STORY: Third Rate Elk Hunter
The third story in a series from Nicole Qualtieri leans into the magical impossibilities of elk hunting.
A Note From Nicole
The story below is the third in a series of four from me, The Westrn’s founder & Editor-in-Chief Nicole Qualtieri.
The idea of The Westrn is to create a space where writers can paint with the brushes in their toolkit, without the pressures of advertising, affiliate marketing, or SEO.
I’m still debating how I will be able to give content away and then protect paid content. Paid content allows me to pay writers for their art. But free content allows art the space to breathe in the world. This is all an experiment, so I’m treating it as such and appreciate any feedback you could give in the comments.
Third Rate Elk Hunter
“Down!” I barely whisper the command — I practically mouth it — and Butch lays still as stone. Flattened into the hillside. A border-collie-turned-black-and-white mountain rug.
“Stay!” He reads me in that genetically hard-wired way a working dog does. I won’t go anywhere, his eyes respond, until you tell me it’s okay.
I turn around. Through the trees, I hear bodies rubbing branches, I catch black-and-tan legs flashing in the gaps, and from less than 70 yards away, a bull elk I’ve been following breaks loose with a trilling, sonorous wail of lust and exhaustion. It tinkles through the trees, each note falling down with the precision of rain on a windowpane. Internally, I ache. Externally, I shake. And my compound bow is in hand, but not drawn.
In the presence of this bull and the bulls bugling across the hillsides, I rack my brain until I come up with the one partner to this sound that I can think of: whale song. Somewhere, down the line of evolution, whale song and elk song collided. One went to sea. The other went to land.
Unsurprisingly, the creatures share a common ancestor called the Indohyus. The small, hooved creature is most similar to the Asian or African mouse deer of the present, and it took to wading into water to escape predators. Today, certain types of mouse deer employ the same behavior, holding their breath for up to four minutes below the surface to avoid threats.
Did Indohyus sing? We leave that up to the imagination.
Fast forward 50 million years, some Indohyus broke off to become the Blue Whale, while others broke off and morphed into the bull beyond the pines. And every even-toed land-lubbing ungulate on the planet rests under an umbrella that ties them as the closest living relatives to the ocean’s largest mammals. The order Artiodactyl stretches like an umbrella over species from the hippo to the camel to the cervids of Montana, and it also includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises before the wetter mammalia segment off into the infraorder Cetacea.
It’s fitting then, though perhaps allegorically lazy, to proclaim that the elk is my white whale. I make a much less monomaniacal slash vengeful Ahab; however, I’m interested in these beings, to say the least.
At the time of this particular hunt, I am still holding onto both of my legs in their God-given form in contrast to the Captain’s singular leg; however, I was on the mend from two knee surgeries over the summer. Unbeknownst to me, that winter I’d head into two more in which I’ll trade in my 34-year-old knees for prosthetic joints made not from a whale’s jawbone but of NASA-grade materials meant for a more sophisticated sort of longevity. So, with about 50% of use in each lower limb, we’ll call the leg game pretty much even in this particular pause in my hunt.
Nicole: 1. Ahab: 1.
Where hunting deer or pronghorn alone turned out to be a physical mountain that was very possible to climb with subpar joints, hunting elk alone seemed like a Himalayan kind of sojourn. But alas, it was September, I was five years into hunting, and I had yet to notch an elk tag.
I’d only recently fitted myself to archery equipment that held enough power to legally hunt elk in Montana. I’d rifle-hunted for elk in the fall, certainly. But I didn’t want to shoot my first elk in a hay field alongside a pile of other road hunters. And my new compound bow opened up a whole new opportunity for a struggling big game hunter: The Rut.
“You’ve never hunted the rut? You’ve gotta hunt the rut!” Wanna shake up an elk fanatic? Tell them you’d rather stick to rifle hunting; archery just seems so hard.
“Well, it’s a helluva lot easier in The Rut,” they’ll tell you, with a Coors Banquet warming in one hand while the other points playfully at your face, “And a helluva lot more fun.”
The first time I heard an elk bugle was — and I say this unabashedly — through a quick trip to the drive-through window of fast food wildlife viewing. Thanks to a tip, I knew the jig was up; they were going off.
I drove the hour and a half to the northern gates of Yellowstone National Park in my beat-up sedan, with my little crop-sensor camera occupying the seat next to me. I stepped out of the car and into the densely populated and steaming geologic bounty that is Mammoth Hot Springs in September.
Immediately, a bull in full rut screamed at the top of his lungs, spittle arcing out with each roar, drool dripping from the edges of his lips, eyes rolling into the back of his head, a skull laden with antlers so ginormous most hunters would faint. Then, he pissed on himself in the vainglorious and gag-inducing way of a very stinky billy goat. And he did this with a swing set and a plastic slide not twenty feet behind him.
Oh, Nature. You beautifiul, inimitable, never-give-a-fuck kind of beast. Animal sex, like any wild and erratic and hard-wired behavior, refuses to stop at the prude and hidden edges of defined wilderness areas. No, it pours into the paved streets of Yellowstone, onto the high bridges of Gardiner, and into the alfalfa fields of Paradise Valley. Cow elk are not impregnated in a vacuum of serene landscapes, but often at the soft edges of human protection, in spots with a presumed amount of safety, and sometimes in full proximity to hundreds of gawking people and an empty playground.
There are no archers or border collies hidden behind the pines in Yellowstone. And the hormonal and audacious roar of the park elk was not the tinkling song of the younger, more timid bull now in front of me. This public land herd was sketchy, on the move, running amok. I’d been following them for a few hours, closing in, slowly, steadily, and somehow with Butch still on my heels.
I hadn’t intended to take him with me, but like most days, I severely underestimated the possibilities at play. I’d walked away from my truck, looked back, and saw his very sweet and perfect nose plastered up against the window with a horrified FOMO that was too much for me to bear. He’s a good boy, I thought, he’ll listen. I probably won’t get into anything anyway.
Me, in full camo with dark brown contouring paste swiped over my cheeks for silly posterity, Butch, in his elegant tuxedo of a fur coat, I told him to get behind and he knew we were hunting. It wasn’t his first rodeo. At this point, he’d rifle-hunted with me every fall of his life. I’d even called a game warden to affirm the legality of hunting with him in Montana after being told I was doing something illegal.
“He’s just hunting with you as a companion, right? He’s not chasing deer or pursuing game?”
Nope. Just hunting with me, on heel.
“In Montana, you’re good. As long as he’s under control.” I thanked the officer, hung up, and asked Butch for a victorious high five. As usual, he gave two paws with an all-in hell yeah, brother kind of enthusiasm. And now we’re back in the field, no human or canid left behind.
We only get about a quarter mile onto the trail, when I nearly step into a steaming pile of elk shit. And I mean steaming. A bugle rips through the lodgepoles, smacking me in the face and straight out of my just-walking-in mindset.
I raise my eyes from shit to trees. Three cows and a bull turn the corner angle of the hillside into view, not 100 yards away. Trotting ahead on the trail as if they’re simply going out for a good time, the cows are 1, 2, 3, tail-to-tail, and the bull lollygags behind.
I nearly pee myself between excitement and forgetting to breathe. Profanities are the first thing to hit my brain. The second thought intertwined with the first thought’s profanity is, where the eff is the wind.
I am in a small depression between two mountains that I’d barely describe as such. More aptly, they are foothills to bigger mountains that just never formed in this particular stretch of the Rockies. Though Montana does hold big picturesque mountains in areas like the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness or Glacier National Park, the state holds more than 60 separate and named mountain ranges, most of which are more like the one I’m in. It also boasts a series of smaller hill ranges, from the Sweetgrass to the Ekalaka Hills.
These mellower ranges have a lived-in and rolling feel to them that at times conjures the Appalachians of Pennsylvania. It’s a type of rugged that is al dente; it’s a much easier chew than, say, the steep rocky ledges of mountain goat country.
I chose this particular range — the Elkhorns — because I knew they were more walkable on my 50% legs than a lot of elk country, and because I wasn’t fully invested in getting a bull. In fact, if I shot a bull in these mountains, I’d be in for a whole heap of trouble.
The unit I hunted is — for the moment — one of the toughest elk tags to pull in Montana, which is a process that takes place via lottery. Thus, I did not hold the appropriate license. But, you can hunt cows on your general tag, so that’s what was on the menu. Preferably a young one — a smaller elk that I could carry out in my pack alone over a few trips with sub-par joints.
And here I was, hunting less than 800 yards from my truck. Boom goes the dynamite. Bow in hand, I started up the mountain.
When I first became a hunter, the idea of wounding an animal was so terrifying and egregious that I resolved to only hunt with a rifle. Not that I believed then that I couldn’t wound an animal with a rifle — I can and I have — but it seemed much more likely that I’d recover a wounded animal or that such an impact would render my injured prey easier to find. It was a waste not, want not kind of thought process.
Suffice it to say, meat on the table is predicated — most simply put — by an injury of some sort. Any meat. All meat. It’s the only way. The added dimension of being the one to inflict an injury is understanding that some are survivable while others are mortal.
There’s some science out there on the subject of wounding mortality or lack thereof, but it feels incomplete. Read: It’s a near-impossible task to figure out just how many animals are wounded by hunters each year. Hunters, for what it’s worth, don’t all strike me as the kind to be excellent at self-reporting — or self-limiting — after injuring an animal. Certainly, many animals make it from wound to freezer. But, many don’t. And among the many, it is impressive just how tough wild creatures are.
Friends of mine have witnessed deer pull arrows out of their own shoulders. Some have countered that they’ve seen other deer help out their arrowed friends. At my local archery shop, I can hold a deer scapula where the bone grew over a broadhead in addition to a separate elk vertebra with a broadhead lodged within it. These were found after killing healthy animals in entirely separate circumstances. Word to the wise: be cautious when field dressing a big game animal, for ye know not what ye might find.
The pragmatist within me also looks to nature as a guide, and as a guide, nature is a bitch. Prey animals are built to withstand, sustain, and outmaneuver pain. They heal. They are stoic. They move on. Or they become a part of the food chain. Being a hunter means I have to accept that suffering is inherent to the process of putting meat on the table. Suffering, of course, is also inherent to life. I’m not foregoing a process beyond the natural: instead, in choosing to hunt as part of my lifestyle, I am deep within it.
When I’m good — and most of the time, I’m not terrible — I can minimize suffering and offer a quick death. When I’m not good, another bullet is loaded and ready to make good. The first animal I lost was a whitetail buck on a friend’s farm. And we saw that South Carolina deer on camera that night, with a minimal pass-through bullet wound in the gristly place above his shoulder. I didn’t hit bone, nor did I hit spine. It passed through an area that is one of the most benign on the body. He was eating, carrying on, and chasing does as boy deer do.
Breath, exhaled.
The elk trotting along the hillside disappeared over a tree-lined ridge. Butch and I ascended slowly and steadily in their direction. I came upon an old grassed-up logging road with a spring that was clearly a wallow. Bull elk use wallows to cover themselves in mud and urine, make a giant scene, and act like total ding-dongs in their cow-crazed bravado. Each wallow is essentially an elky, fratty college bar where the guys show off, ladies drink free, and the drinks taste like muddy water. This one was well-stomped, but pretty dry. To my eye, it lacked recent sign and action. Closed for business.
I walked to its edge, and a mountain grouse burst up from the wallow and nearly into my face, stunning me backward so quickly that I almost ate dirt.
Though elk still seemed like a tall order, a grouse is an unlucky archer’s dream hunt. One, it easily fits in a large pocket. Two, the bird is generally slow and a bit oblivious; it’s similar to killing a tame chicken. Three, grouse are seriously delicious. A much-passed-around saying in the elk hunting community goes “Mountain grouse is better than Mountain House.”
With an arrow notched, I scoured bush and tree trying to find where this bird went. The surprise of flight was too sudden; I didn’t see where it went.
Alas, I never saw the bird again. Grouse dinner was not on the menu. And now, I wasn’t willing to sit the wallow, because bugles were once more going off, and they were back in the direction that I’d come from.
Down the mountain we went, me with my little dog on heel. He’d broken away once when baited by a red squirrel with a loud mouth, alerting the whole forest to our presence. The skittering and ungodly loud sound will drive you batty after days in the woods. I couldn’t blame Butch for attempted murder. He had his own hunting priorities, and I had mine, and mine took precedence.
“Not now! We’re chasing elk!” A pat on the head, a doggy smile, and we’re back to following bugles.
As we descend, I pull out a little bottle filled with a fine white powder. Now and then, I squeeze what hunters have dubbed a “windicator”, and out the powder shoots, its flow showing me which way the wind is headed. I make a route headed toward the ravine in which I try mightily to keep that wind in my face.
There is no running down the mountain with bad knees, and at this point, I’m wondering just how far down they are. I make it back to the trailhead, where a lean valley cuts between the mountainside I’d just descended and a deeper ravine with a smidge of water running in the bottom. I cross the valley to the near edge of the ravine.
A steep and thickly wooded knife’s edge shoots up from the opposite side of the ravine and nearly straight up into another mountainside. The creek is barely that, a pittance leftover from spring runoff, with pockets of water and wispy streams winding through woody detritus.
It sounds like a few bulls are on the steep shelf, as the notes, trills, and roars bounce off the ravine walls. I’m sitting at a decent vantage point with binos in hand. Nothing, until I spot a bull on the stream’s edge, a few hundred yards away. He stops in his tracks, leans into the depth of his body, and calls with his eyes closed.
I pick up my bow, make eye contact with Butch, point at my heel, and we begin to make our way through downed timber and bare patches between the trees.
The border collie, though not a hunting dog by design, alights as a dog that is perfect for the job of hunting companion. In them lives a natural behavior to ‘down’ themselves when a problem is afoot and they’re looking to solve it. And a border collie finished for herding livestock works in concert with a human shepherd to move animals through a series of big runs, quick movements, slow walks, and a lie down that will hold, push, or direct livestock one way or another.
Of course, I’m not using Butch is any capacity to manipulate game, and he is not a finished stock dog by any means. But his commitment and loyalty to my asks give me faith that maybe, just maybe, we can do this together. We are most certainly not going back to the truck.
Poof, the spray bottle told me to stay high and work my way over. When we reach a clear patch, I down Butch in the timber, walk across, then make eye contact and point where I want him. He is rapt with attention; this, he tells me with each stop and start, is fun.
I curl around a bush and find myself at eye level with a slim pine tree battered, scraped, and beaten by a bull’s enormous antlers so recently that the scent of elk and pine comingle. The ground is littered with elked mulch, and I scoop the tawny shavings into my hands, breathing the scent into the bottom of my lungs.
I pull an arrow from my quiver, and I go through what I’ve learned as an archer.
Aim small, miss small. Don’t just pick a spot, pick out a clump of hair, pick out an actual hair. Focus on process. Draw. Anchor. Wait. Know your distance. Goddamn, I think to myself, I have too many mantras. I am, alas, a beginner at this game.
But I’m a lucky beginner. I pass rub after rub, and a bugle rips from the bottom of the ravine. Then, not 60 yards ahead, I see a cow flash through the new growth, another, another. The three cows are here. Then, antlers.
The mantras fall away. It’s time to get close.
“Down!” I say this out loud but only through air pushed from my lungs. “Stay!”
Butch puts his head on his paws, his way of saying he’s there for the long haul. I turn and try to make out a path, legs flashing ahead below tree branches.
Here’s where legitimate elk hunters will start to sniff out the story. I carried no elk calls, no diaphragms, no bugle tube to interact with the beasts at hand. I had practiced my calls in the car, my elk mews, my stab at a bugle. But, they sounded, I don’t know, like a drunk American trying to speak Spanish on a Mexican vacation. I felt like a fraud, and I respected the elk enough to know that they too would agree.
Anyway, why scare them when I’m within 100 yards with the wind on my side?
Time, to, boogie.
Arrow notched, I weave through from tree to tree, slowly, steadily, quietly. I pull out my range finder and lock it on the last spot I saw an elk. 40 yards. I can see elk moving nearby, I notch my arrow, clip my release to the bowstring, and wait for the opportunity to move closer.
Knowing my distance to these animals makes me slightly uneasy but also offers a window of error that is decipherable. I feel most certain shooting between 20-25 yards or less. That, to me, is my ethical shooting distance, and it’s a short one. But, it’s the spot where I am confident enough to make a shot that would likely be lethal, or at the very least be accurate, with much less room for mistakes. That boundary in the moment made up my mind for me: I wouldn’t take a shot any further out than my 25-yard limit.
The bull flashes ahead of me. He’s what hunters might call a ‘raghorn,’ a term that got under my skin the first time I heard it. 6 tines, each side. A 6x6 bull. But he’s young, maybe 3 or 4. Physically smaller, and antlers, well — nothing special. The term itself sounds derogatory, it’s a “not good enough for me” kind of term. But these days it fits into my vocabulary as a way of articulating what I saw in the field.
“One raghorn, three cows, a calf,” I might tell another hunter about this little herd in my midst. He’s a peanut compared to the Yellowstone herd bull I saw, dominating man and beast in town. A herd bull is the king of the castle, the ruler of the roost, the bull that serious hunters aim to kill.
“Let the raghorns lie,” the elk diehards say, “I’m looking for a herd bull.”
Like making the varsity team in high school, many elk hunters are simply looking for a greater challenge, a more specified outcome, a path that leads to becoming a better, smarter, stealthier hunter. Press this up against the idea of “trophy hunting” and it’s hard to distinguish ego from intent.
But a great hunter might get into a dozen or more raghorn bulls before he is able to engage with a wiser, bigger, older herd bull. Today’s herd bull is yesteryear’s raghorn. He might have been passed on multiple times by the same hunter, year after year, until he’s grown to his prime. There is a protectionism here, and it favors letting young, virile, healthy animals grow to full adulthood.
In captivity, bull elk can live into their twenties. That’s with what I call three hots and a cot: human-provided feed, water, protection, and sufficient habitat. In natural circumstances, 10-13 years is an old bull. The window isn’t long or short, but older bulls have certainly outsmarted and lucked out in their elements. There just aren’t as many of them. By that time in life, they are, in fact, rare birds. Champions at life, holding trophies of their own enduring.
What is the best way to die, then, in this older age?
Rarely does an animal like this die of old age, peacefully, in the bounty of summer, with a flower crown, a full belly, and a final nap in the warm sun. Elk are a living, breathing, bundle of nutrients the earth is just waiting to envelop and then transform into new energy. They are a holding place for what is next in their forest, in their fields, and in the river bottoms they frequent.
Let’s say one has a choice, then, between a relatively quick death and one that is slow and onerous.
Slow for a bull elk, might be starving through winter, only to reach a -35 degree day in February, where they lie down and can’t get up again. Perhaps it’s starvation or the cold that sends their last breath into the atmosphere, but predators use the depths of snow and cold nights to advantage, and should that dying elk be found by wolves, it is not a peaceful last breath fogged into the night.
Wolves, it should be mentioned, do not often prey on healthy adult elk in good circumstances or with other food sources in prime availability. It’s simply too risky; an adult elk can seriously injure a wolf. I watched a young cow take on four wolves as she tried to protect a newborn calf hidden in tall grass, the wolves never once attempting to take her piston legs and teeth on. They were on the lookout for feeble, and they found it. The noise of that culmination stays with you.
Therefore, we will scratch death by wolf as a fast death for these full-grown elk. They would typically have been suffering, weakened, or facing some sort of issue for a length of time before the wolves mercifully step in, after a strong risk assessment, then start eating them often before a conscious death arrives.
Another slow death: Two Junes ago, I discovered the remnants of a large cow elk who tangled the hock of her hind leg in barbed wire at the very back corner of a 25-acre horse pasture. She caught her leg under the cover of willows, in a spot far from the human eye. Upon finding her carcass stuck and strewn on that warm day — the horses standing and grazing the growing grasses amongst her bones — I knelt by her whitening skull and said penance for not knowing she was back there sooner. No doubt, she was an elk I’d seen most days the previous winter, said hi to as she passed through the herd of equines. The prairie grasses grew thick, rich, and green where she’d given herself over.
Fast might be getting hit by a semi on the highway, left as fodder for bald eagles and ravens on the side of the road, some passerby cutting off the antlers to take home just because.
Fast might also be crossing a river at high water, getting swept under the current, drowning, then resurfacing on a rocky edge or a sandbar, where dozens of animals — from cutthroat trout to red-winged hawks to hordes of black flies — make a living off the dead.
Fast, comparatively, is also taking a well-placed bullet or an arrow through the heart or the lungs, often dropping an animal in their tracks. They might power through a few hundred yards, they might bed down for a bit, as blood takes over where it doesn’t belong, while leaving through exit wounds. An arrow through the lungs, like a bad step in the river, is a drowning case in which we trade water for blood.
Wildly, where an animal feels the shocking punch of the bullet, a well-placed arrow doesn’t always invoke that sort of response. The animal might jump in surprise, look back in wonderment, become woozy, grow confused. Finally, teeters from side to side, lays down and dies.
The hunter, when as sure as one can be of the shroud of death, then walks up to this animal recently passed over. It’s up to the individual to treat this moment in one way or another, but beyond the initial recognition, in a string of words so cliched they make me wince and groan, the “real work begins”.
As a hunter with moderate success filling tags and stacking meat in my freezer, I can assure you that the work to get to the point of breaking down an animal is as much or as little as you want it to be. You could have paid for private access and shot the elk in a hay field, his back streaked by the shadow of a pivot above him, or you may have hiked alone nine miles into a wilderness area scant with elk before this moment occurs. You may have hunted thirty days to get one shot opportunity. You may, like me, have hunted modestly for nine years and never filled an elk tag.
But, the work of making meat always leaves me incredulous. I can walk up to one animal, with a single knife, and there, in the field, break it down into a series of packages that I can stick in a load-bearing backpack and huck to my vehicle.
This is not dissecting a piglet cured by formaldehyde or deboning a chicken for the oven. This is the raw process of turning whole animal into meat for the freezer. Once schooled in its ways, it happens more quickly than one could imagine, no matter how big the creature.
And, to my eye, there is nothing improprietous about it. I prefer what many hunters call the gutless method. I learned it via YouTube when I realized a mule deer I killed was too big for me to really flip over and gut first. Two hundred plus big-bodied pounds of dead weight on the hoof proved impossible to budge. He was the first I did that way, and it stuck. It took two heavy trips to get that big boy back to the truck.
It goes something like this.
With the first few swipes of a knife, I begin to peel back thick fur and skin. Between skin and muscle lives the web of sticky fascia, and the fascia films over the vermillion power of muscles, tendons, and bone. Peel it back further, to reveal the hind rump, the rib cage, the front shoulder, the neck musculature. It’s a satisfying feeling, the separation of fascia and skin.
By picking up a hind leg, I can sweep, saw, and separate a hind quarter from the main trunk of a cervid, while slowly cutting and working my way up to the hip joint. Popping the ball joint from the hip socket requires aptly-pushed physical force once the correct cuts are made, and suddenly one leg is now ready to be processed into steaks, roasts, shanks for osso bucco, bones for soups. I’ve even boiled the feet down into collagen-infused stocks. One quarter for many uses.
My personal favorite quarters are the front shoulders. The shoulder is made up of sinewy roasts and cuts for the most part, the kinds that take 6 or 8 hours to slow cook down into buttery mouthfuls of the most flavorful meat on the animal. And it is equally satisfying to separate from the body. A deer or elk shoulder isn’t connected by a joint; only tendons and fascia tie the shoulder to the body.
Place the leg over your own shoulder, work at the fascia from below, and you’ll hit no bones to speak of. The shoulder floats so easily off of the body once skin and fascia are released that it seems unlikely that it would stay so easily on the animal. The shoulders, being the most weight-bearing part of this animal, appear fragile in their attachment. But that tough sinewy muscle is that way for a reason. It is lean, strong, and worked with every motion of the high-headed cervid. It is a function of wonder in its floating efficiency.
Remove two quarters. Flip the animal. Do it all over again.
After the animal is quartered, I go visceral, and it’s a careful process. The guts are still alive here, and now that the animal has been dead for a while, those guts are more alive than ever. Within minutes of death, the lack of oxygen causes cells to spring into autolysis. This is also called self-digestion. With no new oxygen coming in, cells acidify, burst at the seams, and bacteria jumps in to make good on the plentiful offering of energy in transition.
Should I not move quickly enough, I might lose good meat to this process. It’s always top of mind in the race for what’s edible and to whom.
The billions of organisms within living bodies for now are just snacking on refuse; they await the feast of bursting cells that acidify within minutes of oxygen deprivation. Essentially, we are chock full of minuscule living beings biding their time until we are not. In death, our body decomposes from being to earth, no outside help necessary. And decomposition itself is a beautiful word, although a grisly action.
This effort is an undoing of composition, the process of going back to the beginning.
This morbid ecosystem-in-action also translates into the one thing I’m trying my best to avoid now that I’m aiming for offal: odor. The smell of air released from guts is gross, often gag-inducing. But if I tread carefully enough, I can get the heart, liver, kidneys, and tenderloin out without disturbing the visceral peritoneum that encases intestines, colon, and more smelly areas where food continues to break down and ferment in the body.
All states have wanton waste laws that require hunters to take meat out of the field in one way or another. In Montana, I’m legally required to take all meat “suitable for food” in order to fulfill my duty as a hunter. For big game, this is further defined as all four quarters, the tenderloins, and the back strap. I am also held accountable for transporting and taking care of it in a manner that makes sure it is fit for human consumption.
I go a step further by trying to take as much as I can, from taking the shanks off the lower legs, or sawing entire slabs of the rib cage to bring home with me.
Another piece of meat I refuse to leave in the field is the neck, bone-in if possible. The neck, like the shoulder, is layered and sinewy from constant mechanical output of lift and flex. When cooked low and slow, it is succulent and infused with the flavoring power of bone and bone marrow.
It is also attached to the head. And dependent on the sex of the animal, I may or may not leave it in the field. Detaching the head is my least favorite part of the meat-making process. And I’ve learned through trial and error that I must skin it out in the field, lest it becomes an ever-more morbid process of getting it from animal to wall. To me, it’s unpleasant at best. But, it’s work that must be done.
It behooves me to mention that, dependent on species, taking an animal apart in the field is also predicated on just how that hunter aims to celebrate it totemically. I prefer a simple euro mount, which is an easy process of just boiling the skull down to the bone and chemically treating it for cleanliness and whiteness. Specialized shoulder and body mounts require more intimate knowledge of skinning, caping, and preparing an animal in the field prior to its date at the taxidermist.
Alas, I am not super precious with my totems, valuing space over large frozen celebrations of life in glass-eyed repose. Never say never.
Still, I’ve never killed an elk. The big-bodied mule deer I killed is small compared to the animals in front of me. I check my maps; I’m only a half-mile from the truck. It’s doable.
I work another ten yards off the distance between me and the dancing, singing cervids. A clear path slides between the trees, and I am clipped in to my bowstring and ready to draw. I toe another five yards off the ticker, and glance back at Butch. He too is crawling in, slow walk, cat-crouched. It’s too close to say anything, but he sinks to his belly as I make eye contact and nod. He’s never done this before, and neither have I.
The raghorn bull steps into the clear lane. Ranged, he’s at 30 yards. He stands broadside, offering me illegal lungs, and through held breath, I wait for him to move. A cow is behind him, another ten yards or so.
He steps away, and the lane from where she’s standing isn’t so clear. It’s also just beyond my range, the 25-yard beginner-friendly line I drew in the sand even before I set out for this hunt. Suddenly, they look back toward the trailhead. They burst into the new growth and away from me.
I never pulled my bow back. My heart is in my throat. My knees suddenly throb with the demands of the day. There’s no following this herd; I’m toast.
It’s late in the afternoon. I ruffle Butch’s mane and he jumps and sashays with the release of the hunt. I weave back the way I came to avoid throwing scent on their path, though anywhere is fair game.
A white F-350 is parked where I found the initial pile of shit. A young guy steps out, head-to-toe camo, ready to hunt.
“Whoa! Where’d you come from?”
I surprised him. I grin, bow in hand.
“They are literally right here!” I say in response. He, too, is on the hunt for a cow. I point him up the hill where I’d last seen the elk headed and bid him good luck. A bugle alights from the ridge. Long and lean, he floats up the hill like the elk do.
I begin to boil water for a Mountain House, lamenting the sneaky mountain grouse. Throughout the day, I’ve saved waypoints in an app called OnX Hunt. The path of my day streaks red across the screen with icons where I’ve found notable things, 5.2 miles. Wallows, grouse, rubs, elk, elk, elk. I have walked into the heart of the action, hunted as hard as my degrading knees would allow, and made it within yards of impact.
In Moby Dick, some mistakenly confuse Ahab as the protagonist. But it’s our narrator Ishmael that brings the story to a more distanced understanding of the passion at hand. He weaves in and out of the narrative, a consciousness behind the crazed hunt for the murderous whale.
But he’s not a Melville creation. Ishmael first alights in the Bible, as a teenage boy banished to the wilderness of Beer-sheba for teasing his brother. Though banished, God deigns mercy upon him and his mother by offering a well of water in a moment of dehydration and certain death.
Genesis 21:20 And God was with the lad, and he grew; and he dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.
As I’m setting up camp near my truck, the hunter walks down from the woods, and he saunters over.
“I got within 30 yards to a cow, full draw, but she winded me at the last minute.” I know the feeling.
“Next time,” I say. He nods goodbye, and takes off into a darkening night.
Bedded down into my comfy camp with Butch, I am hopeful for the next day’s offering. But a hard wind blows in so loudly that any bugles are swallowed by the wash of whipped noise. At one point, something walks near the tent, rustling and rooting. Butch growls softly, I open my tent flap with a headlamp in hand, and I hear it bound away before I see anything of note.
In the morning, I awake before dawn to silence, the wind ceased to nothing. I get up, pack camp, put on my boots, and walk alone into the darkness.
I hit the ridge to see if I can hear anything. I wait, and I wait. The sun begins to peek over steaming pines and stacked hills. Light washes tall clouds in the distance, color beginning to saturate the vista before me. Deep navy turns to cornflower blue turns to late summer bluebird. The stars disappear in the onslaught. Miles before me, and no elk sound travels to meet my ears. Birds sing, squirrels grumble, the small ones of the forest skitter and scatter.
But the elk rode away on the big wind, or they were silenced by it for one reason or another. Perhaps they’re tucked in not too far from me. Perhaps they absconded into thin air, shapeshifted into squirrels and birds. Perhaps I walked off the mountain, and they sung like the Tabernacle Choir in their knowing of my absence.
The tag in the pocket of my pack goes unnotched that fall.
I try all things. I achieve what I can. — Ishmael, Moby Dick
Final Note from Nicole
If $5/month or $50 a year doesn’t seem like too much to give — or if you’ve already given it — THANK YOU. That’s all I’m currently asking.
Either way you slice it, I hope you enjoyed this story from my 2019 elk season. It’s now 2024 and I’ve become a somewhat better educated elk hunter, but alas, I still haven’t filled an elk tag. My goal is to spend the majority of this September in the elk woods.
So. Perhaps this is my year. Comments? Let’s chat below.
Sometimes the stories of failure are more memorable than the stories of success. They stick with you in a way that's difficult to describe. It's a testament to just how hard hunting really is and how many little things have to fall in place, whether through luck or skill, in order to be successful. Also, “Mountain grouse is better than Mountain House” will now be part of my vernacular heading into the woods this fall!
What a great story Nicole. I am not a big game hunter, but completely understand the journey we each take as we attempt to go after dreams and adventure. Very well written.