The Trouble With Elk

    Three miles on the map, seven miles or more on the ground—one way. Squiggly contour lines stretched the distance. And there were 684,175 uprooted trees to crawl over, 300 yards of talus pitched at a 45-degree slope to ease across, and half-rationed oxygen to breathe. We called every 200 yards along the way, although we held scant hope of finding an elk before that distant drainage.
    Not that we found one there, either. We discovered a large open meadow with fresh beds and tracks, but no elk. Wayne called to the four winds. Jeff curled up and took a nap. I thought about the walk back.
    We decided to drop to the stream and hop boulders back to camp, a change from tree hurdling but no less tiring. Jeff faded two-thirds of the way home. "He needs a brushing," said Wayne, "something to pep him up." Brushless, we did the next best thing. We left the stream and climbed toward the trail coming down from the spike camp in Buck Hollow. When we were 50 yards from it, we told Jeff that another half-mile of vertical assault lay ahead. Psychology, that's the key to stress. While Jeff was muttering about last rites, we suddenly hit the trail. His spirits soared, and he walked the last mile and a half to camp with no more stoop to his shoulders than a middle-aged Neanderthal man.
    The next two days were exercises in frustration, which is to say they were typical of a bowhunt for elk. George, Jeff and Wayne returned to the ridge of the 5-point bull. I went out with my trusty horse and parallel­ed their path farther down the valley. I jumped one deer; the others saw and heard nothing.
    Then the weather turned foul, and Wayne decided to pull out. No matter how well one calls, flogging an area when the elk are not there or are not answering is pointless. We broke camp in the morning and shuffled up the trail in the afternoon. We drove to Montrose, where Wayne lives, and Jeff and I checked into a motel.
    The break was unplanned but well warranted. A hot shower, clean clothes, a rare steak and a double scotch dropped my rpms to idle—maybe closer to stall—and in that delicate subfunctioning haze I had a new vision of what we had done. We had taken turkey tactics and applied them to elk, or, in a broader sense, we had found universal qualities in the hunting of both.
    We had located animals by looking where others had not looked—on the fringe of the country others had hunted and into which the animals had been pushed. When we found our elk, we stuck with him, calling enough to make him answer, but not calling so much as to frighten him away. When we had pin­pointed him, we had moved to within 100 yards and set up like turkey hunters. And had one of us shot and hit that hull, Wayne told me he would have bugled immediately. Many times, he said, he had done that and the animal had turned and come back, then died. I've had a young gobbler come in, spook, then return when I called again.
    George chose to stay in town and fix his Jeep, which had been uncooperative on the drive back to Montrose, but Wayne, Jeff and I got up at 3:30 a.m., had a big breakfast in an all-night diner, and then drove two hours to the rim of the canyon we had camped in the first five days of our hunt. We took a logging road toward the edge above the bowl we had hunted on the second day. Wayne was convinced the elk were here, that they were high rather than close to the creek we had hunted before.
    Where the ground started to pitch down, we stopped and Wayne called. What happened next was a total surprise. Almost immediately, and from just 300 yards away, a bull screamed back. If we had been the Keystone Cops on the first day, now we were the Three Stooges. We fumbled for arrows, searched desperately for cover, then followed Wayne at a quick trot toward the bull.