Welcome to the next installment of the Hunting Hawai’i series. In this edition, I climb a cliff, almost die, and take a crack at a feral goat. Check out the shop for merch and stuff. I’m not you dad, or a cop, or an aggressive sign, so I won’t tell you what to do. Enjoy.
After our morning hunt on Saturday, Brian had Bret and I hop into his Tacoma and head into Kaunakakai to get lunch and restock on provisions. There are only a couple of restaurants in Kaunakakai, and by this time I had visited all the open ones, plus a food truck. This time, we went back to the local cafe to get some coffee, then wandered over to the food stand next door to get lunch. I had tried most of the stuff on this menu, so I ordered a classic Loco Moco and settled into a picnic table to listen to Brian’s newest iteration of our plan.
By Saturday’s lunch, Bret and I had successfully harvested Axis Deer in the wide-open plains of South Molokai and the dense mountain jungle of Central and North Molokai. By Brian’s estimation, it was time to hit the mountainous East side of Molokai and take a crack at those Axis Deer. According to Brian, these deer were much different than the Axis we had been hunting, they were wilier, faster, and even a slightly different color. Brian told us to be ready to take shots as close as five yards away, and as far as over five hundred yards away. I pointed out the difficulties we had been having with our accuracy up to that point, but Brian shrugged it off with a casual wave.
Brian’s repeat customer, Buck the Bowhunter from California, met us at Brian’s house after we returned from lunch. Bret and I were introduced to Buck and his hunting buddy, maybe “Jesse.” I know he introduced himself, but Brian and Blaze said his name wrong so many times I couldn’t keep it straight. For simplicity, he is now and forever “Jesse” in my mind, whether he was before that moment or not.
Since he had visited Molokai quite a few times, Buck was comfortable renting his own car and driving around wherever Brian told him to go. This was my first time visiting, and I preferred to have a local guide me around to make sure I didn’t wander somewhere I wasn’t welcome. Buck and Jesse followed Brian in their rented Ford Edge as he drove us to the East side in search of adventure.
We made three stops on the way to Molokai’s Halawa Bay. The first was to check on some motorists stopped by the side of the road. They were already being helped, but we stopped and offered our assistance, which was cheerfully refused. The second stop was to check in with a couple of Brian’s local friends who were loading their truck by the highway after a morning of fishing. They hadn’t had much luck, but they wished us well with toothless smiles and enthusiastic shakas. Our final stop was at a scenic overlook for Brian to point out where we would be hunting until nightfall. I looked across the bay, and from a distance, it didn’t look too bad.
I would later find out that I was wrong, but at the time I was too absorbed with the native beauty of Molokai and the view of Maui across the channel. I was also closely listening to Brian’s story, complete with sound effects, of him crossing the channel from Molokai to Maui on a jet ski to work on the Lahaina restoration for his day job.
After finishing his story and snapping a couple photos, Brian ushered us back into his long-wheelbase Tacoma and we were off. The rest of the drive was quite short, pausing only to wave at some locals who were enjoying the beach in Halawa bay.
Halawa Bay and Halawa Valley are the sites of some of the oldest settlements in Hawai’i. In Hawaiian antiquity, Halawa Valley was densely populated, but after tsunamis in 1946 and 1957, the valley was all but abandoned. Now, only a few people actually live in the valley, while local families use Halawa valley as a combination recreation area and spiritual site. While there aren’t very many people in Halawa Valley, there are a ton of Axis Deer, and as we would soon discover, feral goats.
Brian parked us at his family’s camping spot, explained a bit of the history to Bret and I, while the bow hunters from California performed some sort of strong smelling ritual intended to conceal their human scent from the skittish Axis Deer. I have no idea what they were doing, as my archery hunting is lackadaisical at best. No need for such rituals when the magnum caliber in your rifle can reach over a thousand yards in the right hands (not mine).
With sparse instructions best summarized as “follow Blaze,” Brian sent Bret, Blaze, and me off to chase Axis Deer. I believe the hope was, yet again, that we would do a bunch of the work, and the deer would get pushed right past Buck and Jesse to shoot at with their bows. I did not have time to clarify, because as soon as I loaded my ruck with water, Blaze took off across the beach and I had to move quickly to keep up.
Beach quickly gave way to jungle, and we spooked a group of Axis into running away from us through the dense foliage. Jungle quickly gave way to a mountain, and Bret and I followed Blaze straight up the cliffs.
Blaze moved up the cliffs like some sort of half-Hawaiian, half-goat superman. Bret lagged only slightly behind, but I was sucking wind carrying both a rifle and my ruck with enough water for Bret and myself. I think Bret started growing concerned about my wellbeing about halfway up the cliff, because he eventually passed his rifle off to Blaze and offered to carry my rifle up the mountain. Swallowing my pride, I relented and passed it forward. The small consolation is that I was carrying about thirty pounds on my back while Bret climbed unencumbered with fresh knees and ankles that hadn’t been beat to hell by the military just yet.
It felt like it took us hours to climb even halfway to the top, and by the time I got there I was sucking wind so bad there was no way I could make an accurate shot on any animal smaller than a blue whale standing right in front of my muzzle. It was probably only about thirty minutes of climbing, but climbing straight up with no stop until your whole-decade-younger-than-you guide stops feels like an eternity.
At this first spot, Blaze hopped around on rocks with his monocular looking for Axis deer in the valleys to either side of us. I sat there and caught my breath while taking photos, hoping vainly that the two younger guys would think I was just really interested in photography and not interested in preventing myself from keeling over and falling back down the cliffs we just climbed. From our vantage point, I could see the overlook we stopped at just before entering Halawa valley, along with the bay we climbed out of in search of Axis deer.
From our vantage point, we could see Buck and Jesse below us, hoping that our scramble up the cliffs would push some Axis in range of their bows. Unfortunately for them, they would have to wait, as the only Axis we saw were moving up and away from them. One herd passed about four hundred yards in front of us on the next ridge over, but neither Bret nor I could get a shot. Bret because he couldn’t get lined up on the biggest deer and me because my heart rate was still over a hundred beats per minute even fifteen minutes after stopping our climb.
“Oh dude, you see that goat?” Blaze asked us. I did not see the goat at first, but after Blaze walked Bret on the animal, I saw it. Standing, silhouetted on a rock outcropping, was a mottled brown goat.
“Shoot it, brah,” Blaze urged.
“You sure?” Bret’s concern was evident. I also had concerns. First, I had shot and eaten feral goats before, and after processing and cooking fifty pounds of meat, I hadn’t managed to find a recipe that made it taste good. Second, that goat was like, way over there on the next cliff, and I really didn’t want to climb out there to recover it.
“Yeah brah,” Blaze assured us. “You gotta shoot them. They’re not supposed to be here.”
Even with that assurance, I was hesitant. I don’t particularly like shooting animals I am not going to eat. Bret settled in behind the borrowed .300WSM, took careful aim, pulled the trigger, and sent a round sailing harmlessly into the mountain. The goat in question hopped off the outcropping, unscathed, and Blaze looked at us with a mixture of confusion and pity. How we could miss a shot that close was a mystery to Blaze, but not to Bret. Bret demanded I hand over the 6.5CM I was holding, and I happily did so.
In Blaze’s estimation this side of the mountain had been burned. The Axis deer had moved up and over the mountain and the goats had moved on somewhere bullets weren’t an issue, harmless as they had been so far.
The solution: rotate 180 degrees and look at the other side.
On this other side of the mountain, we did not find any Axis deer. We did find a herd of feral goats, and Blaze again urged us to shoot them. I was still apprehensive, but Blaze laid out two points that made it acceptable to me to shoot them. First, the feral goats are even more destructive to the natural Hawaiian landscape than the Axis Deer. Second, and possibly more importantly, even if Bret and I didn’t want the meat, a local Filipino family would take it and, according to Blaze “turn it into something next level (brah!).” I was convinced, and so was Bret.
The only problem was the goats kept dipping in and out of cover. Now, much to my chagrin, we had to return to sea level in order to pursue them. Bret and I followed Blaze at a break-neck pace down the cliffs, returning to sea-level much faster than it took us to get up the cliff. We duckwalked up a small gully to stay out of view of the goats milling about on the adjacent cliff, and snuck our rifles up into position.
“Ayy, if you both time it right,” Blaze whispered to us, “you could probably both get one, maybe two each.”
Now, with me on the borrowed .300WSM and Bret on the 6.5CM, we took careful aim. There was one Billy goat hanging out on a big rock, with several of his nannies and kids running around the cliffs near him. As we watched, the Billy remained on the rock, while the rest of the goats milled around on the cliffs around him.
“Bret, you shoot that big Billy,” I whispered, “and I will take one of the other goats when they run.” A grunt of approval.
BLAM!
The Billy dropped on the rock, and the nannies and kids scattered all over the cliffside.
“Shoot, SHOOT!” Blaze whispered then shouted. I lined up my crosshairs on a nanny running around the cliff towards the other side of the mountain with a group of kids.
BLAMBLAM! Bret and I touched off near simultaneous rounds, both impacting the nanny at the base of her neck, punching through and taking one of the kids with her.
“Spence fired first,” Blaze crowed to Bret. It was true, as far as I could tell. So Blaze gave me credit for both the nanny and the kid. But first, we had to get across to the next cliff.
About a decade ago, I went on a hunt with a good friend of mine who was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan. During that hunt, my friend shot a very nice buck, while I shot a very small fawn that had taken the place of a doe I had been tracking but took my eye off of. The fawn was so small that I was able to hoist it into my truck with one hand, unassisted. Up until the point of being on that Halawa Bay cliffside, I had never shot a deer or similar animal smaller than that fawn. Blaze brought back the kid and the nanny at the same time, the nanny slung over his shoulder and the kid held in his hand looking like a chew toy my dog would be thrilled to rip apart.
Blaze set the nanny and the kid down next to the Billy, and set about processing them. Bret and I tried to help, but the two of us couldn’t even match his pace. After Blaze finished the Billy and the Nanny, he took over the last half of the kid that Bret and I had been working on. We packed the meat up, took a quick look at the Sun, and decided to high tail it back to Brian’s truck for the night’s adventures up Halawa Valley.
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