Closing out November; getting ready to head home.

Tomorrow is the last day of November, and Faith and I are in Seattle for an Avastin infusion tomorrow. This morning we were in Fort Benton, Montana, after celebrating Thanksgiving on Friday with our grand friends Laurie, Jack, Bentley and Johnna. The delayed Thanksgiving dinner plan turned out to be a really good one, when Erin harvested her mule deer buck on Thursday afternoon -- a really nice one, I might add! Here they are, after we got it back to camp and hung it from the tripod. I took a "B" tag doe the day before, to go with the doe I took in South Dakota and the buck I took earlier in November. This has been a grand hunting trip, and not taking an elk or antelope is just part of the events. We all have plenty of meat now -- Erin, Heather and Faith and I -- and we had a wonderful time at various points and events. Erin and Heather got a good break from southern California, where they live, work, play, teach and learn...and Faith came here from a professional conference where she was honored with a national Forest Service award!

Tomorrow, after my various medical events, Faith and I will return to Missoula, MT. She will be there for one more day, and I will stay butcher, grind, vacuum-seal and freeze the two remaining deer at the home of our great friends Orville and Olleka -- who have provided me far more help than I can ever describe -- then head for Bellingham for Friday afternoon's rendevous with the AMHS ferry headed back to Ketchikan. This has been a great seven weeks, though I should probably apologize for not reporting events all that regularly during my adventures. I feel ever so much better than I did in October when I headed south, both physically and emotionally. Now being home in Alaska will be wonderful too, and I will continue to improve my health.

Thanks again for all your help and support...

Dennis and Faith

It's been a good while...in a good way...

It's been a couple of weeks since I've entered a report -- but it's been a couple of very good weeks. As I noted the last time, I'm in Montana and points east and west for a few weeks, visiting friends and mostly hunting. Weather has been largely very good here, despite heavy snow further south in Wyoming and Colorado. My health has been very good, relatively speaking, of course. The Avastin-Every-Other-Monday event is going well -- I've made two flights from Missoula to Seattle and back, and if anything they're quicker and cheaper than flying from Ketchikan. Planes aren't as big, though... Temodar is a bit of a different story, since I have been really feeling it now when I take it. Fortunately, it's only five days out of 28, so I can move past it and get over it. By about day four, my appetite is gone and it's hard to eat. By about two days past day five, I'm back into the eating business.

Hunting, both alone and with friends, as been great fun. Some things, like trying to find an antelope during the one snowfall I encountered, proved to be pretty unlikely to happen. It was great fun on my friend's ranches, but no meat came out with me. Deer hunting, however, has turned out very nice indeed, in part because the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks has a very hard-working and very nice set of people working to re-assign tags that are turned in because people are unable to use them. I had been only able to buy a "B" (doe) tag for mule deer, until Monday, November 2nd. Then they made available some leftover deer-elk combination licenses that had been returned to them, let me know, and put one aside for me to come to Helena to get -- because, you see, when they let me know on Monday, I was in Seattle getting an Avastin infusion! Monday night I flew back to Missoula, Tuesday morning I drove through Helena on my way to my hunting area near Ft. Benton, and Wednesday morning...

Not the biggest mule deer buck I've ever killed (though it's plenty big enough), but might be one of my biggest celebrations. It's hard to describe how good I felt, having come through my needed treatments through the summer and made it back to my life well enough to go out by myself and begin filling my freezer for the winter. I have some hunting trips to go, including an elk hunt with some good friends; a visit to South Dakota that will be grand; and a trip here from my daughter Erin for her hunt near Ft. Belton. We'll end up with Heather and Faith joining us there for a few days to conclude my venture to the Lower 48 and celebrate Thanksgiving and our anniversary. So far my trek has been wonderful, and I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks!

Hope your month goes well too...

Dennis & Faith