The first time Florida turkey hunter Wayne Carlton heard an elk bugle was during a 1973 deer hunting trip near Craig, Colorado: The eerie high-pitched squeal instantly reminded him of part of the kee-kee run turkey call. Using a diaphragm mouth caller, Carlton had used the kee-kee run many times while trying to lure gobblers in the South. He was confident that, with practice, he could learn to imitate a bull elk's bugle with the same method.
    In 1976, Carlton moved to Montrose, Colorado, and started a pest control business. The next spring he took a break from spraying cockroaches and chasing skunks from under houses to hunt turkeys on Log Hill Mesa near Montrose. He didn't find any gobblers, but he did spook two spike elk and four cows, which started running up a hillside. Carlton quickly pulled a rubber coin purse from his pocket, selected a double-reed mouth caller, popped it into his mouth and squealed. The elk stopped and one of the spikes bugled. "That little incident got me all fired up," Wayne told me while I was hunting elk with him last fall. "I figured that if I could get a bull to respond in the spring, I could surely call him in close during September."
    In Colorado , the peak of the rut, or their breeding season when elk bugle, usually occurs in late September before rifle season opens. Only archery and muzzleloader hunting seasons are normally open in September, so hunters using primitive weapons generally have the best opportunity to call a bull within shooting range.
    Carlton 's first chance took place during an archery hunt with Greg Pink, the Montrose County sanitarian. Using a coiled gaspipe bugle, Pink had been exchanging challenges with a small bull that had four points on one antler and five points on the other. After half an hour of bugling, the elk finally walked away and disappeared into some timber. It was evidently unconvinced that Pink's calling was genuine. Pink shrugged. Wayne took that as a signal to experiment with his diaphragm. He'd been practicing during the summer, so he took a deep breath and tried his best to sound like the bull. The moment he finished that first bugle, a big six-point bull came charging like a racehorse down the hill and dropped out of view in a ravine.
    "I saw a little quaking aspen shake and, at first, I thought the wind was blowing it," Carlton recalled. "But then it dawned on me: There wasn't any wind. The elk was beating up that little tree. The aspen was about 30 yards from me on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. I didn't know at the time that I could have called the bull right over the fence, so I tried to stalk him. I got within about 15 yards when he detected me. That old bull threw up his head and ran past Greg and stopped broadside about 20 yards from him. Greg missed. But we didn't care. We were just happy to find out my mouth call worked on elk. To see a great big animal like that come in close was pretty exciting for a flatlander! Greg was really excited, too. 'That mouth call is going to be wild,' he told me. 'I could hardly tell the difference between you and the elk.' "