During the hunting season, there are endless approaches to seeking food. Many of these techniques are dependent on many more other influences- weather, topography, geology, human impact, and time of day are all playing a role. When I’m looking for mushrooms, wet, cool weather is imperative. Young Douglas Fir dominate forest is ideal, and a ridge with some slope within a few hundred feet of wetland can raise probability of edible fungus, but you never know for sure. This is the beauty of reading the language of landscape, the sky, nature in all her forms, to best receive her bounty. When hunting Blacktail Deer, I’m looking for active sign that was recently made, usually near a diverse range of vegetation to brows, with places to hide, water to drink, and safe space to rest. Grown in clear cuts, like the one pictured above in foreground, are perfect deer habitat- with the understanding that hunting them within that thick cover is nearly impossible. So why walk into this mess? Because that’s where the deer are.
I began my walk by moving to the edge of the tree line next to the overgrown clearcut. These transition zones are good entering points off a road, and buffer some of the initial noise you will make moving into terrain with slash and logs spread all over the ground, muddy ruts from heavy machines working across the land, and the new growth weaving together to heal and regenerate the soil. On that rich earth there are clear shapes- signatures left by the inhabitants of this ever evolving commercial timber property. Those last words are the legacy of human impact- ownership over place. This philosophy of resource extraction by dominion through violence over the land remains. So do the original peoples who are now regaining their land through the dominion rights of our laws today. It will be a beautiful thing to see human signatures that are with nature upon these soils.
Today I am walking with this hope as I seek to connect to the land that feeds me directly in body, mind, and spirit. The deer moving across this clearing are doing the same- uninterrupted, even with colonial oppression for over 200 years. The plants also keep growing, and the wild waters flowing, even as money trumps the land in madness. I have to keep a sharp focus when moving through this terrain, just like the deer I am hoping to see. Though there are clear footfalls made fresh in the last hour, since the last hard downpour, I was not thinking about following any specific track, more the lines of passable trail these deer had erected through human induced chaos- which does somewhat mimic environmental drastic changes- like a forest fire, or blow down, but with less betterment of the place- but a reasonable profit for corporation to maintain.
Just before heading out on foot, I had driven a few miles to get here. The roads that allow for this access are monumental in build and devastation- including the accessibility, which allows me to walk into this setting for a hunt, and the machines to clearcut. As I was driving in, I came upon an active part of the tree farm agricultural “renewals”- spreading treated sewage from Seattle into recently clearcut expanses, much like the one the deer and I were enjoying. The Loop System of biosolids for the soil is green washing at its best. Treated sewage is full of prescription drugs, heavy metals, and forever plastics- which are then spread into watersheds- yes, it’s all connected- and the good news is- there’s a lot of fresh nitrogen in the ground to grow more trees! The overgrow clearcut I am walking in has been replanted with these excellent GMO timber producing forest products. The deer don’t eat them, they are nabbing the fresh, tender leaves and shoots of the last understory growth this plot will see for the chemical future. Herbicide is sprayed liberally to keep wild plants from shading out the industrial timber being cultivated.
Vine maple, willow, and fireweed all signal the brief flash of wilderness trying to come back. The Douglas fir will grow in this, and a forest would naturally evolve in time, but chemical application speeds up growth and guarantees more production for our industrial corporate profits. The cumbersome brush just feeds the deer, and after the herbicide treatment, wildlife stays away from these areas. That makes the sewage spread easier though, so it’s a win win for the farm. Remember, this is an agricultural practice. But I see a lot of brows (could you see it in the picture above?), and I stumble on through the maze of animal trails coiling through the piles of debris. I will applaud industry practices which sifted from burning slash to piling it, to spreading it across the barren soils after the cutting is done. This helps prevent more catastrophic erosion caused by logging. The treated sewage application will reintroduce some of the nutrients lost when the majority of the biomass (tree trunks) harvested in logging, are hauled away. This massive removal of fertility from the soil has to be replaced if more trees are to grow.
As I drove by the freshly fertilized fields, the smell caught my breath, and I rolled up my windows quickly while gagging on what is an horrific stench. It took about a mile of distance to get away from the odor and loud machine work. My overgrown clearcut was alive with other sounds- bird-calls, caking sticks as I stumbled around, and the occasional buzz of insects lazily bombarding through the brush with careless ease while I bumbled along trying to follow the deer trails. I knew I was not going to sneak up on a deer, but I would hopefully get a view of one rising from it’s lay to get away from me, and sure enough, by the time I was well into the center of the field, I could see a flagging tail and occasional bouncing head of a young blacktail doe hopping over the slash with ease as she moved away from my oncoming cacophony. To be clear- because there was no clear view, I was not even thinking about trying to take a shot. This was an exercise in finding the deer and getting them up and moving. Perhaps if I could keep in line with the deer till it popped out onto the road, or came into a clearing, then I might start to think of my options, but the doe quickly disappeared into the thick cover while I stumbled down into a bog with some large bones scattered about. What the?!?
My sudden limited vision and low lying predicament sent a slight sense of caution into my steps. The ground was open, but high walls of earth and brush loomed over me, and the area was littered with elk bones that had been gnawed upon. Scenes from Heart of Darkness came into my mind, and I hastened to get back onto higher ground, and take a look around me to make sure I was not warranting a stalker. But I’m carrying a gun- what am I afraid of? My gun would not catch a cougar with the element of surprise. When these big cats choose to make an ambush, they leap from behind, usually from above, and their long sharp teeth are the perfect width apart to sever the spinal chord. The blacktail sign was gone, and I beat a retreat out of the bog, climbing up the side of one earthen wall. My frantic brain, now in flight mode, pushed me towards a large old growth stump with enough elevation to give me some vision. I scrambled up the decomposed woody mass and surveyed my surroundings. There was not a cougar around that I could see, so I sat still for a long time waiting.
The sky to my east was filling up with darker clouds, and a rain sheet began to obscure the nearby mountains. Weather was coming in, and I didn’t want to be caught in it while scrambling through slash and derbies, so I planned my rout back to the road. Just as I was about to climb back down, I spotted the flag of a familiar tail and watched my doe flitting along about one hundred feet away. It was in the general direction of the road, so I decided to trail her again. Heading east, I used other stumps as landmarks to keep in the right direction. Soon the deer was lost again, but I came upon her bed (pictured below), and other lays in the area, which confirmed to me there were several deer using this clearcut as a bed down zone. That coupled with the tracks and brows all around confirmed this as a deer habitat that could be hunted successfully with some patience and a little luck. However, it was now starting to sprinkle, and I needed to get back to my truck before the downpour began.
The stalk was successful, in that I found a deer with lots of confirmed sign. When it’s not raining, blacktail deer tend to bed down and relax for a while. It’s a great time to go walking through the clear cuts to see what pops up. These industrial timber lands maintain openings in an otherwise impenetrable forest. If there was not so much chemical use, I’d say it’s a great place for deer to thrive, but in recent years, with all the applications going on, the wildlife is starting to disappear from the area. In the 2 weeks of hunting I usually have available, the tree farm is my go to place to seek a deer- but in the last five years, I’ve harvested from my own land or neighbor adjacent with permission. I’ve noticed a shift in the past 10 years of hunting the tree farm. The deer are going away, pushed out by unpalatable chemicals and activity in the area. This problem is not lost on The Snoqualmie Tribe, who recently purchased the northern 20,000 acres of The Snoqualmie Tree Far- which is owned by Campbell Global, an international conglomerate of resource extraction wealth. The tribes tend to continue logging practices, but some of the 20,000 acres is going to the tribe as ancestral land for restoration and traditional use. My hope is they plant native food crops and regenerate the forest for long term climate adaptation. In the end, they will do what they like- as they should, because all this land we’re on is stolen, and giving it back to the people who were following their original instructions like the deer, will have a far better overall impact than colonial greed.
Like the tracks and the lay, chemical sprays and treated sewage leave a mark that, unlike the tracks and lay, the marks of colonial industry will have a lasting cascade of detriment to the environment that will haunt all for generations to come. With the deer becoming far less prevalent in these areas of the tree farm, I worry the effects are compounding faster than science can keep up with. Like climate change, the environmental unraveling in our forests and wild water will come to us in pollutants we may not see, but cancer rates keep going up, and once introduced into the environment, most of these hazards cannot be easily mitigated. I continue to walk the landscape looking for signs. In areas of the tree farm that have not yet seen these applications, there is more wildlife activity, but as soon as the cut and spray begins, the animals shy away, and much of the diversity in vegetation is chemically killed. These practices do not help our habitat for the deer, or ourselves, and if we don’t start changing our own practices, all life will suffer and eventually become extinct. Still, I am grateful for every opportunity to be in the landscape learning from what nature reveals, even when the signatures of man made atrocities scar what’s left of the natural world. I’ll endeavor to connect and be apart of what’s left, while also remembering what was. Thank you deer nation, for continuing to stay present and in your place or origin.
EEC Forest Stewardship 