This story, “Frosting on the Cake,” appeared in the June 1967 issue of Outdoor Life. It began with this note from the editor:
Bob Kuhn is one of the leading wildlife artists of his day, well known to the readers of OUTDOOR LIFE for his dramatic and lifelike paintings of hunting and big-game scenes. Since 1942, he has illustrated dozens of hunting stories and painted some 25 covers for this magazine.
Believing that a wildlife painter should get his material firsthand, and also rating hunting one of his favorite sports, Kuhn has been hunting since his boyhood at Buffalo, New York. Now 47, he lives at Roxbury, Connecticut, and goes after big game as often as he gets the chance. Here he tells the story of a hunt for a trophy he had wanted for a long time.
IN THE YEARS I have made my living as a wildlife artist I have done my share of hunting, and I can’t complain about my luck. I’ve made trips for big game to Alaska, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Montana, Maine, Kenya, and Tanganyika, and I’ve taken some fair heads and skins. The list includes whitetail and mule deer, pronghorn antelope, goat, moose, caribou, black and grizzly bear, various African antelope, zebra, and a Cape buffalo. But there was one gap that I had long wanted to fill. No elk head hung in my trophy room.
I had painted plenty of elk but never shot one. I know that killing an elk is not regarded as a particularly difficult thing to do, but I just had no luck at it. I made my first elk hunt in British Columbia in 1951, and it was a lulu except for one factor — I didn’t get an elk. Mike Cramond of Vancouver and I hooked up with an old Shuswap guide, and we packed into the back side of Jasper National Park country. It took us two days to chop through deadfalls the 12 miles to where we camped. We had a big basin to ourselves, and in five days of hunting we each got a good goat, and we collaborated on a small but prime grizzly. Then we walked into a band of elk.
The cows were standing around, looking surprised and stupid. The bull was bedded down behind a windfall. Mike and the guide could see him, but I couldn’t. “Shoot the bull! Shoot the bull!” the guide was yelling at me, and we had a lively mixup for a minute. The elk lit out from his bed like a big bird. I took one quick poke at him, but my scope was fogged and I missed. In two jumps that bull was gone.
I tried again in the Montana Bitterroots a few years later but failed to see an elk in eight days of hard hunting.
The thing finally reached a point where my desire to take a bull with a good rack was about as bothersome as a case of seven-year itch. So when Jim Bourne, executive secretary of the Montana Guides and Outfitters Association, came up with plans for what promised to be a successful elk hunt (I’ll confess I had done a little needling beforehand) I didn’t hesitate for even a minute.
Jim picked October of 1965 as the right time, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in northwestern Montana as the right place, and Sonny Benson, based in Polson, as the outfitter with the most promising territory. Sonny had been packing hunters into his area on the Little Salmon River for a dozen years, and the percentage who came out lucky had been very high. Jim would join us on the hunt.
By the time Jim, Sonny, and I had all the details ironed out, my head was filled with visions of parklike meadows, accessible on horseback, each with its bull elk and his harem, plus a few smaller bulls hanging around to keep things interesting.
All I’d need to do would be to size up the trophy qualities of those walking hatracks and pick the one I wanted. I’d kill a bull with a fine, symmetrical head, I decided, big enough to brag about but not to outsized to fit in my trophy room.
“Yes, I got my elk last fall,” I could tell my friends, as offhandedly as if that were something any hunter with one good eye could do any time he got around to it. Maybe as the years went by and I related the story, the head would even grow big enough to be mentioned, always casually of course, as a Boone and Crockett candidate. Of such stuff dreams are made.
After 25 years of hunting trophy game, I should have known better.
Jim and Sonny told me there was also a possibility of other game such as bears — both black and grizzly — and goats. They’d be the frosting on the cake.
At the last minute Jim had to back out because of business pressures. But on October 19, many months after we had first discussed the project, I arrived at Sonny’s base camp on the Little Salmon, about seven miles above its confluence with the Big Salmon. That was 18 kidney-jarring miles on a Forest Service trail from where we had started our horseback ride, at the highway 15 miles north of Seeley Lake.
The trip in had been tough but interesting. We rode through beautiful mountain country, over a line of jagged peaks, up and down countless switchbacks, and across slides and high basins. Finally we headed down into the great stands of virgin timber that make up part of the area’s wild treasure.
The camp was a good comfortable one with a big corral, cook tent, tack tent, and five sleeping tents. Each sleeping tent had two cots and a small wood stove. The usual hitching rail ran along one side of the corral, with feed boxes spaced the length of it. Just 25 yards behind the camp, the Little Salmon tumbled.
Best of all, the outfit was presided over by Buford Boyles, a camp cook who, if he couldn’t convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse, could at least concoct a respectable stew from it. He even cooked mountain goat so that it tasted as good as the best roast lamb. He was also a great storyteller and as salty and companionable a hunting-camp partner as I have ever encountered. Boyles worked long days, from 4 a.m. until 8 at night. But if he had any free time he either went out hunting (he carried an iron-sighted .300 Savage and prided himself on his fast shooting) or fished the holes in the Little Salmon with spinner and worms for cutthroats and Dolly Vardens.
Some of our best camp meals resulted from his fishing. At the end of our hunt he was going to take his teenage son out of school for a one-week trip to eastern Montana for deer and antelope.
Now in his middle 50’s, Boyles had lived all his life in elk country and knew a lot about elk behavior. But he was also a firm believer in the theory that hunting success is mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
“You’re ziggin’ when they’re zaggin’,” he told me one night when I rode in empty handed.
Benson had four other hunters in camp, and two guides to handle them. Duane Skogen and Tony Wyatt were oil men from Billings. They’d be guided by Larry Woodgiard, a young wrangler just turned guide. The other partners were Ralph Nienas, a truck dealer, also from Billings, and Bob Glaser of Fort Dodge, Iowa, in the meat-processing business. Their guide was Alvin McKay.
The hunt got off to an exciting start. We ate the usual black-dark hunting-camp breakfast the first morning, checked our guns, and headed out at first light, bound for a slide area along the main trail, where snow had slashed a skein of narrow swaths years before. The slides were grown over with brush now, but free of timber. Since elk were still feeding high up, those open areas would give us our best chance of seeing what we were looking for.
Without a few places of that kind, I might add, hunt ing on the Little Salmon would be tough indeed. The mountains are all scarred with slides, and I’d guess that something like nine out of 10 elk killed there in the early part of the season are taken in those areas. Later on, after snow forces the animals down nearer to camp, the hunting is a bit easier — unless everything gets snowed in.
No more than a quarter of a mile from camp, just as the light was beginning to get good, Sonny and I walked out at the foot of a big slide. We saw a dark shape move from the fringe of brush high up along the edge of the timber.
“Bear!” Sonny grunted.
We edged ahead a few steps, he put his 7X binoculars on it, and I heard him suck in his breath.
“That’s a grizzly,” he said. “One of the hunters in our last party dressed out a spike bull up there, and he’s got what’s left of it.”
We stepped cautiously, the guide with his binoculars and I with my rifle, a Remington Model 700C bolt action in 7 mm. Magnum, a flat-shooting caliber with plenty of reaching power.
The bear looked a long way off, and I hesitated. But when Sonny moved to a better vantage point I followed, ready to shoot.
I never got the chance. Unknown to us, Skogen and Wyatt and Woodgiard had come out near the head of the same slide, closer to the bear than we were. While I was still getting settled into position, the slam of Skogen’s rifle echoed off the mountainside.
The grizzly reared up, acting more surprised than scared, and Skogen tried again. That was enough for the bear. He dropped back on all fours and came barreling down, straight for Sonny and me. I’ll be a long time forgetting Sonny’s excited yell of “Here he comes!”
We learned later that what happened was that Skogen had overestimated the range in the poor light, just as I had. We were about 200 yards from the grizzly when he started his downhill run, but I would have guessed it at least 300, and Skogen had made the same kind of mistake. The steep pitch of the slide also fooled him. He held over the bear’s back and put both of his shots too high.
There was no chance for me to shoot. We could keep track of the bear by the way he crashed through the brush, and a couple of times I glimpsed a pa:tch of brown, but never enough for a target. He wasn’t charging, for he didn’t know we were there, and he wasn’t close. But a grizzly doesn’t have to be close to make a man think twice, especially if he’s running straight at you. I had painted situations of this kind plenty of times, but now that I was in it, it was different.
The bear was about halfway down to us when he changed course and ran for the timber at the edge of the slide. For a second I saw all of him, big and dark and low-slung, as he crossed a narrow lane. But he didn’t give me the time I needed to get him in my scope, and my visions of a good bearskin rug evaporated.
He went out of sight so abruptly that I thought Skogen had hit him after all, and he was down in the brush. I ran all the way up to the place where he had disappeared, but when I got there, winded and excited, there was no bear around. At least he had gotten the elk hunt off the ground in a hurry. Later that morning a smaller grizzly crossed that same slide, in plain sight but high and out of range.
At first light, while we had been messing with bears, Nienas and Glaser all but stepped on a fine bull elk, browsing at the edge of a slide two miles above camp. Glaser put him down, and we devoted the afternoon to quartering and packing him in. Those two hunters continued to be hip-deep in elk much of the time for the next week, and Nienas killed a good bull. Wyatt and Skogen also bumped into a few but saw none good enough to shoot. I didn’t even have that much luck.
I came close to seeing elk the second day, and bull elk at that, but not quite close enough. Sonny and I left camp before daylight, planning to ride three or four miles up the main trail and then fork off on a rough side trail into Gill Creek Canyon, high country where he thought elk might be hanging out.
We hadn’t ridden half a mile into the canyon, picking our way through a tangle of blowdowns, when the wild, strange music of a bugling bull rose loud and clear above the chatter of Gill Creek. A second bull answered almost immediately, and very soon the chorus swelled all around us. Finally there or five elk challenging one another.
One or two were lovelorn young squealers, but one was an old harem master that, to judge by his low, chesty tone, was probably just what I wanted. Sonny got into the act with his elk call and drew some belligerent replies, but none of the bulls would risk moving down to meet this new challenger.
We finally tied our horses, crossed the creek, and climbed on foot up a network of game trails that led to open slides. The bugling continued until midmorning, but do our best, we couldn’t get sight of an elk, and the rest of the day was no more productive. That was the night the cook told me I was zigging when they were zagging.
I hunted hard the next few days, and Sonny did everything he could think of. We climbed the heights, sat at the slides, and still-hunted in the timber, but our efforts were in vain. Skogen and Wyatt did a little better. They didn’t catch up with a shootable elk, either, but they both took good goats.
Meanwhile, Glaser and Nienas, on whom the gods had already smiled and who didn’t care whether they saw another wapiti or not, kept bumping into them-bulls, cows, big ones, little ones, good racks, poor racks, and no racks at all.
A couple of days after the morning Sonny and I heard the bugling, we hiked back shortly before noon to the foot of the slide where we had encountered the grizzly. We were standing inside a little opening, discussing whether we should go on to camp for some lunch or hunt hungry the rest of the day. Sonny glanced up toward the top of the slide, and his eyes widened. “I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “There’s another bear up there on those elk leavings!”
It was a smaller bear than the one that had barged down at us, and although it looked brownish I took it for a black. I also saw that it was big enough to make a good rug.
“Sit down and take your time,” Sonny cautioned.
Before I could get organized the bear backed into the brush. But he wasn’t spooked, and a few seconds later he reappeared. My rifle was scoped with a 4X Redfield, and when I got the crosshairs steady on his shoulder I squeezed off. He went backward out of sight like a cat getting off a hot stove. My Remington was loaded with 175-grain soft-points. The range was about 200 yards, and if I had put my shot where I meant to, it should have flattened him in his tracks.
“I guess I missed him,” I admitted sheepishly.
Sonny’s reply was a completely noncommittal, “We better hike up and see.” We checked carefully but could find no sign of a hit, no blood, no tuft of hair where the bear had stood. When we combed the brush for half an hour without seeing even a track, we agreed to return to camp and eat some lunch, then come back and have another look. “I didn’t hit him,” I grumbled, “and we’re probably wasting our time, but we can’t quit until we’re sure.” Sonny agreed.
Boyles hiked back with us. “From the way you say that bear acted, I’ve got a hunch you killed him,” he told me firmly.
We climbed the slide and fanned out. In about five minutes the cook hailed us.
“You’re looking too far away,” he yelled. “I’ve found your bear.”
Hit just behind a shoulder, it had piled up under a spruce, stone dead, only 20 feet from where I’d walloped it. It was a youngish black bear, dull brown in color, not the bright reddish-brown known as cinnamon. I had seen others like it in Yellowstone, and Sonny and Buford said the color was not too unusual.
The bear had a good pelt, and that piece of luck went far to soften my disappointment over an elk hunt that wasn’t exactly a hot-shot affair so far. And if I had needed a lesson in never giving up on wounded game until I had done everything possible to trail it, which I didn’t, that experience would certainly have been more than enough to supply it.
Toward the end of the week, when my time was running out, Sonny and I rode back into Gill Creek Canyon, left the horses, and went ahead on foot to Gill Lake at the canyon’s head. Sonny had a spike camp there, and we reached it about noon, pooped and drenched from the wet underbrush. There was a small cache of provisions slung in a tree, out of reach of bears. We lowered it, broke out the bottle-gas stove, and wolfed down a couple of bean sandwiches and some hot coffee. Refueling over, we rehoisted the provisions and resumed our hike.
That was a beautiful spot. The valley was narrow, and sheer gray cliffs rose like great fortress walls beyond the fringe of forest on both sides of the canyon. The little lake was crowded with cutthroats eight to 10 inches long. We saw them by the dozens, chasing food in the shallows, suspended in the blue-green depths. I’d like to go back there sometime and try those fish with a fly rod.
Beyond the lake lay a fir-dotted meadow, grading up to an encircling ring of crags. That meadow was as hoof-marked as a cow pasture, and over it hung a strong reek of elk. A few days earlier this would have been the place. But now, for some reason, the elk had moved out; the whole meadow had an empty and deserted look.
Sonny and I stopped at the edge of the timber to take it all in.
“It’s hard to believe,” I said, as much to myself as to him, “that in this whole sweep of goat country there isn’t a goat to be … oops, what’s that?” My eyes had stopped on a white dot on the cliffs directly above us.
Looking back, if I had foreseen the hard climbing that spot of white was to lead to, I half think I might have kept my own council about it. But I suppose I’d have pointed it out anyway, regardless of what lay ahead.
Sonny gave it a quick check with his binoculars.
“It’s a billy,” he told me. “Let’s go.” The goat was bedded on one of a series of buttresses that jutted from the crest of a sheer ridge 1,200 to 1,500 vertical feet above us. It would be much farther the way we’d have to climb.
A slide, one away from the billy’s observation post, seemed to offer the best route up. I saw Sonny glance at his watch.
“It’s 12:30,” he commented. “We’ve got the whole afternoon.” I didn’t realize right then that we’d need it.
The ridge started at an easy grade but turned steeper as we climbed. That was a heart-pounding, gut-busting stalk. In places the footing was so poor that we grabbed at alders, shintangle, anything available to pull ourselves up and keep from plunging down the rain-slick slope.
The guide had been bunged up in an argument with a truck while hauling hay the previous April. One arm was severely damaged at the elbow, and the other hand half paralyzed from a pinched nerve.
So Sonny Benson wasn’t operating at peak efficiency as he scrambled up that slide with me, but he was still by far the best man on the mountain. He must have been a real brute before he tangled with the truck, I thought to myself.
At the end of the climb we came to a thicket of scrub evergreens that gave us cover, and we wormed up through them to where we could see the goat, still bedded on an outcrop beyond a field of tumbled rock. The range was about 200 yards. I took off my cap, laid it on a log, and rested the rifle on it.
The climb had left me in poor condition for shooting, and the excitement of that big white billy in my scope didn’t help. But I finally got the crosshairs where I wanted them and squeezed off.
“Over his back,” said Sonny.
The goat bounced to his feet, and through the scope I could see that he had stopped working his cud. I held lower, and squeezed.
“Just under!” Sonny said more desperately.
I slammed the bolt back and ahead — on an empty magazine. I had loaded with only two shells to begin with, and now my flat-shooting, custom-grade rifle was just an elegant but useless toy. The goat was on his way.
My fingers went frantically to my cartridge belt, fumbled, and freed one new round. I shoved it into the open action and bolted it home. It took hardly more than a couple of seconds, but it seemed to take more like five minutes.
Considering that he’d been shot at twice, that billy didn’t behave the way goats are supposed to. He was climbing a narrow ledge that angled steeply up the face of the rock wall, but moving deliberately and without the slightest show of fear or panic. All the same, this shot would have to be on the money. He wouldn’t give me another chance.
I found his shoulder with the crosshairs, and at the report of the rifle he dropped, kicked himself off the ledge, and tumbled end over end down into a small chimney. At the bottom of it he hung up in brush, and I put a second shot in at the sticking point. That ended his thrashing.
All we had to do now was get to him. He was in plain sight, but about as inaccessible as a fly on the ceiling. Sonny led, picking his way up the ridge. I tried a lower route but had to backtrack. I was below him when he finally reached the goat, concluded it couldn’t be skinned where it hung suspended in that vertical chimney, and nudged it loose.
At his yell of “Timber!” I ducked under an overhang. The billy came flying past me in a shower of rocks. It stopped on the slide below, and I wouldn’t have given a wooden nickel for my trophy after that fall. But when we got down to it the only damage was an inch or two broken off the tip of one horn.
We braced ourselves on a slope of loose rock as steep as a church roof and got the head and cape off. Then Sonny shouldered the trophy, and I took the rifle and our cameras. We inched across the slide to a strip of timber and started down. It was 4 o’clock when we hit the elk meadow and the ground under our feet began to level off. Miles of rough trail still lay between us and the horses, and about that time I began to realize that a whole afternoon is none too much for a goat hunt.
We made a forced march to the horses, tied the head and cape behind Sonny’s saddle, and climbed aboard. At that point I was ready to slump and let my horse haul me back to base. Visions of a long, strong drink were dancing in my head, and the less effort I had to make on the way to our camp, the better.
But the horse, aptly named Hoppy, had other ideas. He couldn’t abide mountain goats, even dead ones, and that rolled-up hide behind Sonny’s saddle was too much for him. He danced and jumped and skittered, between trees and through down timber, and only luck saved me from being skewered on a spruce spike or bashed against a log.
I had once served in the merchant marine, though, and I fell back on that experience for the verbal ammunition to convince Hoppy that he was doing the wrong thing. He gradually simmered down. Once or twice after that he made a quick jump sideways, roughly his own length, but that was only to see if his passenger was staying on the alert.
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We plodded into camp at last light and had the drinks I’d been dreaming of. While we ate, Sonny and I took turns elaborating on how a bunged-up outfitter and a semi-soft picture maker had scaled a mountain cliff and killed a goat. The lies were of a harmless nature, only slightly improving on the facts.
I left for home a couple of days later, a very satisfied and happy hunter. I didn’t have the cake, but I did have the frosting, and I had enjoyed getting it, too. I’ll go back and kill my elk another time.
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