The Trouble With Elk

    You need a sense of humor to bowhunt elk; if the elk don't chuckle at you, your partners will. Fortunately, the owner of that first deep voice—at the bottom of a sleeping bag in the bottom of a tent at the bottom of a Colorado canyon—had brought along his sense of humor.
    Jeff Anderson knows how to laugh—at himself, at fate, at elk. Not that he is a camp wag. Jeff hunts hard, and he was primed for a big elk on this trip. For starters, he had brought along a new body and was anxious to try it out. Over the past year, you see, Jeff had found health. He had lost 50 pounds, forsaken cigarettes, rediscovered weight lifting, and taken to a diet of sprouts, bran and other good things (the body brushing, we speculated, was a by-product of hanging out in health-food stores).
    Moreover, Jeff is "in the business" (as people in the business like to say). He is the father of the Anderson Treesling, the Anderson 245 Broadhead, the Anderson Gunsling and other innovative outdoor products, and he wanted a big bull, felled by his own broadhead, to help pitch his line. Results sell: Charles Atlas would not have realized a dime from the skinny teenagers who read his ads in comic books if he had had a 36-inch chest.
    There were no stonefaces in the rest of the crew, either. The mocking titterer bag was Wayne Carlton, resident outfitter and elk impersonator supreme. Wayne is a turkey-hunting Florida transplant who discovered in Colorado that his seductive mimicry of a lady turkey on a diaphragm call could be successfully translated to the challenging bugle of an upstart elk. Once he mastered the right noises, Wayne learned the proper moves, and in a half-dozen years he has become an eminent elk hunter and the manufacturer of the world's first diaphragm elk call.