Ninety Years Old and the Old Fire Burns
After a hiatus of a couple decades, it was time to hunt together again. The roles had reversed. I was gun-bearer and Dad had the tag in his wallet.
by Ben Long
The author's father, Roger Long with a bull he took in 2018 at age 84. PHOTO: Mike Beiser
Once, 30 years ago and not long after we got married, my wife Karen asked me if I thought I would ever get tired of this hunting business, if I would outgrow it.
“Hmm,” I said. “That is a question you should ask my dad.”
In 2024, my dad turned 90. This morning, he set the alarm, and it went off well before light. We dressed in our wool pants with suspenders, brewed a pot of coffee and smiled like a pair of schoolboys playing hooky.
So if nothing else, the answer to Karen’s questions remains, “Not yet.”
Dad and I walk out of the house and under a clear sky full of stars and a moon full enough to steal horses by. The ground is frosted but not frozen. Steam from our breath rises thick enough to tell us where the slight morning breeze is blowing. We walk into the shop, past the tool bench and table saw, past the elk and moose antlers on the walls, to fetch Dad’s Browning .30-06 autoloader, a rifle he bought for $150 in 1972, when I was 5.
The setting is my parents’ farm in northern Idaho on the eastern edge of the Palouse prairie. The Palouse is known for its rolling hills of cultivated wheat fields, but our corner of it blends into evergreen forests and lumpy mountains rising to 5,000 feet above sea level. The farm covers 160 acres, a quarter section of land that includes a pond, pasture, woodlots and fields cultivated with high-quality timothy hay that is dried, pressed and shipped overseas to feed racehorses in places like Saudi Arabia.
But it turns out elk like that hay just as much as do the Sheiks’ thoroughbreds.
Dad and I have a history of elk and elk hunting that goes back a half-century. Though he was a college professor, he believed schooling should never get in the way of my education. Provided my grades were good enough, every fall he sprung me from school for a few days at elk camp.
Dad took me on my first backpack hunt into the mountains of the Idaho Panhandle in September of 1977 when I was 9 and he was 34. That trip, we shot a grouse, slept in a little pup tent and watched a grand six-point bull elk casually stride across a rugged mountainside. The hook was set. Even sometimes during those strained teenage years, it felt like the only thing we held in common was our shared passion for elk. There were deer, bears and upland birds too, but elk were elk.
In those days, Dad and I spent October weekends camped at timberline, sometimes enduring storms and waking up to find our entire supply of water frozen solid. Nights sometimes crawling on all fours, struggling for traction on ice-covered mountain trails, packing out loads of meat and antlers by flickering flashlights.
This continued throughout my college years and my early professional years. In my mid-20s, my career took me out of the Gem State and next door into Montana. Separated by a state line and hundreds of miles, we kept hunting but rarely together. We swapped stories every fall and when we got together on holidays. If either of us got an elk, we heard about it over the telephone lines.
But now, after a hiatus of a couple decades, it was time to hunt together again. The roles had reversed. I was gun-bearer for him and Dad had the tag in his wallet. Where he once sacrificed his own success to have me along, I was happy to play the supporting role, with no tag but with a saw, rope and knife in my backpack.
So we step into the night. Farm dogs bark and coyotes howl back in response, trading insults over that ancient boundary between the wild and the domestic. This morning, we lean toward the wild.
At this little farm, my dad channels his inner Aldo Leopold, cutting firewood, fighting weeds, watching the migrating flocks of waterfowl. Going into winter, his store of cordwood would make anyone proud. It’s an active life, one that has kept his 6-foot 2, 190-pound body active and his brain sharp. I’ve never heard him gripe of a backache.
“I don’t get out of breath and my heart doesn’t beat too fast,” he said. “But I do get tired.”
Still, 90 is 90. Nine-tenths of a century. Decades past the average lifespan.
“I’m not old,” he jokes. “I’m ancient. Turning 60, 70, even 80, didn’t really phase me. But 90! It just seems impossible.”
Truth be told, I’m not entirely comfortable encouraging this elk-hunting escapade. Perhaps venturing out in the moonlight carrying a rifle down old logging roads is beyond common sense at age 90.
After all, it doesn’t take much. In 2023, just after hunting season, Dad injured himself changing a tire, limping in agony on a broken hip for three weeks before a doctor finally ordered a proper X-ray to accurately diagnose the problem. He scheduled a hip replacement surgery. Watching him learn to stand again alongside his hospital bed, I honestly wondered if he would ever again walk farther than to the mailbox. Let alone hunt elk.
Maybe it is wisest to let those days go by. Maybe this is a stunt that could go wrong. Maybe we should just be content with our memories.
But elk are adaptable, and we’ve had to adapt as well. While we used to hunt backcountry elk, now we hunt backyard elk.
The animals have adapted to the farm country of the Palouse, eating winter wheat and chickpeas and spending their days hiding in dense woodlots of second-growth fir. While Episodic Hemorrhagic Disease outbreaks have crippled the local white-tailed deer herd, elk numbers remain strong. Dad keeps a spotting scope in the living room and keeps an eye on the elk on his land and that of his neighbors.
The hunting here is more like hunting whitetails than what one might imagine western elk hunting to be like. Land is small farms and woodlots. It’s no wilderness, instead having gravel roads, cultivated fields, logged-over forests and jungle-dense second growth. While elk enjoy strong local support, they also can cause hardships for farmers when their numbers get too large or their feeding too concentrated. Having 100 elk—70,000 pounds of plant-eating animals—feeding on and tromping all over spring crops can pose a serious problem.
These elk are largely nocturnal and operate like whitetails if whitetails weighed 700 pounds and ran in herds by the dozen. They feed by night in cultivated crops and bed by day in dense thickets. When spooked, they torpedo into impenetrable cover to wait for sundown before returning to a farmer’s field, just as elk in the backcountry might rocket off to another mountain range.
Unlike our old days hunting the St. Joe or Clearwater River country, there are no mountains to climb here, no multi-day pack-outs. If we do luck into a bull, it’s likely we can drive a tractor to it and hoist it with the bucket.
So our hunt begins with a predawn walk via headlamp across the edge of the hay field. A great grey owl hoots steadily from a nearby woodlot. We walked about a half mile on the fence-line toward the northeast corner of my parent’s property.
Their land is laid out in a rectangular block of hay ground with a pond in the center. Two neighbors have similar stubble rimmed with trees with a pond and fallow parcels to the north. As we cross northward into the neighbor’s property, the stubble field changes abruptly to second-growth timber and a maze of logging roads. The terrain continues into a broad ravine with a creek at the bottom of it, meandering through an open pasture a couple hundred yards across and a mile or so long.
We have permission to hunt the private land to the creek bottom. We can expect to share it with the neighbors, but otherwise have it to ourselves. Beyond the ravine, the forest is owned by a local timber company. It’s open to public hunting and gets plenty of pressure even midweek.
The rut has lulled by late October, so the elk have little on their minds except eating, drinking and hiding. While Idaho Fish & Game does issue some cow tags in this unit by special drawing, Dad just has an over-the-counter tag good for any antlered bull. I’ve never known Dad to decline a legal shot at an elk, as if passing up an elk is some sign of lack of gratitude. Any elk is a good elk in his book.
As we pick our way around the edge of the timothy field, we are still a half hour from shooting light.
“We can walk without the headlamps,” Dad says. “I can see OK by the moon.”
Ok, I think to myself, if you say so. Privately I wonder if I’ll have cell coverage if he goes down with a broken hip, much less get an ambulance to him. I might just have to retrieve him with the tractor bucket. But Dad’s quite confidence leads us into the darkness as we walk carefully along.
The stars have only just begun to fade. Porchlights glow from farmhouses miles away.
From somewhere in the dark, a cow elk’s chirp, followed by another, and then a chorus of restless elk, brings me to a halt. I reach forward and tap my dad’s arm. I can tell from his arched eyebrows that he can hear them too. He points toward the sound. They are not far.
I’ll be damned, I think. We found ‘em. Now we just have to somehow stay hidden until shooting light.
Dad slips a round into the chamber, as slick and quiet as you please, and double checks the safety. A half hour before shooting light, a full hour before sunrise. We stand still and wait for light, listening to the cervid conversation of mews and yelps.
Dad remembers when few hunters used a pair of binoculars, and he considers them a new-fangled contraption. He has never adopted them into his kit. But I have a pair. They magnify the tiny amount of available light. Pointing them toward the sound, I can make out the greyest forms in the gloom, where the field meets the trees. I squint at the blobs. The blobs move.
“I can see at least three,” I whisper. Three turns into six and then a dozen. It’s too dark to see antlers, but a few of the elk are a shade lighter than the dull grey of the cows and calves, suggesting a mixed herd.
The elk are 250-300 yards away. In our eagerness, we arrived a bit early.
So we get down to wait and perhaps set up for a shot. But getting down isn’t as easy for Dad as it used to be. Gradually, muffling his usual moans and groans, we settle down and watch. Ten minutes pass and I watch the herd filter into the trees and out of reach. Perhaps they heard us chamber that round. Perhaps we made too much commotion settling on the ground. Either way there will be no chance for a shot here. It’s not light yet.
“They will be headed for the creek,” Dad says. “They’ll have to cross the open. We can meet them there and maybe get a shot.”
“Lezzgo.”
Dad picks up the pace, walking quicky through the stubble on his long legs. The path disappears into the timber and a maze of logging roads and ponds. It’s getting lighter by the moment and it’s now officially legal to shoot. We could bump into an elk anywhere in there.
“Psst,” I whisper. “Do you want to take a moment and catch your breath?”
“Am I huffing and puffing?” he says.
“No,” I answer.
“Ok then.” And we trot off with an appointment to keep.
We drop into the timber. I keep pulling back, going slow to pick the woods apart with my binoculars. But Dad presses forward. He’s got a hunch where the herd is going and wants to get there posthaste.
The logging road snakes its way to a brushy ravine. We pause at the edge of a scrubby clearcut, logged maybe five years before and now growing back with shrubs and young second-growth larch and fir. I scan the edge of the cutting unit, and see the herd edging into the opening, maybe 500 yards away.
“I’ve got ‘em,” I say, pointing out where the herd is coming into view. There are more elk than I expected. I count to 30.
“They don’t have any idea we’re here” I say. “But that’s a lot of eyes and ears. I can’t make out any antlers in this light.”
“That many elk and there has to be at least one bull in the herd,” Dad whispered back. I agree but keep trying to confirm that hunch with my binoculars.
The herd is strung out across the brushy slope roughly a quarter mile away. One cow, and then a few others, cross the cutting unit well beyond rifle range, disappearing into the timber. At first, it appears the rest of the herd will follow and stay beyond Dad’s comfortable shooting range. Then a cow begins to angle toward us.
That cow leads a small contingent on a lower angle, more to our favor. The bulk of the herd, presumably with the bulls, remains milling around, perhaps 300 yards away, but following like ball bearings going down a funnel.
“They are on their way,” I whisper. “They are coming right toward us.”
Dad responds by leaning against a fir tree to rest his rifle and eyes the elk in 4x Weaver scope. One, two, three cows cross within 100 yards.
“Those two are close enough,” he whispers.
Dad knows as well as I do that the elk will flow like a river down the slope in front of us. There will be spike bulls and raghorns distributed among the cows and calves, and any mature bulls will come last.
This is coming together, I think, my own pulse beginning to drum harder. This might just work.
The elk are not in any hurry. I notice Dad’s shoulders shaking. Bull fever is still a force. But with a steady rest, a good rifle and 60 years of elk hunting experience, I bet on Dad. We only need one of the bulls to step into the crosshairs.
It strikes me: 50 years into this and we’re having one of the most exciting elk encounters of our lives.
A few more cows filter through. Each passing cow draws the legal bulls past us. Just. A. Few. More.
But then, boom. We both are startled. A rifle fires a short distance to the north, on the corporate timber ground. Another hunter, unknown to us, is nearby. They evidently shot at one of the cows that slipped past us. The elk freeze a moment and mill around, confused. Heads up.
The elk don’t flee. There is no desperate herd panic. But they don’t proceed toward us anymore. All we can do is watch them filter away, crossing over the horizon. Once they are skylined we can easily make out the antlers of spikes, raghorns and at least one massive mature bull.
Against the pale blue horizon, the elk pause and look back, reminding me of war ponies surrounding a wagon train in an old western movie. We watch them file over the hill and disappear. We shake our heads and laugh a little.
I watch through the binoculars as two other hunters emerge from the trees and approach a downed cow on the far side of the creek. We can hear their happy, back-slapping chatter.
“Well,” Dad says philosophically, “I have had my fair share of bulls over the years,”.
“True enough,” I reply, “but it would have been fun to get lucky.”
We walk back to the house where I will fry eggs and bacon while we review our day and plan for the next morning’s hunt. Unlucky? It’s all how you look at it. Some might say our luck fell short that morning. But really? At 90, every day is good fortune. Most of the hunting companions from our old times are no longer living, let alone still out after these grandest of big game animals. What percentage of 90-year-olds are hunting elk on this glorious October day? Who could be luckier than us?
Ben Long is a Montana conservationist and longtime contributor to Bugle. He can be found on Instagram at BenLong1967 and at conservationforthewin.org.
