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The Elk Creek Buck
 
 
    Going down a climb like that is a lot harder than going up, and going up was no longer an option, so I clung there, with anxiety pushing my blood pressure high enough to bulge my eyes and my bowstring slowly cutting off my oxygen, thinking that I had better do something fast, thinking that it wasn't over until it was over, and in this case "over" meant Curled up in my sleeping bag back in the tent.
    When you get into situations like that, you don't see very well. Maybe your brain tells your eyes to do a slow dissolve so you won't have to watch the ground rush up, or the lion bite your arm, or whatever it is that's after you. I could see the rock in front of my face and the empty air below me, but minutes passed before I saw the small ledge to my left that contoured around the rock. I edged over to it, tested it the way you test a step in an
  
 
Photo By: Alan Carey
 
He was a true trophy, a wise old buck who lived where no one could go.
 
    No, that deer was gone, but if there is any justice in life, his offspring would be there. Or his friends. At least that was our reasoning.
  
abandoned house, then inched along until I came out on a bigger ledge that led to a trail that circled the rock to the top.
    The deer wasn't there, but I
  
 
It was enough to get us back there, enough to put us through the drill of waterproofing tents, shaking mice turds out of cook gear, buying food, and packing mules. The mountain, you see, is way back in the Gunnison National Forest in southwestern Colorado, back in country where the big mountains, the good mountains, like to hide.
    It was enough to get me up that reef when we saw a buck bolt from a bed beneath an overhang, high in the rock. For a moment I thought it might be enough to get me killed, too.
    But my foot caught on something and my hands found rock that wasn't crumbly and I stopped. My bow, which I had hung around my neck, was slowly garroting me, but slow death by asphyxiation was better than fast death by meat tenderization at the foot of the cliff.
  
was, and that made me pretty happy. I wasn't dead yet.
 
 
I don't know what's harder than hunting big mule deer with a bow on the top of schizophrenic mountains; nothing I've tried, for sure. They have the eyes and the noses. They hold the high ground. They know the routes in and out. After four days of oxygen deprivation, cold winds, cantankerous mules, rocky footing, wet snow (in August!), 10-hour climbs, and my cooking—
   
 
  Article By Lionel Atwill  
  Page 3
 
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