There aren’t many decisions you have to make that are as challenging as the final decision to pull the trigger and take the life of a living thing. 

Up until the trigger engages the sear and the firing pin speeds toward the primer, everything is negotiable.  You can change your mind, let the animal walk, yield to the overwhelming pressures and second-guesses. The fears and uncertainty are welling to the bursting point.  What if I’m wrong?  What if I wound this animal?  Am I sure it’s legal?  Am I sure it’s safe?  Do I want it bad enough to kill it?  

Maybe it’s not universal, but for many hunters, these are largely subconscious thoughts that occur in the time it takes a finger to travel a fraction of an inch… part of the emotional roller coaster that makes hunting such a powerful experience.  Because once you decide to pull that trigger, all bets are off.  To all intents and purposes, you are a killer.  At this point, even if you miss you made the decision to kill.  There’s no going back on that.

How many other decisions in life carry that kind of weight?  Marriage might be one.  The decision to have a child is another.  These choices are life changing and irrevocable.  Like a bullet, this kind of decision can’t be retracted once it’s made.  Even if you change your mind, the trigger has been pulled.

For me, the decision to pull up stakes and relocate to the Texas Hill Country has fallen into that category.  It has been an extremely hard call to make, and it’s going to entail an awful lot of changes.  Some of these changes are already taking place, and I have no doubt there will be many more that I haven’t even considered yet.  But I’m locked in. Damn the torpedoes…

Over this past weekend, the realization of one such change sank in. 

The B-zone deer season closed on Sunday.  I’ve been so busy with so many things since the August opener, I hadn’t even made time to get out there.  For the first time since I came to California in 1996, it looked like I’d miss the B zone season altogether.  With so much going on, I didn’t think I’d miss it all that much, but early last week I started to really get the itch to get out there at least once.  If nothing else, I could really use a little time in the hills just to regroup in my mind.  I knew just the place to do it… Kokopelli Valley.

This was the jinx-breaker buck. Not big, but my first in CA.

Kokopelli Valley (not its real name… and it is really a canyon, not a valley) is one of those special places.  It’s where I went on my very first CA deer hunt, and where I killed my first blacktail buck.  I went through several years of jinxed hunts, missed shots and blown opportunities before I put that first animal on the ground… all of which led to the naming of the place.  Kokopelli was a trickster and a fertility figure.  He was as likely to steal you blind as to bless you with bounty. 

When I was first introduced to the place, it was on an invitation from my friend, outdoor and gun writer Dave Campbell.  He and Bill Karr, an Editor of Western Outdoor News, were going up, and since I was new to the state they wanted to show me some new country and introduce me to CA deer hunting.  “It’s not going to be like hunting in NC,” Dave warned me.  “We probably won’t see anything.  Some hunters go years without seeing a legal buck.”

Within an hour or so of setting out from the trucks, Dave had a forked horn buck on the ground.  On the way back to the truck, I saw another one.  And by the end of the six-weeks or so of the season that year, I’d seen a couple more and missed a big 4×4.  Either I was really bucking the odds, or this place was something special.  It quickly became my regular haunt, and over the next couple of seasons I could be found parked at the trailhead every weekend.

Kokopelli Valley is where I got Kat into hunting.  In fact, she was with me when we came up with our name for the place.  At sunset, a pine snag on top of the mountain looked exactly like Kokopelli dancing and playing his flute.  I had noticed him the first season I hunted there, and I was thrilled that Kat could see him too.

Over subsequent seasons, we named a bunch of spots and landmarks.  There’s the Quail Tree, right where the trail empties into “Surprise Meadow”.  The tree was so named because there is always a covey of quail that flushes when you’re sneaking along the trail.  At first light, it’s a great way to get the heart thumping.

Surprise Meadow was named for a little forked horn buck that just stepped out in front of me as I was dragging back to camp on closing evening one year.  I was tired and aggravated by a constant stream of hunters who would hike into the canyon, and then hike right back out instead of spending time to actually hunt.  My rifle was slung and my ass was dragging, and when the little buck stepped out we just stared at each other… a little surprised.  When I finally thought to unsling my rifle, the deer realized he had other business to tend to and faded back into the brush. 

There’s Clumsy Kat Crossing, which is a narrow rift where a stream had cut across the trail.  For me, it was a fairly easy stride to step across.  For Kat, however, with her shorter legs, it required a little finesse.  Making that crossing in the dark got comical a time or two.  Fortunately, she wasn’t there the morning I slipped and fell in. 

Clumsy Kat Crossing brought you into Frog Hollow.  On warm afternoons, when you stepped across the crossing a little frog would plop into a pool of standing water.  This little routine lasted until the Trough Fire scorched the place in 2001.  The rains that winter changed the course of the creek, and Frog Hollow and Clumsy Kat Crossing never held water again.  Without the flowing stream, the crossing filled in until it’s barely noticeable as a dip in the trail. 

After the Trough Fire.

The Trough Fire brought a bunch of major changes to Kokopelli Valley.  The whole area is about one mile long, from the trailhead to the boxed end of the canyon.  Running essentially north to south, there are three predominant meadows.  Surprise Meadow is part of the first, and leads into Buck Grunt Bowl and Big Meadow.  Just to the east, separated by a low ridge and a dense thicket of oaks, chemise, and pines is Long Meadow.  At the northern end of Long Meadow was an old homestead, complete with blackberries, figs, grapes, and a small apple orchard.  The apples came ripe at the same time that deer season was fully underway, and the area was loaded with deer and bear sign.  Quail, band-tail pigeons, coyotes, and squirrels were also thick.  And to the east of Long Meadow, separated by a deep crevice and running creek, is a narrow meadow that foots the High Ridge.  Bordering the canyon on the western side is another high ridge, topped by the main road.  From ridge to ridge across the canyon is a shade over 1200 yards.

Prior to the fire, the road only allowed a view into isolated sections of the canyon bottom. Plenty of hunters would park and glass from the road, but what most of them didn’t seem to know was how much they were missing from their comfortable perch.  Because the hillsides were so densely covered, very few hunters ventured over the edge to try to reach the bottom.  To really hunt Kokopelli Valley, you had to go to the trailhead, get out of the vehicle, lace up your boots, and hit the trail.  Huge manzanitas and dense chapparal obscured the road hunters’ vision, and more than once I’ve watched deer feed unmolested, less than 200 yards below the oblivious hunters. 

The fire knocked all of the underbrush down, and opened up the view to anyone who wanted to stop along the road and glass.  Worse yet, the deer were so habituated to moving along their hidden trails that they continued to use the area after the cover was gone, making easy targets for the road hunters.  The impenetrable poison oak and chemise that covered the northern end of the canyon was also gone, and hunters could drop in from either end of the place and push through with relative ease.  For a couple of years after that fire, Kokopelli Valley became a very busy place. 

The fire also burned the Kokopelli tree. A tall stump still stands up there, if you know where to look, but that’s it.  The travelling trickster has travelled on.

The canyon has mostly grown back now, although too much of it is still visible from the road.  On most weekend evenings during the deer season, there are at least two or three trucks pulled over along the turnouts.  At least the north end has grown back enough to discourage extensive foot travel, so most hunters have to walk in the long way, from the trail head. 

One more from Kokopelli Valley

The last few years I’ve only managed to make a small handful of trips back to Kokopelli Valley.  I’d say half the time I made the drive as much for sentimental reasons as to hunt deer.  It’s a special place, at least to me, and as a reward for my loyalty I can honestly say that I have seen deer on every visit.  Often, the deer were all does, or else they were out of range or running.  But always, deer… and that’s saying a lot for public land. 

This past weekend was no different.  I arrived on Friday evening, grabbed my boots and charged into the field as the sky was already darkening.  As I stood glassing from a spot we’d named “Katbird Point”, I was startled by a rustling in the bushes behind me.  I turned, and 10 yards away a small doe was emerging from the thicket.  The poor thing practically turned inside out when she realized she’d almost walked right into me. 

On Saturday morning, I hiked up on the High Ridge to get away from the anticipated crowds.  From the ridge I watched a couple of does moving off to bed. Around 10:00, I saw movement to the north, and after a second to find it in the binoculars, I spotted a really nice 3×3 charging down the ridge, right toward me.  I could tell by the way he was running that he’d been pushed by other hunters, and sure enough, about 100 yards behind him (and oblivious) I could see two guys coming down the middle of the ridge.  As the buck got to about 300 yards, I started looking for a place to set up for a shot.  There was a rock outcropping about 20 yards away, but before I could get to it, the buck jagged off to the west and dove into a crevice.  I watched in disappointed amusement as the deer neatly circled back behind the two hunters, and then crossed the ridge to the safety of deep cover in the chapparal.  The guys had no idea what they’d missed.

I spent the entire day up on top of the ridge, and as the shadows started to stretch across the canyon and the temperatures dropped, I eased back over to the east side of the ridge.  It was already cooler here, and I figured the deer would be moving soon.  From my spot, I watched a hunter with two youngsters eagerly in his tracks.  He was pointing out tracks in the Long Meadow, and led the boys to one of the big oaks that survived the fire.  I kept watching as he circled the end of the meadow and then slowly backtracked to the main trail.  I hoped a deer would come out and give those youngsters some excitement and motivation to keep on hunting, but it never did.  In the last minutes of light as I made my own way back to the trailhead, a large deer stepped out under those same oaks and stood broadside to me at less than 100 yards.  It was too dim to make out antlers against the backdrop of brush, so I could only watch until the deer finally caught my wind and slinked into the shadows. 

At the truck, I debated staying one more night.  I had promised my daughter a horse ride on Sunday afternoon, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay long if I hunted Sunday.  I also knew that there would be a crowd of hunters trying to make the best of the last day of the season.  It had been a great weekend already, and I didn’t want the frustration of a bunch of yahoos.  I broke camp and headed down the mountain toward home.

It didn’t hit me until I was rounding the first curve, maybe a quarter mile from the trailhead, but when it did, it hit me hard.  If things go as planned and I finalize the deal in Texas this fall, I’ll probably be living in the Hill Country by this time next year.  This was, very likely, my last hunt in Kokopelli Valley. 

I had to stop the truck and get out, and I don’t mind admitting that there was a lump in my throat as I raised a glass to Kokopelli Valley, and to the times I’ve spent there over the past 15 years.

Related Posts