My brother and I decided to do the late Whitetail buck hunt this year as we did not manage to fill our tags during the early general season. We had hunted moose in the Huckleberry unit in 2008 (both took younger bulls) and thought it would be fun to revisit that area and get another chance at filling our deer tag. We camped in the same spot as we did on my brother's moose hunt (he hunted in mid November of 08 and I hunted early October but I helped him fill his moose tag). Anyway we arrived in camp early afternoon on Saturday the 12th and got camp set up then went out for a short hunt. We saw some does but no bucks. We hunted hard all week but just did not see many deer. We only saw 5 bucks and only one of them was a legal buck- in this unit it had to have at least 4 points on one side. We had planned to break camp Saturday morning to head back home so Friday was our last day to hunt. We put in about 6 miles on foot Friday afternoon and about 1/2 mile from the truck (parked at a locked gate on a road system) he saw the lone legal buck and was able to make a good one shot kill on the buck at 230 yards. He is the biggest buck either of us has ever taken. I was mighty happy for him. I do not think we will do this hunt again anytime soon though as there just are not enough deer. We talked to several folks who either were locals or had hunted the area for many years and they all said that the deer numbers were really low- over hunting, winter kill from last winter and wolves. One guy in Chewelah at the gas station said 4 wolves had been spotted on a nearby hill close to town on the 12th. We tracked a cougar and tried to call it in but never saw it.
We saw something like 25 moose over the week, almost more moose than we saw deer.
Here is a pic of an owl we saw on one of our hikes and one of my brother with his buck.
