The Trouble With Elk

    Wayne also can imitate, by voice alone, fighting raccoons, the ban­jo and guitar lines of "Dueling Banjos," owls, crows, cats and a deep-voiced bow-hunter with a penchant for body brushing. You need a sense of humor with someone such as that around.
    George Payton was the third member of our party, an Army sergeant major with 29-plus years experience running mess halls and a competitive archer, who came along to learn the outfitting business, which he was considering as a retirement job. In exchange for calling lessons and for the joy of our company, George agreed to cook—a beneficial arrangement for us, since Jeff was always body brushing and Wayne con­sidered a four-course meal to be a bag of peanuts, a Snickers bar, beef jerky and a Coke.
    Best I could figure, I was invited along for my good looks.
    Our camp lay at 10,000 feet in a hellish canyon northwest of Gunnison . On our first day, after dropping 1500 feet from the rim and unloading the horses and cleaning the mouse droppings from the tent and dis­covering we had no sugar but 60 pounds of pancake flour, we were kicked back, taking it all in, when a pair of Georgians came strolling up the creek. We knew they were from Georgia because they talked funny (fortunately, Wayne talks funny, too). Their partner, leading out their rent-a-­mules, had passed us on the trail; these two, dejected from a week of elkless elk hunting, had chosen to walk out, fishing on the way, so they would have something to show for their efforts. The fish, unfortu­nately, were not biting.
    In misplaced southern drawls, they told us they had hunted every side canyon up and down the creek from our camp. No elk—no tracks, no bugles, no wallows. The only life they had seen was a muzzle­loader's spike camp up Buck Hollow.
    When they left, Wayne had what I thought at first to be a quasi-mystical expe­rience. He rolled back his eyes and ran through six bars of "Dueling Banjo" sotto voce. After the musical interlude, he announced, "Now we know where the elk are. They're where the hunters aren't."
    There was great weight in that simple statement. The spike camp and the Geor­gia boys had pushed the elk out, probably down the creek and up a side draw that neither group had hunted. If we could reach the edge of unspoiled country where the hills hadn't echoed with bugles tainted by southern drawls, we might find a bull.
    At sunup, we mounted the horses and rode for two hours—down the creek, to the top of the mountain range on the far side, and along its narrow ridge. We passed the spike camp; we passed the horses of those hunters; finally we passed the last fresh sign of pack animals. We tied the nags and walked down a ridge overlooking a deep draw of black timber. Wayne popped a diaphragm into his mouth and sounded a long, enticing bugle and a cou­ple of grunts through a two-foot length of plastic tubing. It was as good an elk call as I've heard, far better than most elk.
    That was not just my opinion. From down in that tumble of blowdowns, down deep in the black timber, came an answer. Wayne hammered back at the bull. He answered again. George looked at me, I looked at Wayne , Wayne looked at Jeff, and like the Keystone Cops we tumbled down the ridge.
    Hearing a bugle, however, is not the same as finding a bull. This one was annoyed by Wayne 's calling, but not suffi­ciently annoyed to come calling. He was swaggering around down there like a pimp on a street corner, traveling just enough to make locating him difficult. We worked around him for three hours. He refused to come to us, but we eventually fixed his position. Wayne gave a short vocal rendition of a cavalry charge, and we dropped off the ridge into the elk's living room.