Welcome to another installment in the Hunting Hawai’i series. In this edition, further misadventures of poor marksmanship, early wakeups, and sneaky arachnids. Read on to learn more! As always, the Shop is open and has the best books and merch available anywhere. Any little bit helps support the blog. I appreciate you reading!
When Bret and I finally made it back to Brian’s house after Bret shot his velvet buck, we were treated to a dinner of wild boar goulash, fried rice, and blueberry banana bread. Brian regaled us with stories of past hunts and hunters, told us how the two bow hunters he picked up that morning were doing, and talked passionately about conservation while Bret and I devoured our meal. One of the mistakes we made when we left to hunt that morning was not bringing enough food for a full day out in the bush.
After we stuffed our faces, it was time to pass around a bottle of whiskey and listen to Brian’s plan for the next day, our last day of the hunt. His plan was to take the bow hunters out early in the morning, but Bret and I would have the early morning off to sleep in, then get a quick morning hunt in. After our morning hunt, we would get breakfast/lunch, run errands and get ready for a final, balls-to-the-wall afternoon and night of hunting. This was agreeable to me, especially as I sat there exhausted and worn down from the two preceding days of aggressively hunting Axis Deer across Molokai, day and night. My feet hurt, my legs ached, and I was in desperate need of a shower and a solid night’s sleep, so any excuse to chill out for the morning was good with me.
It turned out that having the “Early Morning” off just meant that Brian and Blaze rousted me and Bret right at 5:00am. We piled yet again in the Can-Am side by side, and headed back out to the hills to chase Axis Deer once again. Blaze dropped us off, and we high-tailed it up the hills to a hide site that Blaze figured would be right in the path of the morning migration down from the mountains. Bret and I moved as quickly as we could, and arrived just as dawn broke in our first hide site in the morning.
At this point, I will admit to growing a little careless. Over the past two days, I had seen more deer than I had seen in my entire life. There are were so many deer on Molokai, it didn’t seem to matter what I did, we would always see more. I was a little desensitized, and through our carelessness, Bret and I kicked up a couple small groups of Axis Deer before we made it to the hide site. Since Brian had gotten us out of the house so fast and we had moved so quickly up the hills, as soon as we settled into our hide site, I realized I really needed to piss.
Many hunters will tell you that relieving yourself in the field is an almost sure-fire way to attract your quarry. Your prey likes to catch you with your pants down, and any time they can do it literally, they will take advantage. Sure enough, a big Axis Stag walked out onto the ridge about fifty yards in front of our hide site while I was mid stream. By the time I finished, re-zipped, and quietly hustled back to my rifle, the Stag had meandered to a little more than 150 yards away, still well within range of the .300WSM I was holding.
I got behind the rifle, sought out the Stag in the scope, and steadied myself to take the shot. The Stag had kept slowly walking away from us, and as I held my crosshairs right under his chest until I was ready to take the shot. I flicked the safety off, with Bret watching through his own scope off to my right.
BLAM!
The Stag jumped into the air, did a summersault, and for a brief moment I was incredulous that I hit this big Stag. Then the moment passed when he jumped up and sprinted straight up the mountain. Sprinting straight up the mountain is not the behavior of a wounded deer. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t hit the deer, because I was certain I still had the crosshairs under his chest when I touched off the round. Having not learned my lesson from earlier in the trip, I had gotten excited and squeezed the trigger before I was ready.
Bret, however, saw the summersault as proof that I did hit the Stag. I really hoped I hadn’t because it would be a miracle if we recovered it after how fast it ran away up the mountain. It was vastly preferable to have a clean miss than a bad hit, and despite the Stag’s summersault, I was certain I missed cleanly.
When I was stationed in Texas, I did a fair amount of Whitetail Deer hunting on a ranch that a coworker owned an let me hunt on in exchange for labor. One season, during the “culling season” where the only lawfully harvestable deer were antlerless deer and spike bucks (bucks without a fork in their antlers), I took a shot at a spike buck that promptly stood on his hind legs then flopped over on his side. Confident I hit that little buck square in the chest, I started walking to it. This spike buck startled me by hopping back up and running off through the sage brush. I shot twice more with my semiautomatic .308 rifle, this time aiming for the buck’s neck, and he tumbled face first into the sage.
I was certain that I would find at least two bullet holes in the spike buck, one in the chest and one in the neck, when I butchered the deer. Despite the spike’s theatrics, I only found a bullet wound in the buck’s neck and none anywhere else.
With this experience lodged in my memory, I was certain that I had missed the big Axis Stag, despite his summersault. Even so, Bret and I dutifully checked for blood trails and any sign I hit the Stag. After almost an hour of circling around the ridge the Stag had stood on in front of us, we resigned ourselves to the fact that not only had I missed a fairly easy shot, but we had effectively burned our hide site and needed to relocate.
Bret and I decided to head back down the mountain a little ways, towards a ridgeline we had seen a bunch of deer on the day before. We hustled our way into a new hide site, catching glimpses of Axis Deer milling about in the draws below us and on the ridges above us as we moved. We figured since Blaze had told us to be back down the mountain before lunch, it made sense to move a little closer to the trail before hunkering down to wait.
We saw a ton of deer again, but none of them big Stags like I had missed earlier in the day. Bret and I both figured we had done our conservation culling duty the first night, so now we were primarily interested in some sort of trophy. Since Bret shot his velvet buck the night before, it was my turn to harvest a trophy.
We sat for hours, watching a veritable parade of does, yearlings, and fawns walk past us, both uphill and downhill. Every once in a while, a nice looking Stag would make themselves known, and we would get our binoculars on it and it would disappear over one of the many ridges surrounding us. The big deer were back to avoiding us, having already given me a chance that I squandered.
As the morning wore on, and Blaze’s pre-ordered rendezvous time grew ever closer, Bret and I settled into just talking about the random stuff two military guys talk about on a mountain side. Bret, having gone to high school in South Dakota and college in North Dakota, had some pretty strong opinions of Minnesotans. I think he was surprised to learn that Minnesotans don’t really think about the Dakotas all that much. A little while after that paradigm shattering revelation, Bret announced he was going to take a leak and walked out the back of the hide site, up into some rocks.
“Hey you should look at this,” Bret said a short while later. I assumed it was a vile Dakotan trick, and did not turn around.
“No thanks, I’m good,” I told him.
“Seriously,” Bret said urgently, “there’s a bright green spider right behind you.” Now, I was less sure about vile Dakotan tricks, and much more sure that a bright green spider equals venomous spider. I was also sure that venomous equals bad for me. So I looked.
It was, thankfully, a bright green spider and not a vile Dakotan trick. Sitting on its web, stretched between two tall blades of prairie grass was a Hawaiian Garden Spider. According to the internet, the venom of the Hawaiian Garden Spider is both “not medically significant to humans,” and “causes mild reactions, similar to bee stings.” Bee stings aren’t fun, so I avoided testing that out. I snapped a photo to remember the spider by on the way down to meet Blaze.
Our morning hunt a bust, Bret and I met Blaze waiting in the Can-Am on the side-by-side trail at the base of the hill. We had a couple hours to kill before our last afternoon hunt and our last night hunt, and Brian and Blaze had something special cooked up for us. But first, lunch.
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