by Keith Leatherwood
May 31, 2002

On December 18, the Blunts Reef buoy off Cape Mendocino was registering 8 feet of swell every 17 seconds, with light East winds. I hiked out down the coast at dawn with Spencer and Rudy, my dog. We were trying to surf one of the more remote reefs around that I’d only experienced on a few smaller days.

We reached the coast about 400 yards south of our goal. The tide was going out, but still so high that the beach was disappearing for a few minutes whenever a set of waves came in.

Sitting atop the bluff, fifty feet above sea level, we scanned a calm sea at the base of the tall cliffs to our North.

Spencer was the first to see the deer. A thousand feet to our North, a large buck had slid down five hundred feet of near vertical cliff, too steep for any human. Now he was alternately swimming fast and running when he felt the ground beneath him. He closed the gap between us quickly, charging through the whitewater the way a horse will. I could see his nostrils flaring, then hear him panting as he drew closer. Rudy stepped to the edge of the bluff to look over but made no sound.

The buck froze at the base of the bluff where we sat, just across a small creek. I could see he was magnificent, with nine points on his antlers and a face that was masked with gray like an old dog. His big chest was heaving. He lifted his nose and I heard him take three big sniffs.

He must have got a whiff of us, or maybe he was still running scared from whatever had sent him down that cliff in the first place, because he turned and ran straight into the ocean, swimming at a steady pace straight out to sea.

A quarter mile out he started to circle back to the North. By this time, all we could see was his rack sticking out above the surface. I wondered out loud if he was about to be shark food. He began circling back toward shore, aiming roughly towards the spot he’d come down the cliff some twenty minutes earlier.

Up until this time, the ocean had remained smooth. As the deer approached the steep, rocky shore a large set wrinkled the horizon. The biggest swell so far that morning passed under the deer when he was less than fifty yards from the “beach,” and exploded all of it’s energy directly against the base of the cliff.

The deer swam faster as he neared the steep shore. The next wave picked him up two feet higher than the first. I stood and cheered him on as he nearly caught it, then was surged up the rocks, just at the base of the cliff. We saw him get his footing for a second as thousands of gallons of water sucked him backwards, somersaulting down the steep rolling cobblestones, just into the trough of the third twelve foot wave. The wave sucked him up and dashed him against, then under a big overhanging boulder. I briefly saw his hooves come thrashing above the surface, then nothing.

There were five more waves in the set. Each smashed with great force against the rocks, as we scrambled north and up, trying for a better vantage. I felt bad, like maybe we’d got that old buck killed just by being there, but after the eighth wave, the water receded and there he was, wedged way up between the boulders. He limped a little when he came out, but he slowly made his way a hundred feet or so up to some bushes and disappeared from our sight.

I thought about that old buck a lot on the way home. The next day, when I went in to MRC to talk about the reforestation program, I told them this story and they hired me to plant trees in the Mattole. I think they liked the story.



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Table of Contents for Mattole Restoration Newsletter, Issue 18 - Summer/Fall 2002