After three hours of horseback riding from base camp, switchbacking up skinny trails slickened with mud and fresh-fallen snow, we reached our destination—the rim of a mountaintop 12,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies. Tying the horses to spruce trees, we hiked up to the edge of the ridge and looked out across the endless layers of mountains and valleys below. You could see for miles through the clear, thin air. But soon enough we pulled our eyes from the panoramic vista and peered down into the dark, blowdown-infested canyon below—our hunting grounds. This was the first of a series of cavernous spruce basins Wayne Carlton planned to bugle into with his diaphragm elk call, to try to find a bull we could entice into range of my blackpowder rifle.
    Catching his breath, Wayne leaned forward and let out a tremendous, three-note bugle, starting with a deep roar, blending into a loud, clear note, followed by a high, shrill whistle. The imitation was so realistic it was eerie. And that wasn't my opinion alone. From deep in the black canyon below, an elk responded to the call with a sharp, piercing bugle only seconds after Wayne had finished his rendition.
    It would be an arduous task to get to this bull. Between us lay steep, snowy, slippery slopes laced with spruce blowdowns and jagged rocks. But elk crave rough cover and isolation from man. Wayne had a hunch that after three weeks of hunting pressure, this is where the bulls would have sought safety—the darkest, most heavily timbered basins they could find, far from humanity.
    Using normal elk hunting methods of stalking or still-hunting would have made the task of getting within muzzleloader range of a trophy bull all but impossible on this heavily hunted public land. But the early timing of blackpowder season did offer us one major advantage: the second week of September, when it began, coincided with the beginning of the rut. Bulls were starting to gather their harems and proclaim their territory by bugling. Because of this, the males were responding to challenge calls from other elk—and to hunters who could blow a call sweetly enough to sound exactly like an elk.
    That's where my chances on this hunt seemed particularly bright because Wayne Carlton, my partner on the trip, happened to be one of the finest elk buglers in the country. Wayne first visited the West from his home in Florida on a hunting trip 13 years ago.