska
Method: Rifle
It wasn’t until the moment my father and I stepped off the plane in the city of Kodiak that we fully realized that a dream we shared was about to come true. Like most kids growing up in the outdoors, I have long dreamed of going to Alaska to hunt the Last Frontier. Unfortunately for some, that’s all it will ever be: a dream. But for me, I swore that come hell or high water, someday, I was going. I knew that my father shared this dream with me, but he was likely never going to be able to make it happen on his own. And since he wasn’t getting any younger and I didn’t want to go alone, I disguised this trip as a present for his sixtieth birthday. We were headed to Kodiak Island to chase Sitka blacktail deer in Larsen Bay.
The morning of day four was crisp, clear, and quiet. For the first time, the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the grass and trees were sparkling with frost-covered beauty. We made our way up the trail along the babbling stream, hoping to cross paths with a buck in the timber, but we reached the first beaver pond a half mile later with no deer sightings. We sat down to glass the surrounding mountain slopes as the sun crested the horizon and showered the valley with warm golden light. It didn’t take us long to locate several deer, but none were packing antlers. After about thirty minutes of not turning up a buck, we continued up the valley.
By the time we reached the second large beaver pond, the clear skies had given way to low clouds and fog, which made glassing the slopes less than productive. I sat down at the edge of the pond to glass what I could of the mountainsides through the passing breaks in the clouds. I saw seven does on the same hillside in the time it took me to eat my sandwich. As I started into my cookie for dessert, I glassed the ridge through another passing hole and saw what I thought was another doe feeding with her head in a small patch of brush. But as I looked, the deer’s head came up and the brush came with it. What I’d thought was just another doe was actually a buck with more headgear than any three bucks we’d seen put together! My jaw dropped and my heart skipped a beat. I spoke to Dad as I continued to admire the buck. “Get over here. I just found a giant!”
I quickly put away what was left of my lunch and gathered myself to make a play on this buck. I ranged the buck and the tops of trees between us, trying to decide where we needed to get to for a shot. I motioned to Dad to take a look at the magnificent buck through my spotting scope, but he shook his head and said, “If you say he’s big, I’ll kill him. I don’t need to look. Let’s go!”
I picked a small knob at the base of the ridge the buck was on that looked like it would offer a good place to get above the brush without spooking the buck. We started for it, weaving through the alder thicket at a good pace. A quick look at my watch showed 11:30 a.m.—plenty of time. About 100 yards from the knob, the ground gave way underfoot. My left leg disappeared clear to my crotch in muck, and I still didn’t touch the bottom. Fortunately, my quick pace had carried me just far enough that my right foot landed solid and kept me from sinking farther into the unknown depth of the hole. With Dads help, I pulled my leg out of the quagmire, and we continued, albeit at a somewhat slower pace, to our shooting position.
At the base of the rise, we drew up. While Dad caught his breath and got ready, I was scanning the slope to relocate the buck. After looking for several minutes and only seeing the half dozen does that were also on the slope, I began to worry that the buck had gone up and over the top. But then, he stepped out from behind a bush and stopped to feed. We crawled up the rise, and Dad lay down and got comfortable while I ranged the buck. I lasered 300 yards nearly straight uphill. I called the range to Dad and told him where the buck was standing, now looking down on us from his perch just below the crest of the ridge.
When I heard Dad whisper that he couldn’t see the buck because his scope was fogged up, I almost choked. I jerked the lens cloth out of my bino harness and wiped both lenses of the scope—to no avail. Dad still couldn’t make anything out through the scope. So, in frantic desperation, I grabbed my rifle, handed it to him, and said, “Just use mine!”
Dad and I have shot together enough that I knew there wouldn’t be any shift in point of impact between us even though mine was a southpaw rifle. Meanwhile, as we swapped rifles, the buck remained where he was, broadside and unconcerned with the circus happening below. As Dad got back down on the rifle, I reiterated where the buck was standing: “Three hundred yards directly above us, right in the middle of the grass strip.”
Dad whispered back, “With the fog, I can’t see antlers. Is he the one facing right, with the dark face like a raccoon?” I confirmed that it was, and a split second later, the rifle boomed and I watched, almost as if in slow motion, as the bullet struck the buck just under the shoulder blade and crumpled him in his tracks. He began to roll down the hill, but his antlers caught in the vegetation and he was suspended belly up, nearly 700 feet above us. After what seemed like forever with not so much as a twitch, the realization of what we’d just accomplished caught up to us, and the excitement and emotions were overwhelming.
At this point, Dad still had not seen the antlers on this buck and had no idea what he’d just shot. As much as I wanted Dad to be the first to put his hands on the magnificent buck, we decided that because of the steepness of the slope and the time it would take him to get to the deer, it would be best if I went up alone, dislodged the buck, and rolled him to the bottom of the mountain.
It took all of twenty minutes for me to climb up to the buck, and when I pulled him out of the grass, he was even bigger than I’d realized! I got him facing downhill. At first, I tried to control his descent, but I soon realized it was futile, so I turned loose and watched him roll and flop down the mountain. I followed him down, barely managing to keep myself upright, and when Dad and I fished him out of the willows that brought his descent to a stop, we both stood awestruck at the size of the buck.
We took the time to take numerous pictures and began caping and quartering him out. Once our packs were loaded, we began our last hike out of the mountains. Even though we were stiff and sore from the past three days of hard hunting and our packs were more than seventy pounds apiece, our steps were easy and light with the weight of potential failure no longer on our shoulders.
We’d both got our bucks. Two days earlier, I had taken a non-typical five-by-five buck in the neighboring valley where we also encountered a large brown bear. (I found out that I get more nervous talking to pretty women than I do walking through bear-infested brush with a pack full of meat covered in fresh blood!) But this time, we had a good trail to follow back to the beach, and we arrived nearly an hour ahead of schedule, which turned out to be fortunate, as there was a major storm blowing in, making landing on the beach more difficult by the minute. While we waited for the boat, we snapped a few more pictures and sat, enjoying the scenery and taking in the moment of a dream come true.
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