Try Him Again
Anyone who has ever estimated the distance to an unseen bugling bull knows how deceptive that sound is. He can seem to be a quarter of a mile out then appear 40 yards away, looking right at you.
PHOTO: victorschendelphotography.com
by Chris Madson
We drove the last mile in four-low, easing over the half-buried boulders in what passed for a two-track, through the creek and up the other side to the wide spot at the end. No conversation, even among two good friends. We’d already spent two long days in the black timber and meadows—dawn-to-dark, 20-mile days with a few fresh tracks, a few clusters of fresh green droppings...but no hair. There isn’t much left to say, I thought as I drove. It was time to ditch the disappointment, clean the slate and be ready to take what the day had to give. Tim, I figured, was going through his own version of the same silent exercise.
I killed the engine and turned off the lights. Out east over the mountains, the stars were dimming, but under the trees, it was black as the inside of a cave. We both switched on our headlamps, climbed out, uncased the rifles, retrieved the daypacks from the back and headed into the timber.
There were no trails in this wilderness—when it was designated Situation I grizzly habitat 40 years ago, the Forest Service managers quit maintaining the trails, adopting the unwritten policy that, while they wouldn’t close the area to the public, there was no reason to encourage fraternization between people and bears. The USGS map showed drainages flowing three different directions out of the area, uncrossable marshes and a scattering of meadows that all looked identical. It was a good place to get turned around.
The first mile we had to cover cut through a featureless stand of old lodgepole, without the slightest navigational cue, especially in the dark. I had the compass out, heading as close to due west as I could through the deadfall and snowberry, already in hunting mode, feeling the ground under the soles of my boots, going slow and quiet. Tim, a deeply experienced elk hunter in his own right, followed like a whisper.
I’d told him about this elk camp—a collection of exceptional participants, all of them competent in wild places and more than willing to shoulder their share of the load. The founder of the camp had a horse trailer and tack, so we all shared the rental on a couple of mountain horses to help pack elk quarters. And the little cabin sat in the exact center of some spectacular country—untrammeled forest, meadows and marshes, basalt rimrock winding through the trees and one of the West’s great mountain ranges serrating the horizon. Best of all, it demanded more effort than most hunters were willing to invest, especially since there were surprisingly few elk. We had it mostly to ourselves.
Tim had asked for an invitation, which the rest of us were happy to provide. He laid down the money for a nonresident tag and showed up on the porch the afternoon before the opener saying that he was looking for something big. A lot of hunters say that on the day before the opener then change their minds as reality sets in, but Tim was a born Westerner with 40 years in the elk woods. If he said he wanted something big, I could take him at his word, and since I was looking for prime meat, not antlers, there was no reason we couldn’t hunt together.
The first gray light of dawn had filtered into the trees as we stepped out onto the low bluff overlooking Stony Lake. A white mist hung low over the sedge meadow around the lake, and as we watched, the first sun of morning broke over the treetops from the east, touching the mist and turning it seashell pink before it began to lift.
It was my tradition to start the morning with a bugle from the top of this bluff. I knew Tim was a wizard with the call, so I leaned over to him and whispered, “Why don’t you give it a try from here?”
He pulled the bugle tube out of his pack, wetted the reed and let fly. A bright, cloudless morning, not a hint of breeze, at the edge of an opening away from the dense timber—I figured the call would reach half a mile or more. After the first series, we held our breaths and listened hard for more than a minute. Nothing.
“Again,” I whispered.
Another wail from the call. We listened...and far, far away, a ghostly squeal came back to us over the treetops.
“He’s a long way off,” Tim whispered.
“Yeah. I think we ought to get to the other side of the meadow. Maybe meet him halfway.”
Tim nodded.
We hustled down through the alder at the edge of the meadow and waded through the heavy sedge, the dense peat that passed for solid ground oddly soft and uncertain under our feet. Finally, we entered the timber on the far side.
“Try him again.”
Tim got on the call, and we listened again. Nothing. Nothing. Then, just the hint of a high note, almost swallowed by the silence.
“He’s moving away,” Tim whispered.
My heart sank. Long, hard experience had convinced me that I will never catch up with an elk steadily walking away. Not spooked, not running, just walking. Four legs beat two legs just about every time. Still, there was a chance, just a chance...
“Well, let’s see if we can make up some ground on him.”
We headed east over the rise on the far side of the meadow, around the head of the creek and up onto the next ridgetop, going as fast as we could with daypacks and rifles, knowing there was always the possibility the bull could change his mind and come back, in which case he would certainly see us moving before we saw him. Elk are good at that kind of thing. Better than we are. We stopped on the brink of the basalt rim towering above Horse Creek, another spot that promised particularly good acoustics.
Tim unslung the bugle and delivered a particularly convincing challenge, complete with an excellent series of descending grunts at the end. After the call, he picked up a stick and beat the shrubbery to imitate a frustrated bull sparring with the vegetation. Then we listened. And listened. Finally, grudgingly, the bull answered.
Anyone who has ever tried to estimate the range to an unseen bugling bull knows how deceptive that sound is. He can seem to be a quarter of a mile out then appear 40 yards away, looking right at you. He seemed closer than he had been at first light; that was all I could say. Tim waited another minute and responded. The bull replied instantly but farther away.
“He’s got cows with him,” Tim whispered. “He’s not gonna come back for a fight.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I dunno. I guess this is a lot better than anything else we’ve had in the last three days.”
“Agreed. Let’s get after him.”
We headed west along the rim to a spot where it crumbled into the valley below, the hexagonal columns broken into pieces roughly half the size of my house. No sensible person would have crossed that jumble of boulders, but we thought we had a line on the bull and didn’t want to lose it. I cross-slung my rifle to free both hands and scrambled across, Tim right behind me. When we got to the ridgetop on the far side of the boulder field, I thought it was time to call again.
“Tim, let me try.” He was using one of the biggest calls on the market. When he blew it, he sounded like the bull of the woods, a seven-point bruiser that would kick the tar out of any upstart stupid enough to challenge him. It was a good call for luring a trophy bull.
The bugle I carried was the exact opposite, the smallest call I could find. It sounded like a pimply faced teenager whose hormones had gotten the better of him. I figured no self-respecting bull would let a squeak from a beginner go unchallenged. Maybe that would turn the bull we were chasing.
“Give it a shot,” Tim whispered.
I did. It was a good squeal, and I added a couple of tenor grunts at the end. We listened. Finally, down the ridge on the valley bottom, an answer, but no closer than the bull had been before. So much for shifting our identity, I thought.
We headed that way, hurrying while we scanned the timber ahead. This is not a good way to get a shot, I thought as we walked. We’re making more noise than we should, and it’s hard to pick up motion when we’re moving ourselves. Still, the bull was moving away. We were four hours into the chase, and he was still calling all the shots. But there was really no choice. We headed down into the valley. Forty minutes later, we had made our way into an aspen stand on the valley floor, a long sedge meadow to our left and a steep spur of the ridge no more than 80 yards to our right.
“We could use another mark on him,” I whispered to Tim. “Try him again.”
Tim bugled. An immediate answer thundered from just out of sight around the spur. Tim unslung his rifle and looked desperately for a rest. He motioned to a downed aspen in front of us and whispered, “Use that tree. If there’s a cow with him, let me take the bull first?”
He’d apparently grown weary of the loud-mouthed opponent who’d been trailing him all morning and was ready to run him off.
“Sure. Get down.”
We both took rests on the dead aspen, and Tim cow called. The response came instantly, and not five seconds later, the bull appeared at the base of the ridge, on the sunny side of 50 yards away. He’d apparently grown weary of the loud-mouthed opponent who’d been trailing him all morning and was ready to run him off. Two cows stepped out, one of them screened by deep grass and deadfall, the other in the clear. I let the crosshairs of my .270 settle on the neck of that cow and waited.
When the shot came, three things happened at once. The bull collapsed; the two cows spun to escape…and the aspen under my rifle bucked with the recoil from Tim’s .300 magnum. When the scope settled, the cows were gone.
I looked over at Tim. He was grinning from ear to ear.
The elk are a part of the whole, the reason for the rest, but just a part. The antlers are monument to a memory; the hunt is the trophy.
“That was something! That was something! Wasn’t that something?” he said to no one in particular.
“Something alright,” I replied a little sourly, still thinking about the cow that got away. But then, I looked over to the spot where the bull had stood. The grass under the aspen was easily three feet high and thick, but I could see two points of a rack above the grass tops. The image of the bull came back to me, striding toward us, head up, antlers laid down his back, ready for a fight.
“Yeah, that was something!” I admitted.
We walked over to him. The tan flank was crusted with mud, and the musky cologne of a bull in rut rose off him. Beams nearly as thick as my wrists; six points on each side, the last one two feet long and white as polished ivory.
“You said you were holding out for something big,” I said to Tim with a grin.
“The biggest I’ve ever killed,” he said. The smile was gone and there was a look of admiration, almost reverence, on his face.
I wouldn’t hazard a guess on how that rack might have scored. I imagine there were bigger bulls taken in the Rockies that year, and there’s a good chance not even they would have measured up to the size of the best racks from the privately managed areas in Arizona or Utah.
But there are other ways to take the measure of a bull. The antlers on Tim’s wall represent a wild adversary at the peak of his power and intelligence, the essence of the wild and beautiful place that produced him, as well as the effort and judgment required to catch up with him. Judged by that standard alone, Tim’s bull was a world-beater.
When I think of that day—and I think of it often—the sight of those antler tips over the grass seems like a period at the end of the story. Well, maybe an exclamation point. The plot unwinds in the hours and even days before—the chill blackness at the very beginning, the alchemy in the mist over the lake at sun-up, the feel of the meadow underfoot, the scent of warm lodgepole in the morning sun, the view of an untouched expanse of wilderness from the top of the rim. The high note of a bugle at the very edge of hearing, there for half a second, then gone as if it had never been. The parts so often left untold, where the heart of the story lies. Over 40 years in the elk timber, I’ve come to realize those are the threads that linger. The elk are a part of the whole, the reason for the rest, but just a part. The antlers are monument to a memory; the hunt is the trophy.
When he’s not hunting, Chris Madson writes on wildlife conservation and the environment from his home in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
