Elk hunt memories replace action

Published 12:49 am Friday, October 26, 2007

This year’s elk hunt in Colorado produced no meat but as usual gave rise to memories that will sustain me until next fall. I have heard of only a few who went west and scored on the big bugling deer, but I’m sure some hereabouts returned with smiles and stories and big taxidermy bills.

I saw not a single bagged elk brought into the little northwestern Colorado town out of which I hunt. I hunted the first rifle season of four that extend into mid-November. I sat all day a week ago with intermittent snow and high winds in a place where I had seen a lot of elk in previous years. This day could only offer huge flocks of sandhill cranes and some all day howling of the big, furry coyotes in the area.

With plenty of time on stand to think, I took comfort in memories of previous hunts. One in particular that came to mind was my brother’s first elk hunt. Ron took his bull just a short 40 miles away from where we braced against the wind and snow last week. It seems more recent but the hunt happened in the 1990s.

The place



I had scouted the remote woods up near Rabbit Ears Pass southeast of Steamboat Springs. Actually I had hunted bulls there during archery and black powder seasons while I lived in Colorado. A forest ranger agreed to leave a gate open for me prior to the season opener so I could carry water to my chosen campsite part of the way by truck. The gate was locked on opening day and we had to pack the remainder of our gear in on our backs.

I had given Ron an introduction to calling elk with a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park where the undisturbed bulls scream and fight and mate in September and early October. When opening day dawned, I headed north along the eastern rim of a giant basin. That day I would find giant aspen trees with trunks as big as whisky barrels chewed down by beavers to form a marsh that was at 9,000 feet elevation.

But before the sun came up, I heard two shots behind me in the direction of our camp. I paid little attention, thinking the shots were probably beyond our tent on a distant road. Surely Ron had not encountered a bull on his very first morning in elk woods. So I hunted the remainder of the day with no more thought of the distant shots.

When I returned to camp I found Ron finishing up the job of skinning out a fine four by five bull. It was in my mental searching for the answer to how he could bag the only bull taken on that mountain that week that it came to me that he is a minister, thus possibly with providential connections that I and others don’t have.



Effortless hunt



Ron didn’t have to move the heavy bull to field dress it because it fell almost within sight of our tent. I, on the other hand, had walked some five miles around the basin. I searched fruitlessly while he strolled casually only yards from our camp, sat down on a log and shot a bull after sounding just one hesitant bugle at the beast.

My only solace was that I had selected the campsite and hunt area and had shown him how to blow an elk caller. I got all the mileage I could from these lame facts.

The hunt did not spoil him however. He believed me that the national average for harvesting an elk is about one every five seasons of diligent hunting. So he now takes his lumps in elk country along with the rest of us. A few years back he was rewarded with a giant eight by seven bull.

But I’ll never forget the day that the most inexperienced elk hunter in the woods dropped the only bull of the day before some of the hunters had finished breakfast.