More on the Hunting Trip

(No More Carcass Pictures, I Promise)

You may have noticed a photo of a bear's paw at the top of my last post. Yes, my brother-in-law shot a black bear during our hunting trip. They got one last year, and the meat was smoked and processed into pepperoni and salami. It had a good flavor - not nasty and gamy, which is the reputation of bear meat. So he's doing the same with this year's bear, and  the hams are being smoked as well. We'll see how that turns out!

My sweetie got a four-point whitetail buck. It was a 234-yard shot. He'd been chasing a three-point closer to camp for several days and could never get a good shot at him, so to get a four-point was particularly sweet.

All four guys had deer tags, so one deer split among three families is less venison than we'd hoped to have in our freezers. But we're grateful for what we got! I don't think any of us will go hungry.

I have photos of both animals, but I realize that some folks are squeamish and some find hunting distressing. So I'm not planning to post any of those to my blog or my Facebook page. Let me know if you particularly want to see them.

Before we ever saw the bear, we saw evidence of bears.

Although the weather was mostly gray and rainy, 

the hillsides were lit up with aspen leaves and tamarack needles.

  

There was some orange amidst the green and brown, too.

 I was surprised to see bluebells still blooming so late in the year.

Bluebell bud!

Another bluebell.

And another!

Two on one stem! At dusk! 

Okay, so I got a little bit carried away by the bluebells. Sorry about that. 

Sometimes it spat snow or hail at us. But mostly it rained.

The day after Bill got his deer, we woke up to snow. Time to go home!

By the time we were 15 miles out of camp, we were out of the snow. Still time to go home.