(Warning: This is a LONG entry. So much so that I’m breaking it into two and releasing them a bit apart. Their relation to cancer or recovery is a stretch in some spots, so if that’s what you’re here for you can probably skip most of it.)

The Hunt

The day started simply enough, work was slow, probably exacerbated by the fact that I was watching the clock… waiting. As soon as our office close out was complete I stuck around a little bit to talk with a coworker about my coparenting woes and then I was off post as quickly as I could be. I had shit to do. It was the day before the western Washington archery elk season opening day. 

The night prior I’d gotten everything packed and staged by my front door, ready to be packed up in Thomas’ truck on short notice. We were going up to my favorite hunting spot together and spending Friday through Sunday night in a wilderness area that bordered a national park. 

See, my theory about elk in Washington since I got here in 2021 is that they spend all year in the National Forest, and then the night prior to opening day they run into the national parks, where hunting is forbidden. I’ve set up accordingly, finding natural funnels near park boundaries where I hope to interdict one on its mission to flee the orange army (I’m using that term broadly, hunter orange is not required during archery seasons in areas that don’t overlap with a rifle season). 

Thomas has lived in this area since he left the Army over ten years ago. He’s got a wide base of experience in many areas of Washington, but he’d never been up here before. We’ve scouted together several times before, but never actually hunted together. This was an exciting first, and incredibly helpful for me as he has a truck that could carry both of our bikes out to our starting point. It’s always comforting when you don’t have to camp alone, and are also able to share resources to lighten the load. 

After loading up my gear, we hit the road. It was a little over an hour to the terminus of an abandoned forest service road where we would park the truck (they’ve constructed a berm to deter people from going in and running into the many washouts). Upon getting to the berm my heart sank a little because I saw something I didn’t see last year… trucks. The ad hoc parking area was full once we had parked. The many fires in the area no doubt have been pushing hunters out of their planned hunts and this was likely the case as this area is largely unmolested by humans most of the year. 

I changed into my hunting clothes, got ready, and took off. Thomas was on a human-power mountain bike (I have a minibike, which is a 196cc motor on a moped frame and fat off-road tires; I’ve modified it to be a hunting rig with racks, saddlebags, and a milk crate bungied to it for cargo storage) so he would be far behind me but after I set up my tent we planned for me to come back down the trail and relieve him of his pack so he could make better time. 

I knew with the bike being heavier than usual, despite my lighter pack, that this would be a challenging venture for me. The road has five significant washouts, and getting the bike up and down them without load is a little perilous at times. Add in my degraded state, the heavier load, and the fading daylight and I knew the game was on. 

The first four washouts went about how I expected- a pain in the ass but nothing I hadn’t felt before in the past. The fifth, I had always known since the days of coming up here on foot, was going to be the real test and boy was it a doozy. To add to the already treacherous nature of the washout, part of the path that was crucial to navigating it had collapsed into the wash. 

Fuck. 

I knew right away there was no way on god’s green earth that I was going to make it around this new obstacle with any extra weight on the bike, including the rider. I unloaded all the gear, my bow, the crate, and took off the packs on my person. I made a few attempts at getting the bike up an embankment by gunning the gas while walking beside it but the hill was having none of it. At this point I was already pouring in sweat trying to will this bike up the hill when I decided that this was the last washout and I was, ostensibly, home free after I cleared it. I shut the bike off and grabbed a number of pieces of deadfall and stones and built up the soft soil I was trying to manhandle the bike up to get around the new caved in area. This feat of primitive engineering worked with some patience, horsepower, and repeatedly giving the minibike motivational speeches such as, “come on you fuckin’ bastard.” 

Eventually I was to the other side of the washout and I walked back across to grab all the items I’d downloaded to make it possible. It was then I did… something… to my knee. It hurt a little, but my ability to bear weight was unaffected so I rode on. This later proved to be a sprained ACL (more on this in Part 2).

After getting to the area I’d identified prior as our campsite I got to work. The light was fading fast and I needed to get at least my half of camp sorted before I could turn around and relieve Thomas. Once that was done I set some chem lights out as markers to our camp and started back down the hill. I found Thomas much further down than I’d expected, walking beside his bike. He greatly overestimated his and the bike’s ability to work together to get up the 3,000 foot elevation gain over the span of about five miles. I took his pack from him and jetted back to camp which was still two and a half miles away. Upon return I tore into his pack, getting him set up with the faint glow of light I had left plus my headlamp. I figured it would take him roughly an hour to get to the camp so I once again set out to meet him, this time on foot, carrying just my headlamp, pistol, and one of his water bottles. 

Right as I exited the trail to our camp, a woman was walking down the road with her own headlamp. I found this… strange. (didn’t most of them pick the bear?) She had no pack, no obvious weapons (although it was dark by now), and was just walking down the road alone. I introduced myself and she said she was walking back to her truck after dropping off and helping her husband and his friend set up their camp. They’d come up on dirt bikes but didn’t want to leave their truck at the bottom because of an unfortunate experience with vandalism in the past. 

She (Michelle) said her husband, during his last run, had mentioned stopping and talking to a guy pushing a mountain bike and I told her it was likely my friend and that I was on my way to meet him. We continued walking together until we ran into Thomas, and Michelle continued down the trail while I took the bike from Thomas and walked with him the last quarter mile into camp. He was a little earlier than I’d expected, seeing as it was now 2130ish, but we still didn’t have a ton of time to get settled and to sleep. We chatted a bit, prepared for the next day, and eventually went to sleep. 

Night time in the forest is not as loud as some would believe, in fact in my experience the quiet can be almost complete silence. Friday night was virtually silent other than a couple guys, on what sounded like e-bikes, making a couple runs up and down the road. I say it sounded like because they weren’t gas-motorized and I decided to forgo my hearing aids for this trip. I figured they would just amplify the wrong things, like my own footsteps, or get lost/broken. 

I think I drifted off to sleep a little before midnight and woke back up around 0350 when I heard either the world’s loudest cow elk or some dildo practicing his “mew” (that is roughly the phonetic sound a female elk makes) in a bugle tube. I dozed for about 30 minutes more after that before naturally waking up at 0445. My alarm was set for five so I decided to just get moving. Thomas started to stir a little before five, probably due to my noise and light. Once we both emerged from our tents, he threw on a small collapsible pot of coffee he’d packed in and served them in collapsible cups. We sipped on our coffee and I ate a Mountain House blueberry cereal I had left over from last year. I added enough water to eat it with ease, and the nutritionist I saw that Wednesday on my rehab team would be happy to know that I finally started adding a starch to my breakfast. 

I brushed my teeth, packed my kit and bow onto the bike, wished my brother good luck, and took off two miles in the dark to my trailhead. 

Morning is my favorite time of day. My teenage self would undoubtedly be in utter disbelief to hear me say that, but it’s true. It’s even more true in the wilderness. You really get to watch the world wake up unencumbered by the sounds of humanity aside from airliners passing high overhead. There are few experiences like this in life. 

As I cable locked the bike to a tree and started up the trailhead the glow of the morning was very subtly appearing overhead. As I rounded the second switchback on the trail I had a perfect view of the river valley in the distance and the glow was just beginning to outline the surrounding ridges. As much as I wish I could have sat there and watched the entire sequence, the clock was ticking. Elk, like most animals, are most active in the morning and evening. I didn’t have to hurry, but time was against me. 

As I reached the alpine lake near where I’d planned to sit, I started looking for signs of people. The ground along the banks was too dry to betray any recent footsteps or animal prints with any sort of recency. I say that I started looking for people because there were two tents at the trailhead and I didn’t see any signs of people, so that means they were ahead of me or opted not to investigate the minibike that parked across the dirt area from them. My money was on that they were ahead of me. Fuck. Nothing pains a hunter more than another hunter being in “your spot.” As I descended back into the dark timber where I was relying on a path I’d memorized to get to the meadow I’d planned to overwatch, I began to really focus. Focus on my steps, my surroundings, and begin looking for signs of animals. 

I keep using “animals” and “elk” interchangeably here because archery elk season overlaps with archery deer, bear, cougar, and small game seasons. I wasn’t planning on being picky. My freezer was empty save a few cases of electrolyte popsicles left over from my earlier treatment days. I am ready to take a break from industrial agriculture for a while, and Bambi’s dad would make a fine burger …as would any of his forest friends. 

I got to the meadow opening and nocked an arrow just in case. As I was slowly walking along the edge of the meadow, I hear a snap to my right and see a guy sitting square in “my spot.” 

You. fuckin’. bitch. God dammit. 

I pointed to my trial camera and quietly took it down from the tree it was on just about ten yards from him. I picked my gear back up, used a hand gesture to indicate that I was going up the draw, to which he gave his approval with a thumbs up. There’s no legal reason I had to seek his approval, it’s all public land after all, but the fact is he put in the work to get there first and I wasn’t going to be a dick and ruin his hunt because I was mad he got there first. 

I relocated 150 yards south and about 40 feet up from him. If this were rifle season that would be wholly inadequate for safety and etiquette, but during archery that is close to three times the distance most bow hunters will comfortably shoot. I found a log to sit beside, dropped my gear, pulled the SD card from the camera and pulled my tablet out to see what’s transpired in the seven weeks since it was put up. 

I was absolutely blown away. A bachelor herd of three bulls that were all 5×5 or better seem to be regular visitors in the evenings, with a small herd of blacktail visiting when the elk aren’t occupying the meadow. There was footage of the elk fighting with their antlers or otherwise horsing around (heh) with either, a black bear and her cub, and the same pair being chased by a cinnamon coat black bear later on. The most significant capture was one of the last videos the camera took before the SD card filled up: a large adult cougar moving through the grass. It was an absolute unit; something you hope never decides to pay you a visit unannounced. I knew they were up here, by sign and probability, but to actually get one on film was pretty astounding.

I remained in overwatch for a couple hours before I started getting a little chilly and bored, so I slowly and deliberately hand-railed the meadow around the half opposite the other hunter and continued on, following game trails to more small glades and benches in the topography. Eventually my knee ache really started distracting me; I decided to return to the meadow and sit on the opposite end of it from where I was previously. I figured since the other hunter was going to take prime real estate in the meadow, I’d sit on a hill overlooking the two trails game would use to get to it, in order to intercept anything before it walked in. Checkmate motherfucker.

Thomas made brief radio contact with me once he started walking around an elevated area nearish to me, but probably a couple miles away in straight line distance. He sounded frustrated and I started to feel bad for him. This area was my idea and so far the only thing we’d gotten out of it was kick-ass footage from my trail camera. You can’t turn that into burgers, though, unfortunately. Then, I noticed I’d conducted my annual ritual of losing a hat.

One of my least favorite hunting traditions is the annual loss of a hat. Every hunting season I lose a hat. Without fail I get too warm, I clip it to my belt, go through some kind of brush where it gets silently ripped off, and I am now without a hat for the rest of the hunt. This time I’d lost yet another “good” hat sometime while traversing a gentle old growth knob off of the main game trail I was following. Every. Damn. Year.

As the sun dipped below the ridge I decided to start making my way out. There was no sign of any kind of recent activity and I didn’t want to be walking back in the darkness with a bum knee in my already degraded state of general poor stamina. Thanks cisplatin, you really are the gift that keeps giving! 

By the time I got back to the bike and down the hill the sun had fallen below the horizon. Thomas was already at the camp boiling water for his meal and I settled in so we could talk about our respective hunts.  I ate after him- some kind of dehydrated “Pad Thai” I picked up at the PX because it was calorie dense. I still couldn’t taste much of it, but it did enough to placate my hunger; 900 calories is 900 calories.

We talked a bit longer about the day, other hunts, future hunts, the plan for tomorrow, and other topics as the darkness started to soak into the dark timber around us.

Right as we both zipped into our tents we heard it: the rumble of thunder. This wasn’t, by itself, alarming because we’d listened to distant thunder most of the morning. The Garmin forecast gave us only a 30% chance of being hit by a thunderstorm, so we decided by the time we saw that our odds were such that we’d stay and hope it would miss us again like it had in the morning.

Hope is my least favorite planning factor.

Before long there was lightning all around, thunder rolling, and a nonstop downpour making it impossible to hear anything but the impact on the tent. Trees were cracking and groaning. More lightning. More thunder. More rain. It went without end. We were at 5,000 feet and mother nature was letting us have it for the audacity to spend another night in her majestic presence.  The only reason we were able to fall asleep at all was our extreme exhaustion.  That was probably around 2200– roughly an hour into the storm.

At 0300 I woke up. Something was different. That something was silence. Just as quickly as it had come on, the storm blew eastward and the fog moved in to replace it. I peaked out of my tent and saw that Thomas’ tent was still intact; satisfied he was probably still alive I tried to go back to sleep. I dozed for a couple more hours before waking up and putting my clothes on. Thomas got to work almost immediately on the coffee. It was at least ten degrees colder and we were in various states of damp from condensation or the downpour.

We made a few alterations to our plan and started discussing what the end of the hunt looked like. The realization that we were not likely to be successful started to sink in but… maybe… maybe. We had to try. Why go through all of this if we weren’t going to at least try?

I went down a long abandoned road, overtaken by grass and fallen timber. I knew it well. Last summer I about shook hands with a cow elk down here. I knew there were deer and at least one bear in here. I had to try. It was dead silent. The rain had since stopped. I put my wet weather gear into my pack and continued. “Keep going until you have to turn around so you don’t bust time,” I told myself. I wasn’t going to give up without milking every last drop out of this hunt.

Then the first time I remember her creeping into my thoughts, at least since the last time we’d communicated a couple innocuous text messages through my Garmin, happened. “She’d love this,” I said to myself as I stood peering down the trail that was shrouded in mist and lined on both sides by dark timber. I smiled. No one was there to ask why, but I knew, and that was enough.

More on that in Part 2.

I got to the point I could go no further before I’d start seriously bumping into the time I promised Thomas I’d meet him at an area about halfway down the main road that we’d nicknamed, “The Quarry” due to the way the rocks had collapsed into a depression at a fork in the trail. I made my way back to the minibike and went back to camp. Thomas had already packed up his camp and left the items we’d agreed would go back down with me. I collapsed the remainder of my camp and loaded up the bike, and away I went.

Soon enough I caught up to Thomas at The Quarry right around the time two younger hunters on e-Bikes had as well. We all stopped and talked together for a while; they got their shit rocked by the storm too and we shared some laughs over what an abject failure of a weekend it was.

We wished them luck and kept going down the road. It was time to go. Thomas spied a doe but wasn’t able to get a shot off. The game had left and whatever remained was likely blown out by the storm to lower elevations. There’s a point where you tell yourself you’ll try again later, but in the back of your mind you don’t know when, if ever, that try will come. It’s self-soothing. A coping mechanism, perhaps.

With extraordinary difficulty despite our combined power, we got the bike up the troubled washout. We stayed mostly together, both coasting, through the rest of the trail. When we got to the flat part at the bottom that still resembled a road I hit the gas and took off. I needed to get some frustration out and it had been a long time since I’d gone fast on something with two wheels.

With that, the truck was in view, the trip was over. We talked to some other hunters at the bottom, changed, packed up, and left. I navigated us to a coffee stand in the mountain town nearest my hunting area and we enjoyed this trapping of civilized life. We drove back to my house and discussed work, plans, women, and life. We were beat. My knee was stiff as hell, and I still needed to get my gear dried out.

Knowing full well I had no interest in doing it later, I went ahead and turned the inside of my garage into a homeless encampment with lines hanging from the rafters, gear taken apart hanging on hooks, gear on the table, everything unpacked and carefully placed to dry out.

It’s still like that. It’s more than two weeks later. Fuck it. I’ll get around to it.

What does any of this have to do with cancer? Well, it doesn’t, at least not in a way that makes sense but anyone but me. This was a weekend I didn’t even think was going to be possible over much of the spring and summer. I know I’m capable of incredible things because I will simply will myself through it, but I know that all the willpower in the world wouldn’t keep my body in check for as long as it used to. Stamina, fatigue, my unique diet, my insatiable thirst– all barriers to going back as far as I’d wanted. I didn’t think I’d get to do this trip at all. But I did. That was the only big win I got, however.

In hindsight, my spraining my ACL on this trip was probably a blessing: it saved me from outstripping my water supply by ranging further. It saved me from outstripping my energy levels and making a serious mistake. Divine intervention? Maybe. Being weaker overall because of my overall health situation? Probably. Either one isn’t being ruled out. Both might have saved me from doing something monumentally stupid in the woods so I could continue writing this blog entry that is probably going to fuck up my life a little bit by the end of Part 2.

I don’t know where I am, but I know exactly where I am.

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The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.