Every once in a while, I do something stupid. And I get myself, as my British bride might say,

into a spot of trouble. Many years ago, I was on Codiac Island hunting sick of blacktailed deer

with a friend. And I'd shot a buck early in the day and we'd bone them off and put them in

our backpacks the right way. And we're working our way down off. We'd climbed

high that year. And we saw a buck walking along this real sharp edge lip. And my buddy

shooting a new 300 PRC. And it was a nice buck. But of course, the thing he said was,

I'm going to see if I can knock him off that lip he shot

this deer tumbled it we went down and retrieved it and we could see the shoreline below us and it was about

an hour and a half till dark and we thought we can either step here and bone this thing off

and put in our packs and then hike out in the dark or we can just each grab an antler

and run try and get down to that shore by dark.

And so that's what we did.

We were fatigued and we made a bad decision because we hit the bottom when we got into

a world-class alder scrub patch mixed with that swampy underfoot terrain that only Alaska provides, right, for us

adventurers. And it got dark on us and it caught us in there. And we were stuck,

dragging 70 pound packs plus a deer, crawling on our hands and knees through prime brown

pear habitat for about two hours before we found the coastline. It's one of those

situations where you get so tired that you just stop making good decisions and you don't

recognize when you really should stop and do something else. Well, I had a good rifle. I had a

375 H&H with a controlled feed action with me, but the barrel was a little long for the alder country.

And dragging it through that muddy terrain and the alders and so forth, I kept feeling like I wish I had something handier.

And today, we're here to look at something handier.

...