The flutelike tone goes up two and sometimes three notes, then usually drops a note before ending in another bawl. The second part of the call is usually termed the grunt or chuckle. I prefer to call it the chuckle because it's reminiscent of a person's laugh. As one hunter described it to me, the chuckle sounds like a person laughing backward. Some expert callers imitate the chuckle with their voices. To reach the high tones necessary, a voice caller usually must suck, rather than expel, air past his vocal cords. To accomplish this requires a great deal of practice, and some hunters simply can't do it because their voices are too low.
    All the commercial calls I've used imitate fairly well the musical part of an elk's call. Only one, however, begins and ends with a bawl. And no model produces a truly realistic chuckle. With practice, a hunter using a mouth diaphragm can copy all the parts of an elk's call, including the bawls, the multitoned bugle or whistle and the chuckle. Several extremely successful elk hunters have told me the chuckle is far more important to them than the bugle part of the call.
    "I usually use a bugle just to locate a bull," one man who has taken about 20 elk told me. "But when I want to get him in those last few yards, I use a chuckle. The chuckle seems to get bulls raging mad, and they'll come right in if you can do it right."
    Another advantage of a mouth diaphragm is that your hands are free. Carlton normally calls through a length of corrugated plastic tubing for added volume and resonance, but before a bull comes within view, he puts away the tubing and calls with just the mouth diaphragm. That way, when he's ready to shoot, all he has to do is pull the trigger or draw the bowstring.
    "Another advantage of the mouth call is that you can keep elk from running away after you shoot," Carlton said. "Right after the shot, I immediately give a loud, clear bugle without moving a muscle. Almost invariably, the elk stops running, turns around and looks back at me. Several times, they have stood there until they dropped dead. That saves you from having to follow a blood trail. I've even stopped bulls from running after they were missed by a guy with a muzzleloader. It would be impossible to do that with a regular bugle because you'd have to drop your bow or gun to pick, up the bugle and the elk would see the movement."
    In 1979, Carlton was standing in open oak brush when he succeeded in calling a five-point bull within 10 paces. He shot an arrow through its lungs and the elk fled at a gallop. Without moving anything but his tongue, Carlton bugled. The bull stopped, shook its head, walked about 40 yards and fell dead.
    The next year he took a friend to a rugged area near Montrose. Early in the afternoon they had three bulls bugling at once. The one that sounded the biggest was on the other side of a creek, so the pair crossed the stream, climbed to a flat spot on the far slope and got ready for action. When Carlton bugled, the bull fairly roared and then it came in. His antlers were so wide that he had to twist them from side to side to get through trees about 40 yards from the hunters.