The Trouble With Elk

We had gone 100 yards when the bull called again. He was coming in without encouragement! The trees here were spindly—no big trunks to back against—so we quickly picked out bushes for cover and froze.
    I saw him at 50 yards. I was looking where I thought his head should be and instead saw his chest. Like a movie scene in which the wimpy hero turns and looks into the gut of some musclehead, then slowly cranks his neck back until he can see a face, I looked up and up and up until I saw the rack. A 6X6! Record-book stuff. He came straight in. We were on line: Jeff to the left, Wayne in the middle, I on the right. We had good cover behind us to break up our outlines. We had doused ourselves with essence of elk urine to camouflage our scent. We had shooting lanes in front of us. And the elk kept coming. Our chuckle this time, I thought.
    At 25 yards out he stopped, threw back his head in a bugle, then assaulted a 10- foot sapling with his rack. Each of us could see his head—up and down, up and down, tearing the tree to shreds—but a single clot of brush in front of the elk blocked a shot.
    Jeff started to move slowly toward the bull's flank. I sat tight, for the elk now faced me, and if he took two steps forward, I would have a shot. The bull kept raking. But suddenly something moved in the shadows of the trees—brownish blurs, big blurs. The bull wheeled, retraced his path and vanished. Twenty-five yards away. Three hunters. No shot.
    "There was another bull out there," said Jeff. He was hyperventilating; so was I. "And some cows."
    "I thought I saw the cows," I said.
    "A satellite bull, probably," Wayne said. "Makes sense. The big guy came to check us out and scare us off, but as soon as he left his ladies, some other punk—the satellite—moved in. He took off to gather up the cows and kick the satellite's rear end."
    Elk joke No. 2.
    The bull and his harem had dropped into the bowl, judging from their tracks, but we didn't know if they had gone to the bottom or just partway down. Wayne decided to work around the top of the bowl, calling down into the timber for a reply before we blindly committed ourselves. We circled the top, bugling every 150 yards. No elk.
    By noon we had reached a rocky out­cropping on the far side, where we took off our packs and ate lunch. Wayne aided up in the lee of a rock to sleep.
    Wayne was about out and I was close to joining him when Jeff sucked in a lungful of air and blasted a call. It sounded more like a 3-year-old having a temper tantrum than an elk, but Jeff was pleased enough with it to try again . . . and again and again. I was about to suggest an optional use for the grunt tube, when I heard a faint noise in the bowl. "Hear that?" asked Jeff. He jumped up, called again, then broke into a hippity-hop dance. "I found him, I got him! I called him! Let's go, let's go."
    God smiles on body brushers. Once we were in the black timber, out of the wind, we could hear the hull bugling below us.
    And down we went. In an hour we came to a fresh wallow, a funky-smelling mud-hole still elk-churned. Wayne called. The bull answered from around the nose of a small ridge.
    We snuck around the ridge. The elk bugled again. We nocked arrows. Wayne called. The elk bugled back. I had slowed to a pace of a paramecium when Wayne rolled his eyes up the hill. A bull, a little 5-pointer, stood 50 yards above us, looking me in the eye. This was the satellite, now stuck in orbit, trying to figure out what these three strange creatures were.