40th Anniversary Feature: A Place in the Hunt
(First published in Sep/Oct 2018)A new baby meant their hunting dynamic had to change, but they refused to leave two-thirds of the family at home
PHOTO: Matthew James Quinton
Editor’s Note: To help celebrate RMEF and Bugle’s 40th anniversary, we reached out to two of this magazine’s longtime editors, Dan Crockett and Don Burgess, to pick some of their favorite hunting stories from the archives for each of the 2024 issues. Dan chose this story, first published in September/October 2018.
by Christine Peterson
The deep bugles were unmistakable from the moment we opened the truck doors. We stood in silence, looking at each other and the heavy fog blanketing the hillside.
More bugles ripped through the damp air, each signaling different bulls with battles to wage.
We donned rain jackets and hats, trying to move as quietly and calmly as possible in the little trailhead parking lot—a dirt patch with just enough room for three or four trucks. It was the third weekend of archery season, hours past dawn, and we couldn’t delay. As my husband Josh and our hunting buddy, Brian, assembled their bows and grabbed their packs, I opened the truck’s back door. I wouldn’t be going with them this year as I had for the past decade. I wouldn’t be trailing behind, listening and cow calling from deep in the trees. I wouldn’t feel my breath catch in my throat with each bugle moving closer and closer.
Instead I wished them luck and unbuckled the newest addition to our hunting weekends—and an elk hunter in training—our 18-month-old daughter.
Miriam and I huddled under the truck’s camper shell and watched as the two men slowly vanished into the fog. As they disappeared, her attention quickly turned to rocks, sticks and Cheerios, bringing my focus back down to her and away from the drama I hoped would soon unfold.
I grew up in Wyoming, but didn’t grow up hunting. Instead of learning the sport from my dad, grandpa or uncle, I went on my first hunt with my husband. He was raised in Lander, in the shadow of the Wind River Range where elk and public land are plentiful.
We merged our lives in the southeast corner of the state where I transitioned from a tag-along to a useful member of the hunting party. He taught me how to cow call. I added another set of ears and eyes to the group.
Then one day, about eight years ago, I tracked a wounded elk for my brother-in-law through the grass and clover. Turns out the boys are color-blind and couldn’t see the tiny drops of red on the green of the forest floor. I earned his brother’s respect that day and realized my usefulness outside of setting up camp.
After that, I rarely stayed behind. I became more a part of the process, and the oddity of me tagging along faded. I also started hunting. First for pheasants and chukars, then turkeys. I applied for an antelope tag that spring during a layover in the Chicago airport. And come elk season, I had my purpose. We hunted as a unit, Josh and I. Other friends and family would come and go, but we stayed a partnership.
Then in 2016, our family grew. Our daughter Miriam was born in July, a couple months early. She wasn’t quite 6 pounds by September 1, too small to camp in the cold Wyoming fall. But our hunting area was four hours away, and I was not going to stay home.
So we rented cabins and bunked with friends. I stayed with her in the mornings and joined for afternoon hunts. She slept cuddled in a chest pack underneath my camouflage coat. It wasn’t the same, but it got us both outside and exposed her to fresh mountain air.
When Josh finally shot his bull during rifle season, our daughter and I spent a week of maternity leave butchering it in the garage. She napped in her pack strapped to me as I trimmed scraps for hamburger off the shoulder, sliced steaks out of the tenderloins and made roasts. She and I would be involved in the process, even if she was asleep for most of it.
This year, Miriam was older. She could camp, nestled in a red sleeping bag with spaceships and stars on the inside. But we still didn’t go on the morning hunts.
It was too risky. Archery elk season in Wyoming is four weekends—eight precious days when you work full-time with limited vacation. She could stay quiet enough on afternoon scouting missions. But those critical hunts, the ones where you leave in the dark and communicate in hand signals, those still weren’t a place for a child transitioning from baby to toddler.
We took her turkey hunting the previous spring. Most of the time, she slept in her blue backpack carrier covered in camouflage. But then one day a tom gobbled, and she responded with a string of gibberish. She was too happy when she talked back to the turkey for me to be annoyed.
Neither my husband nor I got turkeys that spring, and we didn’t care. Knowing she could come with us overruled the desire for 10 pounds of bird meat.
Elk were a different story. We couldn’t risk her innocent sounds spooking one. We wanted elk meat in our freezer.
PHOTO: courtesy Christine Peterson
So that day in September, we waited under the camper shell for the rain to stop. The bugling eventually faded, as did the rain. I wondered if the guys would have any luck.
We’d planned to leave our home (now in the northeast corner of the state) the night before and camp, but the weather forecast called for pouring rain and high winds. Miriam had been playing along with our fall adventures so far, but camping in a deluge with temperatures hovering around freezing seemed like a lot to ask. By the time we arrived at the trailhead, it was already hours past when they should have been in the woods.
Miriam and I went for a walk down the muddy road looking at rocks and sticks and searching for a suitable campsite. Josh and Brian returned after an hour. They recounted a story of sitting on a hillside calling back and forth to elk on the other hill. The bulls called closer, then stopped, then sounded farther away, then stopped. But as they debated if they should go somewhere else, a faint call sounded in the distance.
“You know they’re there,” I told Josh. “Go find them. We’ll be fine here.”
Miriam and I slowly wandered to a clearing in the woods where we could set up camp. Soon she went down for her nap in the tent.
An hour passed, then another. I wanted desperately to know what was going on. Had they shot an elk and were working on packing it out? Had they followed the calls over one ridge and then another, taking them miles from the trailhead? The sun was out now. The fog burned off.
Then from the corner of my eye I saw Josh walking toward camp.
I asked quietly how it went. He raised two fingers. I didn’t get it at first.
“Did you get an elk?” I asked.
He kept his fingers up. “You both got elk?”
“Yep.”
They’d gone past where they were that morning, to the top of a hill and set up near a rock outcropping in a stand of trees that escaped a wildfire years before.
Brian called from behind Josh as two bulls responded back and forth, back and forth.
Then Josh’s bull walked in front of him. He was 15 yards away, and Josh pulled back on his bow. The elk stopped. Josh shot.
Brian kept calling, unaware of the drama unfolding below him. Josh’s elk stumbled about 20 yards and laid down just as another bull came up the hill. Brian shot.
Both elk were down. The hunters waited to be sure they were dead, and then Josh came down to the trucks.
He’d come back to get his frame pack and move the truck closer. He’d also come back for us. Moving two bull elk from the woods down to a vehicle is no simple task. It takes time and strength. And the more help the better.
Miriam didn’t make a sound as we hiked. She watched the trees and looked at the grass, too mesmerized to fuss.
Josh showed us where he waited for his bull, then he pointed to a spot about 150 yards away.
“He’s down there,” he said.
I couldn’t see it yet. We continued ducking under branches and climbing over fallen logs before we popped out on a ridge overlooking the valley floor. The elk’s final resting place had a view.
The bull was stunning. When I’d asked him how big it was, he had just said, “It’s pretty nice.” But it was by far his biggest bull—a massive 6x6 that we would later learn scored over 370. Brian’s bull, a 2- to 3-year-old raghorn that would likely prove more tender, lay about 400 yards down the hill.
I took Miriam off my back, and we set to work. As Josh and Brian peeled back hide and began filling game bags with the meat, I talked to Miriam about what she saw. She was too young to really understand, but it was never too early to begin learning. She touched its hair and antlers. She felt how the antlers were smooth in some places and rough and bumpy in others.
As she lost interest in field dressing, she climbed over rocks and filled and emptied bags with pinecones and sticks.
I loaded her back in her backpack as the elk butchering process completed. We snapped a few photos of the crew, then talked about the logistics of moving hundreds of pounds of meat and a toddler over downfall, up and down ravines and to the truck. Josh hoisted the rack and a game bag on his frame pack. I put Miriam on my back and bear hugged a front quarter in my arms.
Even if I didn’t help call the bull in, I’d help pack it out.
Next year, Miriam will be able to help in her own ways. She will be able to hold a game bag open as we fill it with meat and may even hike up those hills by herself.
I wanted to be with Josh on that hunt. But I also know soon she will be old enough to go too, staying quiet in the woods and learning to listen for twig snaps and elk grunts. Soon she will know what it’s like for her breath to catch in her throat when a deep bugle pierces the air. She’ll recognize the musky scent of bulls in the rut, and she’ll point to tree rubs or elk tracks.
Until then, I’ll stay with her in the lower country where I’ll plant the seeds for what she will soon understand.
Our hunting dynamic changed with a child, no doubt, but it doesn’t mean part of the family stays home. We’re still needed. We’re still a part of the hunt. And one day, her dad and I may be calling in an elk for her.
Christine Peterson is a longtime Bugle contributor who covers wildlife, the outdoors and the environment from her home in Laramie, Wyoming.
