This story, “The Hunt We’ll Remember,” appeared in the September 1970 issue of Outdoor Life.
“ELK, BOB, A BULL!” Sally yelled.
I scrambled the last few steps to the crest of the ridge with my heart pounding. I’ll never forget the sight that greeted me.
A sheltered pocket just below the ridge held a thick tangle of scrubby aspens, the kind that struggle for survival at high elevations, with the trunks twisted and bushy. Westerners call them quakers, for the way the leaves tremble in the wind, but these had no leaves on them now.
The ridge was steep, and we were at least 8,000 feet up. I hit the top with my mouth open, lungs bursting, and eyes popping out, partly from altitude, partly from the excitement my wife’s yell had touched off.
The first thing I noticed was a big commotion down in the aspens. Next I saw three cow elk go crashing up the opposite slope, running full tilt among the twisted trunks. And in the same instant, directly in front of me, the biggest and most magnificent antlered animal I had ever seen came up out of his bed, where Sally had first spotted him. He was a great golden beast with an almost black head and neck and a massive rack of ivory tipped horns that flared above his head like the bleached roots of an upturned tree.
For a second as he raced into the aspens I stood staring, too startled and awe-struck to shoot. Then, as if that were not enough excitement for any hunter at one time, a big mule-deer buck broke out of the thicket and bounded away to my left, straight for Sally. Her deer license was filled, so he was safe enough. He all but ran over her.
Sally was still shouting for me to shoot, but I was waiting for the elk to get clear of the brush. I had hunted enough big game to know that I shouldn’t try for him in a place that thick.
The time was late October 1969. My wife and I were on our first elk hunt, in the mountains east of Dixon, Wyoming, and west of the Continental Divide, just north of the Colorado border. Up to that day Sally’s luck had been better than anything we had dreamed of, but I had done only so-so.
I’m 35 years old and am in the hardware business in Union City, Michigan, 20 miles southwest of Battle Creek. I’ve been an avid hunter and gun nut since I was a young boy, when I began following Jack O’Connor’s adventures and advice in OUTDOOR LIFE. I was most fascinated by Jack’s stories of hunting in the Western States, and I dreamed of the day when my turn would come. It finally came in the fall of 1968, when I made my first hunt outside Michigan.
Chet Simington and I drove to Wyoming for a try at mule deer. Chet is a taxidermist. We both wanted something of good trophy size, and our luck was in. We were back home in a week with two fine bucks. Mine was a beautiful 14-pointer (Eastern count) that scored 178.
I dropped him at 200 yards with my wife’s Model 70 Winchester .243, borrowed for the hunt. My use of her rifle was to have consequences I didn’t foresee at the time.
Chet had booked an Alaska hunt for the fall of 1969, so I would have to find another partner. No problem, for Sally had long before laid down the law.
“The next time that rifle of mine goes West, I go with it,” she’d told me flatly. My wife is a science teacher in the Union City school system, and for years she has shown great sympathy and tolerance for certain traits of mine, such as needing just one more gun or seeing a spotting scope I cannot do without. She has even been patient through many long evenings spent “shooting” the previous season’s buck just one more time. I guess she realizes there is no cure for husbands so afflicted.
Anyway, I actually was pleased with her ultimatum about going where her rifle went. I figured she had it coming. Early in 1969 we started to plan a Wyoming hunt for deer, antelope, and elk. Trying to take all three would cramp us for time, but we didn’t mind.
The elk season in the area we want ed to hunt would be open October 18 through 31. We could take deer anytime from October 5 through the rest of the month, and antelope season would run from October 10 through 25.
For elk I needed a nonresident hunting license that would set me back $125. It entitled me to take one antlered elk, one deer, one black bear, and gamebirds and fish, but I was interested only in the elk and the deer. Sally wanted a deer and would need a $30 nonresident license covering that species only. Our antelope permits would cost $35 apiece.
We could buy Sally’s deer license when we got to Wyoming, but the elk and antelope licenses had to be bought well ahead of time. Applications for the elk license are accepted beginning January 1 on a first-come first-served basis, and the supply is sold out quickly. This year, for example, the 5,500 nonresident elk licenses available for 1970 were all gone by January 14. But I was lucky; my application reached Cheyenne in time.
Antelope licenses are issued by drawing, since the applications always out number the supply. Last fall, for ex ample, 20,800 nonresidents sought the 15,000 available permits. The deadline for applications is June 10. In May Sally and I received the application forms, maps, and list of open seasons in different areas. We sent our two ap plications in one envelope so that if one was drawn the other would be too. Our luck was in, and we drew the coveted permits for the area we chose, near Rawlins.
By the time we had everything lined up we agreed that a Wyoming hunt by a nonresident calls for plenty of ad vance planning. But it’s worth it.
We left home in our pickup truck early on Friday, October 17. We reached Dixon, about 1,500 miles away, before noon on Sunday, October 19.
We were to stay with Harry and Jean Russell, ranchers who run cattle and sheep on a 10,000-acre spread along the Little Snake River three or four miles out of Dixon, in a great game area. To the east, mountains climb steeply to the Divide; to the south and west lies a big sagebrush plateau; and to the north, gently rolling foothills run to the horizon, with sagebrush tall er than a man’s head in the draws. There are deer in those draws, antelope on the plateau, and elk in the mountains.
For any sportsman living in the Eastern half of the nation, one of the great things about a hunt in the West, in my opinion, is the chance to sample the matchless friendliness and hospital ity of the people there. You won’t find better folk anywhere in the world, and the Russells were a perfect example.
Sally and I didn’t want to waste a minute. We ate lunch at the pleasant modern ranch house and then, at Harry’s suggestion, drove out to the sagebrush hills to look for deer. It was typical mule-deer country, with long draws tapering down onto the flats, thickets of sage, and an occasional clump of aspen where the old bucks could hide. Sally was accustomed to the dense whitetail cover back in Michigan, and this didn’t look right to her.
“Where on earth do you expect to find a deer here?” she asked.
I explained that mule deer, unlike our whitetails, like open country.
“They can see you as far off as you can see them,” I told her, “and they seem to feel distance means safety.”
We both were carrying Winchester Model 70’s, Sally’s the .243, mine a .270. Both rifles were custom-stocked by a friend, Dennis Kilpatrick. Dennis is a dispatcher in the Battle Creek fire department and an outstanding stock maker on the side. He studied under Tom Shelhamer, the old master of that trade at Dowagiac, Michigan. Our stocks had been prettied up by Tom, who is semi-retired but still does a lit tle work, such as checkering.
We loaded the guns, took a last look around to make sure of our bearings, and started into the hills, working one draw after another. I felt a little concern on one score. If Sally got a crack at a mule deer it would probably be a running shot. She’s a good shot, but she’s also a southpaw. If she had to get off two or three shots at a running deer, she might have trouble working the right-handed bolt on her Model 70 fast enough to keep up with him.
We didn’t have to wait long. At the third or fourth draw we came to, I caught movement in fairly open cover 400 yards to my right. It was a doe, feeding slowly toward the top of a hill. I could see no other deer with her. Sally was 500 yards to my left and a little higher above the draw. I decided to stay put for a bit and watch the doe, to make sure she was alone. Nothing else stirred, and at the end of five minutes I concluded it was time to move on.
I hadn’t taken three steps when two big bucks went crashing out of the head-high sage. They had been lying there all the time, only 50 feet away, but the brush was so thick I hadn’t seen them. If I had not been walking straight toward them they’d have stayed doggo in their beds and let me mosey past, and I’d never have known they were there. That’s a typical mule-deer trick in such a place.
All this time the second buck was angling up to my left on a dead run, headed straight for Sally. The thought flashed through my mind that she’d probably get off only one shot. I hoped it would be a good one.
I could see that both bucks had good racks, but I didn’t have time to count points. The closest buck was quartering away to my right, running hard. My rifle was scoped with a Redfield variable, 2X to 7X. I swung the cross hairs just ahead of him and fired. The 130-grain silvertip caught him a little too far back. He humped at the shot, then stopped and stood broadside. I couldn’t have asked for more. My next shot centered him, and he went down in a heap.
All this time the second buck was angling up to my left on a dead run, headed straight for Sally. The thought flashed through my mind that she’d probably get off only one shot. I hoped it would be a good one.
Then the .243 cracked. The deer didn’t flinch or change stride, and I knew she had missed. Then, Bang … Whump! Bang … Whump! two more shots echoed down the hill to me.
“Good Lord,” I thought, “she’s working that bolt and she hit him twice.”
Then there was another Bang …Whump! and Sally was yelling, “I got him, Bob, I got him! Come here quick.”
The buck had fallen on an open sagebrush-covered hillside patched here and there with snow. It was a queer place for a war dance, but Sally was doing one when I got up to her, and I grabbed her and joined in. I don’t know which of us was more proud Sally of her deer, or I of my wife. She had hit her buck fair and square with three of her four shots.
Both bucks had nice racks. Sally’s had seven points, mine eight, counting both sides by the Eastern system.
The work that’s part of every deer hunt came next. But at least on those dry Wyoming hills we could later drive closer to our kills than was usual in the cutover timber and cedar swamps back home. We dressed the bucks, left them there to be brought in the next morning, and headed back to the ranch. By the time we got there, the western sky was turning to red and gold.
We spent most of the next forenoon getting the two deer back to the ranch. The Russells’ son Harry Jr., then a high school senior, had sugested that as soon as he got home from school that after noon the three of us go scouting for elk. He knew where to look.
Sally and I were ready when the school bus drove into the yard. Harry grabbed his old hat and his rifle, and we piled into a four-wheel-drive vehi cle and headed for the hills.
We bounced over horse trails so rough and narrow that a goat would have had to watch his footing on them. But at least the scenery was grand. We were admiring it when suddenly Harry cried “Elk!” and slammed on the brakes. He had caught a glimpse of three cows, about two-thirds of the way up a steep, timbered mountain slope. I was carrying 7 x 35 Bausch & Lomb binoculars, and we piled out to glass the slope where we had seen the elk.
We picked up the three cows easily enough, but we were not interested in them. Our licenses called for bulls only, and we wanted a trophy or nothing. Nowhere on the mountain could we spot another elk. But Harry kept saying, “A bull ought to be with them somewhere.”
Finally he suggested that we climb for a closer look. It was late in the afternoon, and we’d have to hurry. Sally wasn’t eager to tackle the steep slope at that altitude, so we left her to watch the show from the vehicle.
After we had climbed a few hundred yards, Harry and I decided to split up, to better the odds that one of us might see a bull. Harry angled off to my left and went out of sight.
The climb was tough. We were high enough that I felt keenly the effects of altitude. Early snow had drifted half way to my knees in the timber. My legs ached from bucking it, my heart pounded, and I couldn’t get enough of the thin air into my lungs. My .270 is a featherweight rifle, but right then it seemed to weigh 15 pounds.
In the fading sunlight of late after noon, I finally broke into a little opening that gave me a clear view of the spot where we had seen the three cows. If my heart hadn’t already been knocking against my ribs, it certainly would have raced right then. The three had become a band of about 30 — more elk than I had expected ever to see in one place.
There was one drawback: I couldn’t see horns anywhere in the bunch.
The elk were still a long way from me, but they spotted me the instant I broke into the little clearing. We stood and stared at each other as I tried frantically to find a rack. Looking at that many cow elk might be exciting, but it was also frustrating.
At last the cows nearest the top of the mountain turned and went over the ridge, single file. The rest followed. They were not spooked, so they didn’t hurry.
Then for the first time I saw two more elk standing half-hidden behind a big cedar, lower down and closer to me. Were these the bulls I was hoping for? It seemed very likely, but I couldn’t be sure.
I dropped down behind a log and glassed them. I still couldn’t see horns, but while I was trying to figure a way to get closer one of the elk stepped into the open. He was a spike. Then the other one stepped out alongside the spikehorn. He was a handsome four pointer, just what I was looking for.
In the poor light I estimated the range at more than 400 yards. I was on a sharp angle downhill from my target and had to shoot through the tops of trees to boot. I held the crosshairs about a foot over the elk’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The .270 roared, its blast echoing down the mountain. The bull didn’t move.
I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe I had missed so badly that I hadn’t even spooked him. I bolted an other round into the chamber, used the same hold, and let fly again. This time I got belted above the eye with the scope, but I didn’t do the bull any damage. That second shot spooked him, however, and he wheeled and started up the way the cows had gone. I shot three more times, with blood running from my cut forehead, and never touched him. Then I just sat there and watched him go over the top.
I kicked myself all the way back to the vehicle, wondering how I’d explain. We took Tuesday off, and Harry and Jean drove us on a sight-seeing tour of the Colorado-Utah area along the Green River. It was a beautiful October day, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.
My legs ached from bucking it, my heart pounded, and I couldn’t get enough of the thin air into my lungs. My .270 is a featherweight rifle, but right then it seemed to weigh 15 pounds.
The next day was set aside for our initiation to antelope hunting. Our permits were for an area southeast of Rawlins, about 60 miles as the crow flies from where we were staying. But the pass over the Continental Divide to Encampment was snowed in, so we had to drive 125 miles around to get there.
Sally and I rolled out at 4 a.m. to get an early start. We reached Rawlins around daylight and pulled into a gas station to fill up and inquire about our area. The attendant pointed out some spots on our map and predicted we’d have no trouble finding antelope.
By 8:30 we had located a band with one buck, but for the next hour we couldn’t get close enough for a shot.
The day was bright and sunny, and as I drove along slowly over rolling hills we saw many bands of antelope. But the season had only three more days to go, and the pronghorns had been hunt ed hard and were very spooky.
Then, as we eased over the crest of a knoll, Sally yelled, “Look at that buck!”
We had spooked him out of his bed, and he was a gem. But as he ran we saw that he had a broken hind leg. Another hunter had crippled him. He went only about 75 yards before he fell in a clump of sagebrush.
“You want to take him?” I asked Sally.
She shook her head. “I might wound him again,” she said, “and he’s suffered enough. You go ahead.”
I took her .243, sat down, and held at the base of the buck’s neck. He never knew what hit him. He was a fine trophy, beautifully marked, with even horns that measured 14 5/8 inches. Even more gratifying, we had done away with a cripple.
We hunted hard for four more hours without getting near an antelope. Then we spotted a lone buck with a big band of does. We made a long roundabout stalk, duck-walking and crawling for an hour. When we peeked over the top of the hill behind which we had seen him, he had vanished.
Sally was pooped, so I went to work with the 20X Bausch & Lomb spotting scope and finally sighted the buck out in a big shallow bowl. He was so far off that he looked no bigger than a fair-size dog. There was no way to get close, but we wormed our way to the rim and I asked Sally if she thought she could score at that distance. In my own mind, I was sure she couldn’t.
“I’d like to try,” she said after a pause.
She lay prone, using my down jacket as a rest for the .243.
“Wait till he’s broadside,” I told her, “and hold a foot high.”
I was using the spotting scope. Sally’s rifle cracked. She missed, but the buck spun and pranced as if he couldn’t decide which way to run. Sally was using 100-grain Hornady bullets with 47 grains of Norma powder behind them. She shot again, and the antelope went down.
I’ll never forget that shot. Sally paced the distance. She’s only 5 feet 2, and her paces are far short of a full yard, but she counted 577 of them. The range had to be at least 400 yards.
“That’s the only rifle I’d own,” she told me.
Her buck was a good one too. The horns measured 12½ inches.
When Harry Russell ribbed me that evening with, “Your wife hits what she shoots at,” I didn’t have much to say. We were due to leave for home on Saturday. Thursday morning, with two days left, we went back to elk hunting. Sally and I were headed for the high country before the sun had thawed the white frost from the sagebrush in the Little Snake valley. Our lunch, a thermos of hot coffee, binoculars, a spotting scope, and two cameras jounced on the seat between us.
It was almost noon when we parked the pickup at the base of the mountain where I had missed the bull three days earlier. We had a long hard climb ahead of us, so we wolfed down our lunch, gulped a cup of coffee, and started up.
The mountain was dished in at the top. I suppose it had once been a vol cano and that the crater had filled with debris over a few million years. Our plan was to hunt along the broken rim in the hope of jumping a bull out of the patches of timber that ran like fingers up the slope.
We had climbed for an hour when we came upon a sorry sight. A doe mule deer had tangled a hind leg in a four strand barbwire fence. She had been caught for some time, for she was weak from struggling and the flesh was torn off the leg from hoof to knee.
I managed to pry her leg out of the fence, but then we saw that her hip was broken. She fell and lay helpless, unable to get up. I knew there was only one thing to do. Sally knew it too.
“Put her out of her misery,” she said quietly.
So I shot the poor doe.
Just below the top of the mountain we came to a short ridge that ran parallel with the rim. Beyond the ridge lay the pocket and the thick stand of aspen I described at the beginning.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when those four elk and a buck deer bolted out of that pocket, for I realized even before I had climbed high enough to look down into it that it was a natural hiding place for any animal that wanted to bed down and stay hidden during the day. But that fore knowledge didn’t make the situation any easier on my nerves.
I watched the bull leave his bed and go crashing into the aspens.
“Hold it!” I told myself. I’d have him dead to rights when he left the thicket, 150 to 200 yards away. Then I couldn’t wait any longer. I got the crosshairs on his shoulder as he crossed a narrow opening, and the .270 roared. I missed. The 130-grain bullet had nicked brush.
“Damn it, you know better,” I said to myself angrily.
I slammed another cartridge into the chamber and kept the scope on the bull. He lunged clear of the brush, stopped, and turned to look back at me. The crosshairs steadied just behind his shoulder, and I concentrated on not jerking the trigger. He dropped at the shot, tried once to get up, and fell back. He was dead while the blast of the .270 was still echoing in my ears.
I slammed another cartridge into the chamber and kept the scope on the bull. He lunged clear of the brush, stopped, and turned to look back at me.
Sally and I scrambled down to him, but neither of us could think of any thing to say right then. I had killed a dream elk. His antlers were 51 inches along the main beams and had a spread of 48½, with six long symmetrical points to a side. Measured after a 60-day drying period by the Boone and Crockett Club method, he scored 362 2/8 — not big enough for the record book, under today’s minimum of 375, but plenty big enough in my book.
The bull had been around for many years and had lived hard. He had an old wound through the hock of a hind leg, a chunk of flesh gouged out under one eye, and numerous scars on his body. He was the king of that mountain, but evidently he’d had to defend his title on many occasions.
The next morning Harry Russell, his son, and I went up the mountain to pack out the elk. When we reached it Harry got off of his sure-footed mountain horse and stood staring at the magnificent bull.
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“I’ve lived in this country all my life,” he said, “but I’ve never seen one like that before.”
It took us until 9 o’clock that night to get the head, hide, and meat packed down off the mountain.
Sally and I started for Michigan the next day. As the gleaming white peaks of the Rockies faded behind us, across the sagebrush plains of eastern Colorado, we came to one conclusion: we would never have a better hunt than that one.
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