MATT AND I WERE GLASSING for elk in the Stinkhole Mountains of southwest Montana.
Actually, that’s a lie. As far as I know, the Stinkhole Mountains do not exist outside my and my friends’ imaginations. The fact is, I am not at liberty to reveal the name of the mountains where I really do hunt elk. Matt and I have a pact of silence regarding our elk spots. To find an elk spot that no one else hunts, we have suffered mind-boggling heat and bone-chilling cold, blistered feet and torn ligaments, sprained ankles and chapped asses, and we’re not going to start advertising the location.
So anyway, we were sitting on a bluff above the Stinkhole River, glassing the Stinkhole Mountains. The sun was nearing the western horizon. As it dropped toward the ground, the clouds in the sky turned the color of salmon fillets. The mountain range rose abruptly from the foothills on the edge of the valley. The mountains were so steep that they looked like a long, straight wave folding over on a beach. From where we were sitting, we were a two-mile walk from the edge of the mountains; the distance allowed us a panoramic view covering many miles of slopes. We could see five miles to the north, five miles to the south. The air was cold enough that I had to pull my shirtsleeves down over my hands to keep them warm as I gripped my binoculars.
Finding elk involves a lot of just sitting and looking. Elk live in the wildest, remotest tracts of wilderness in the lower forty-eight. The cows weigh around four hundred pounds and the bulls weigh up to twice that, but they can vanish into the mountains like little birds. They have bodies the color of dried grass and necks the color of pine bark. In thick timber, you can get close enough to smell an elk and still not see it. The trick to hunting an elk is finding it before it sees you.
I mentally divided the vast expanse of land into little sections and then began picking those sections apart with the binoculars. When glassing long distances, I spend a lot of time examining suspicious shapes and colors that usually turn out to be stumps and rocks and patches of shade. To be good at finding animals, you have to resist boredom when you’re looking around. If I can’t positively identify an animal-shaped object that catches my attention, I’ll come back to it later and see whether it moved. Or I’ll just watch it, then watch it some more.
Hunting in the Stinkhole Mountains for elk, Matt and I have glassed mountain goats, bighorn sheep, black bears, wolves, coyotes, whitetail deer, weasels, martens, mule deer, moose, antelope, mountain lions, and loads of other animals. Next to elk, we’re most interested in the whereabouts of grizzly bears. These mountains hold one of the nation’s highest concentrations of grizzly bears. Every year a hunter or two will get scratched up by a grizzly. Or severely mauled. Or killed. Being close to grizzlies requires that you be wary—but not too wary. If you’re thinking about bears too much, just about anything can start to look furry and alive. Rocks take on menacing characteristics. Stumps stand up. You always think you “might have seen something.” But when it really is a bear, even if it’s two miles away, you instantly realize, binoculars or not, “Holy shit! There’s a grizzly!”
As we glassed, Matt guided my eyes to a small herd of mule deer he’d spotted grazing on a grassy plateau. “Do you see the third peak on the north side of the second valley?” he asked. “Okay, go down from that peak to where the juniper gets sort of thick, and then look below that little patch of lodgepole pines to the right. Okay, go down from there, and you’ll see a little rock slide. The rock is grayish, with a white strip. Well, just below the end of that white strip and to the right—”
“Oh, shit. There they are. Good eyes.”
The sun was low and bright. From miles away, we could sometimes see the quick flashes of sun shining off birds’ wings as they passed from tree to tree. The flashes reminded me of flipped coins.
After a lot of looking, we still hadn’t seen any elk. It had been a dry summer, and warm. We discussed the possibility that the elk were still way up in the high country, on their summer range, though the animals usually move into this area in the early fall. We kicked around the idea of heading over to the eastern side of the range, or just going up into these hills and hoping we’d find something.
As we discussed our options, I was glassing far to the north, up behind the Lone Butte Ranch, when something caught my eye. “I got elk,” I said.
Matt turned his binoculars toward where I was looking. “Where?”
“Well, hold on a minute. Maybe I’m fucked up. Oh, nope. Loads of elk. Maybe forty or so. Up on the ridge above Badger Creek, behind Lone Butte Ranch.”
Matt always says that, when viewed from miles away, elk look like little maggots crawling around on a hillside. The first time he said that, I thought it was a stupid comparison. But after he’d gotten the image in my head, anytime I looked at elk in the distance, I couldn’t help but agree. They do look like little maggots. Even so, I don’t like to compare elk to maggots. Looking at maggots usually makes me feel a little nauseated, but looking at elk makes me feel hungry. In my mind, elk are the supreme animal—the biggest, best-tasting animal around. You might get a mule deer that is more tender, or an antelope that is more flavorful, but for consistent, good eating, elk are unrivaled. The closest comparison to elk meat is beef. I hesitate to compare a native animal that can run full-throttle up a one-thousand-foot incline to a slovenly, Old World creature that walks around a fenced pasture with its own green shit caked on its body, but elk and beef do taste somewhat similar. However, wild elk has more flavor, has far less fat and cholesterol, and is 100 percent organic and free-range.
The Lone Butte Ranch is one of those gorgeous, sprawling ranches that have gone in recent years from a hardworking cattle operation to a celebrity trophy ranch. The ranch covers a stretch of grassland and rolling hills along the Stinkhole River, bordered on the backside by high mountain passes and snow-covered peaks. At the time Matt and I started hunting the Stinkhole Mountains, the Lone Butte was owned by an action-adventure movie star. We entertained the idea of sneaking across the ranch to get into the mountains behind it, but rumors had spread that the movie star had hired a team of range riders and traveled with a Samoan masseur, a ninja warrior, and a machine gun. It seemed that we’d have better luck walking unannounced into the Playboy Mansion than we would trying to slink across his property. Over time, we figured out a seven-mile route of footpaths and game trails that would get us on the other side of the fence, back behind the ranch. A Samoan masseur with a set of keys to the Lone Butte’s gates could make the drive on a four-wheeler in the time allowed between cocktails and dinner. But past that fence is federally designated wild land, protected by a ban on all motorized vehicles and equipment. In short, the other side of the fence is like the edge of the known world.
It was getting dark. The elk herd seemed calm and relaxed, not likely to travel any great distances. In the morning, they’d probably be in that same area, or at least close by. We picked up our backpacks and started hiking downhill through a stand of Douglas fir. We hit a footpath at the base of a bluff. By then it was dark. The path followed Dry Creek up toward the mountains. As we walked, we went through stands of trees and patches of sagebrush. In his earth-toned clothes, Matt looked like nothing more than a shadow in the darkness in front of me. As we entered one patch of trees, a blue grouse blasted out from some limbs above our heads and nearly scared the shit out of us. Getting startled like that got me thinking about bears, so I pulled my headlamp out of my pack, just in case (I didn’t turn it on), and released the safety latch on my pepper spray. My bow and arrows would be essentially useless against a charging grizzly, because it takes time to load, pull, and aim a bow. Besides, I’d be reluctant to shoot and injure a bear with an arrow unless I really thought it was going to mess me up. A couple of years before, we were heading up a trail like this and came face to face with a grizzly. I nocked an arrow on the string of my bow and pulled out my pepper spray, but once we started hollering and screaming at her, she dropped down on all fours and headed back up the trail.
Over the next two hours, we followed Dry Creek, zigzagging through sagebrush flats and sparse patches of aspens until we’d climbed up to a large bench of grassland. The bench spread toward the mountain and then ended where the rocks and timber on the slopes took over. From there, the mountain rose a couple thousand feet, forming a network of ridges and peaks rarely visited by man. We walked up to the edge of the bench, then headed north until we entered a sheltered stand of aspen.
“What do you think?” Matt asked.
The ground in the aspen stand was rough but flat.
“I guess it’s all right.”
We turned on our headlamps, then took off our packs and unloaded our gear. I had a sleeping bag, a plastic tarp, cutlery, archery equipment, a small cooking pot, rope, basic first aid stuff, a compass, long underwear, a rain jacket, a collapsible canteen, a water purifier, candy bars, and freeze-dried food. I found a stout stick and pried some rocks up out of the ground to form a relatively flat spot for my sleeping bag. The air temperature was above freezing, so I arranged my clothes beneath my sleeping bag for padding instead of putting them on for warmth. Matt has a much higher tolerance for rough ground; he laid out his sleeping bag right where it landed and started cooking us some Italian sausages on an alcohol stove. We had made the sausage from a moose that we had killed right in those same mountains. After dinner we hung our food way up in an aspen tree, out of the reach of bears, and were asleep within ten minutes.
Birds started making a racket long before daylight. The white-bark pine nuts were coming into season and loads of birds—gray jays, Clark’s nuthatches, Steller’s jays—had moved into the area to feed. They sounded anxious to get on with their day. Matt and I were a little slow to crawl out of our bags. The air temperature had dropped radically. Checking my water bottle, I found the mouth crusted with ice. I pulled it into my sleeping bag to thaw it out. We lay there, talking quietly and listening for elk bugles. Generally, bulls bugle during their breeding season, which runs from early September to late October. Bugling has something to do with attracting females and challenging rival bulls, but there’s probably more to it than that. I don’t like to act like I understand it very well. The classic, picture-perfect bugle is a three-note sequence that lasts four or five seconds. It sometimes sounds sort of like the name Gloria pronounced in a long, drawn-out way—minus the G. Just as likely, though, a bugle will sound like an outrageously loud belch, grunt, scream, or sob. Bugling usually intensifies at dawn, and then again right before dark. If you listen to the bugles as you doze off in your sleeping bag, the sounds will infiltrate your dreams.
Aside from the birds, the mountains above us were quiet. We skipped breakfast. Our gear was packed up and we were walking north by the time a thin band of light had formed at the tops of the eastern mountains. I checked the trail for animal tracks, a habit of mine. I saw coyote and deer tracks. The tracks formed clean, definite marks in the dry dust, so I knew the animals had passed through recently, probably that night.
The trail cut through a few meadows and then down into a timbered drainage. The creek at the bottom was just a rocky trickle of water. We stopped to fill a couple of bottles. On the edges of the stream, small patches of claylike dried mud adhered to the tracks like plaster. You would miscalculate the number of animals passing through an area if you relied on the mosaics of tracks formed in this kind of mud; the tracks can last for months and it takes major rain or runoff to wipe them away. The most recent-looking track was from a small bear, but it wasn’t clear enough to show whether it was a grizzly or a black bear.
We crossed two more creeks, and then the trail we were following began to split apart, like the frayed end of broken rope. We believed that the herd of elk was still north and east of us. As the trail ended, we had two options: Either head into the mountains up a narrow canyon and then climb through a pass, or else climb another steep ridge and continue moving north along the face of the mountains.
We decided to keep heading north. The going was slow, our route laden with scattered boulders and thick sagebrush. After we topped the ridge, the properties of the Lone Butte ranch lay down below us. The ranch ran all the way to the foot of the mountains, so we’d have to go uphill to dodge the private property line. This meant traveling along the steep face of a mountain slope. Eventually we came to a V-shaped opening in the face of the mountain. It was Badger Creek. We dropped down into the creek bed and then began following it up. We were leaving the Lone Butte’s property line behind us.
Badger Creek does not have a good footpath, so the going was rough at first. We passed through some thick stands of lodgepole pine with lots of fallen trees that we had to climb over. Then we hit a game trail and picked up the pace. The ground got rockier and the trees started to thin out. As we got into the mountains a ways, we started to notice more and more elk droppings. Steep slopes rose up on either side of us. Looking up Badger Creek, we could see glimpses of snow-covered peaks a couple of miles in front of us, up near the range divide. The wind was coming down the valley, and we caught a few whiffs of elk. Elk smell like horses, only sweeter and wilder. When the animals are using an area heavily, the odor permeates the soil and hangs in the air for days after the animals leave. But the odor we were catching was fresh, like it was still connected to its source. The sun was high in the sky and the air had warmed up to the mid-fifties. The elk were probably bedded down on the slopes, in the shade of the timber.
At the creek Matt and I stripped off our clothes and washed up, then rubbed our armpits, crotches, and feet with Dr. Scholl’s Original Foot Powder. An elk might not be familiar with the smell of Dr. Scholl’s, but it damn sure doesn’t hate that smell as much as it hates the smell of a man. We got dressed again and started working our way up Badger Creek, very slowly.
Every so often we’d climb out of the creek bed to look around. On both sides of the creek, scattered across the valley floor, head-sized rocks had been turned over by foraging bears looking for bugs. The soil at the bottoms of the indentations was still moist.
“I’m trying to decide how much money you’d have to pay me to spend the night here with a bucket of honey strapped to my head,” whispered Matt. It’s a favorite topic of ours when in bear country.
Here and there, among the turned-over rocks, we could see large piles of bear shit. One way to determine the age of bear shit is to see what’s in it. A grizzly’s scat reflects its current diet more accurately than that of any other animal I know.
The shit we found along Badger Creek was packed with the green leaves of knick-knick, a low, berry-producing shrub. Knick-knick grows so low to the ground that bears seem to pick up a lot of extra goods when they graze it. Mixed in with the leaves were berry seeds, pine needles, and dirt. Later in the fall, into October and November, most of the bear shit we find contains white-bark pine nuts. A grizzly’s stomach cannot break down the shells of the nuts; the bears pass large cylinders of the crushed shards, packed together like particleboard. I’ve picked through the scat and found whole, individual nuts inside that were still in good-enough condition to roast and put on a salad, if you were in a pinch.
If a grizzly’s been feeding on a dead deer or elk, its scat will resemble a supersized hairball from a domestic cat, with bone fragments mixed in. In the spring, grizzlies eat various grasses and pass greasy, greenish black balls resembling horse manure. One time I was hunting black bears in the spring, in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains, where a lot of grizzlies live. I found a pile of bear shit made of dark, glossy hair. As I turned a piece over in my hand, I was startled to see that the hair was actually a small black bear’s finger and claw. I have a collection of wild animal scat, and I added that specimen as the centerpiece in my display case.
As Matt and I worked upstream, our view of what lay ahead was blocked by trees. The timber on each hillside extended down toward the center of the valley in long fingers that touched at the creek. When we entered the trees, an eruption of angry pine-squirrel chatter filled the air as the squirrels raced to the tops of the trees. I often wonder if other animals rely on pine squirrels as an alarm system. I tend to doubt it, because pine squirrels’ warnings are too indiscriminate. For example, I’ve watched them bark at grouse. In this case, though, the squirrels’ barks were warranted; I’ve shot pine squirrels with my bow and shredded their meat for burritos, so they had plenty of reason to fear me.
We crept to the upstream edge of the trees and found a comfortable place to sit and glass. The squirrel chatter faded as they forgot about the disturbance and went back to knocking pine cones out of the trees. Beyond the edge of the timber, the valley spread out into a large bowl, shaped like an amphitheater. The amphitheater was made of grass-covered slopes, with small patches of white-bark pine and subalpine fir—maybe three or four trees per patch—sprouting here and there.
Say it really was an amphitheater; Matt and I were crouching where the band would play. In the half circle around us, where the back row of cheering fans would be, we could see scatterings of elk. Maybe thirty animals in all, in groups of three or four, formed the amphitheater’s rim up on the ridges. Those were probably the same animals we’d seen the night before.
Off to our right, the north-facing wall of the amphitheater had much thicker timber than the other walls. Long, wheezy elk bugles came down from the timber, but the trees were too thick for us to see what was going on up there. We could see a vertical slash through the timber where an avalanche had swept the trees away. The path of the avalanche had grown over in grass and flowers and was strewn with bleached, barkless tree trunks that had been uprooted by rushing snow. We glassed the avalanche chute but couldn’t see any elk. It sounded like at least three of them up there, screaming their heads off. One of the bulls sounded like it was up and over the rim, maybe even in the next drainage to the south.
We discussed our options.
“If we step out of here,” I said, “we’ll spook those elk on the rim. But maybe we could go straight up after those bulls. Get in on them by coming in from below.”
“That won’t work,” Matt said. “As soon as we start up that hill, they’ll be downwind of our scent.”
He was right. A slight thermal current was moving uphill. Every few minutes, a breeze swayed the tops of the trees on the slope. To kill an elk with a bow, you’ve got to get within forty yards of it. If an elk is downwind, it will smell you coming three hundred yards away, easily.
The creek wound its way through the floor of the amphitheater. It was lined on each side by aspens and willow, the way maples line the boulevards in university towns. The trees shaded the water, which was so cold it cooled the air above it and caused a slight downhill breeze to move along the creek bed. As a makeshift windsock, I had a grouse feather tied to the limb of my bow with dental floss. The downstream breeze above the water was stiff enough to make the feather stand out horizontally on its leash. We decided to continue moving upstream, with the hope that the air current along the water would carry our smell back downstream instead of up into the hills.
We stayed low, moving slowly and keeping an eye out. The stream bed climbed rapidly like a staircase, sometimes spilling over its path in small waterfalls. After an hour of creeping along, we had moved up through the amphitheater. The walls of the valley closed back in on us like a canyon. When we turned around, we could see the place we’d been sitting when we initially spotted the elk, way down below us. We had passed to the upwind side of the animals, so that we were almost eye level with the elk on the rim.
It was getting into the afternoon, and the sun had passed its midway point in the sky. We stashed some of our gear. Matt tied a length of paracord around a rock and hurled the rock over a high limb. Then he tied the cord to our bag of food and hoisted it up into the tree. He marked the location of our gear on his GPS. We were eight miles from the truck, 9,200 feet above sea level.
We moved to where we could get a good look around. As evening approached, we expected the elk up on the ridges to move down into the bowl of the amphitheater to feed on the grass. The slopes there were carpeted in a common bunch grass called Idaho fescue, which elk seem to prefer above all else. From where we were, we could see some familiar peaks where we’d hunted mountain goats in the past. We looked up there with our binoculars to kill time, but it was too far to tell if any animals were hanging around.
Every ten minutes or so, the bulls on the thickly timbered slope would let out some bugles. For an hour, the source of the bugles didn’t seem to move. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, and the trees started to throw long shadows, the source of the bugling seemed to travel downhill toward the creek.
“We should probably move down,” said Matt.
“Yeah, in a minute.”
I was watching the opposite side of the valley. The herd on that rim, at least twenty elk, was moving slowly downhill, feeding along the way. The lower the elk came, the better we could see them. There were lots of cows, and a few young spike-antlered bulls. We decided to split up. Matt would move into the timber and try to get in front of the bugling elk. I’d try to move toward the elk that were moving down the open hillside. Each move was a challenge. Because Matt couldn’t see his elk, he might unknowingly stumble into some cows and spook the whole herd. Because my elk were out in the open, I had the advantage of being able to keep an eye on them. But they had the same advantage on me; they could potentially see me coming from hundreds of yards away.
We each packed up some basic gear: food, water, jacket and rain pants, flashlights and matches, meat bags, and plenty of strong cord.
As soon as we split up, I got the same uneasy feeling that I always get when Matt and I are separated in the mountains. I worry that something will happen to him. Matt doesn’t worry about himself, he says, because he’s too busy worrying about me. Neither of us is likely to get lost, but there’s plenty of other stuff that could go wrong. Rocks fall. Trees fall. You could twist a leg or get stuck between shifting boulders. Hypothermia happens fast, and it kills many mountain hunters. There are rattlesnakes. And then there are things you’d never expect. One time we were heading up a mountain through some thick brush with one of Matt’s old girlfriends. All of a sudden she started screaming and flailing her arms. We couldn’t tell what had happened. I thought she was having a stroke or something. Then we saw that a porcupine had nailed her from above. Her shoulder bristled with quills. The porcupine climbed down from its tree and walked away, as nonchalantly as someone stepping off a bus.
And there are bears, of course, although a bear attack is not likely. But we sometimes get careless and almost seem to be asking for bear trouble. Once we were taking a nap on a ridge and woke up for a moment when a black bear came running by. After our nap, we happened to travel in the same direction the bear had gone. We walked a ways down the ridge, then heard the unmistakable scratching sound of a bear climbing a tree. We thought it was the black bear, and Matt still had a bear permit, so we ran over there. But it wasn’t the black bear. It was a sow grizzly and her cub; the cub was scratching the tree all right, but the sow was on solid ground and looked about ready to come at us. She didn’t, but it reminded me of how easily something bad could happen.
By using the contours of the land, and clumps of trees, I quickly closed the distance on the elk that I was after. I found a few places where elk had pissed in the past day or two, little saucer-sized circles of wet dirt. The piss smelled musky and elky. I scooped up the dirt in my hand and rubbed my clothes with it. I rubbed some of the urine and dirt on my face. I scanned the area for grizzlies.
Soon I was lying prone in a patch of subalpine fir and had elk both above me and ahead of me. I’d moved about as far as I could without being detected. The closest elk was two hundred yards above me. A cow. I could see the top of her back and glimpses of her head. I could see bits and pieces of other elk behind and ahead of her, obscured by trees and rocks and folds in the land. I could see an ear, a rump patch of orangish-colored hair, a leg from the knee down. At least one of the elk was a young bull; I caught glimpses of white antler tips every time it lifted its head. The breeze was more or less in my face, but I watched the feather on my bow carefully. Time and again, a faint wisp of air tugged the feather uphill, toward the elk above me. I worried that a stronger gust would carry my scent up there and freak those elk out. I decided to hold tight until the wind made up its mind about which way to blow. I was on my belly. Slowly, without moving more than an inch at a time, I pushed myself up to a sitting position with a tree to my back.
The elk that was closest to me lifted its head and stared downhill, right in my direction. Shit. Had it seen me? I stayed superstill, holding my breath and avoiding eye contact. The tree’s lower limbs camouflaged my form. The elk looked like a young cow. I’ve had young elk look me in the face for five minutes, then start feeding again. They don’t always trust their eyes. And older animals don’t always trust the judgment of young animals. I’ve watched younger cows and spike-antlered bulls get spooked by a movement and then run off alone, the other elk just watching them go. If a lead cow—an old, mature cow who’s been around for a few years—gets nervous and trots away, the whole herd will trip over themselves to follow her.
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, so I let it out in a slow exhale without moving my chest too much. The elk lowered its head and had another munch of grass. I took a long, deep breath. Maybe it never even saw me. Either way, I was trapped. I knew I couldn’t move until that elk did.
At times it feels as though killing an elk with a bow is an impossible feat. So many things can go wrong, it seems like there is no room left over in the world for something to go right. When I get discouraged, I find it helpful to remember those rare occurrences when things fall into place in the mountains. Just the year before, over a ridge to the south, I was trapped in a similar situation. I’d been crawling down a mountain with the wind in my face, trying to get into a herd of elk that I could hear below me. I made it down the mountain a ways, but then I ran into a group of cows that were bedded down. I couldn’t go down any farther without their seeing me, so I was trapped. I waited about half an hour and the elk wouldn’t move. I was finally getting ready to crawl back up and go look for a different herd when a bull walked up and smelled one of the cow’s asses. She jumped up, stepped toward me, and then disappeared behind a tree. The bull walked after her and paused, broadside to me, at thirty yards. My arrow cut into him right behind his shoulder blade. He took a few steps down the mountain and then stopped. He looked around, stumbled a bit, and then tipped over dead.
As I watched these elk in Badger Creek, I hoped for a similar piece of luck. I watched several more cows emerge over the crest of the rim and start feeding down into the amphitheater. A bull emerged along with them. He was hundreds of yards away. I could have killed him with a rifle, but he was way beyond the range of a bow. He had six tines on each antler; he was a big, breeding-age bull. He stepped up behind one of the cows and got too close to her. She trotted away. The bull straightened his spine, stretched his neck out, tipped his snout up, and let out a horrendous noise, like he was trying to clear a cactus thorn out of his throat. I was so far away that the bull had already closed his mouth and lowered his head by the time the complete bugle had traveled to my ears. The animal was huge. It seemed that when an elk got that big, it should switch from grass and start eating meat. Another bull, up and over the rim, answered him with a three-note falsetto call.
I’d lost track of how many elk were above me and ahead of me. The cow that had looked in my direction had moved down a bit, but I was clearly not going to get a shot at her. She was out in the open and I didn’t have any cover to use while sneaking up on her. The small bull behind the closest cow had turned around; he was walking one way and the rest of the herd was walking the other way. He seemed intent on something that I couldn’t see. Maybe he was going to check out some other elk. As he moved along the hillside, he walked down into a slight gully and dropped from view. That was my chance. I moved to my belly and tried to inch up the hill to close the distance while the elk was out of sight. I kept checking on the other elk that were facing away from me.
The sun was halfway gone behind the western peaks. I could feel the air temperature plummeting. I didn’t have much time, but there was no point in rushing. So long as we didn’t spook these elk, we could sleep nearby and hunt them again in the morning. The breeze stiffened. It was perfect for me. I crawled on all fours until I was close to where the small bull had disappeared into the gully. The bottom of the gully was covered in young aspen trees. Several large boulders were strewn about. I figured the bull could be anywhere. It might have turned back while I was crawling, or it might be standing in range but out of sight. I removed an arrow from my quiver and slipped the nocking point over my bowstring. I was up on my knees. I waited.
A minute passed. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of hooves clacking on rocks and thudding into dirt. The sound was above me. At first I thought the hooves were coming toward me, but they were actually heading away from me. I sat up a little more and saw elk asses moving uphill. The whole slope was going into motion. The elk were heading up, running over the top of the rim. Then, right in front of me, an elk ran out of the aspen and started hauling ass uphill, leaving a trail of dust. It was the bull. His head was held improbably high, like a running camel. His body looked stiff and taut as he ran. Within seconds, the whole amphitheater was cleared of elk.
All I could think was, What the hell happened? I checked the feather. The wind was perfect, blowing away from all the elk. I stood up. What the hell?
When I caught another glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, I ducked back down quickly. Something just below me, something much darker than an elk, was coming my way. Was it a bear? I lifted my head. It was Matt, strolling across the valley like some tourist in Yellowstone Park. Matt had scared off all the elk? What a moron. I stood back up. He was walking toward me. I shrugged my shoulders and lifted my palms toward the sky in a “What the hell are you doing?” gesture.
Matt lifted his bow and acted like he was shooting an arrow. I stood up and let out a yell of excitement. He’d gotten a shot.
When Matt and I had split up, he had gone into the timber and begun working his way toward the bugling elk, who were moving downhill at a fast pace. Pretty quickly, Matt could tell from the bugles that the herd was down along the creek, so he followed them there, backtracking along the same path that we’d walked a few hours before. The wind along the stream had reversed from its earlier direction and was blowing upstream. As he crept downstream, he could hear and see elk on both sides, but he couldn’t tell where they had all come from; we’d just walked through there together and hadn’t seen any elk that low.
Every time he poked up his head for a look, he could see the backs of elk, but none of them were close enough for a shot. He crawled downstream some more, sometimes right in the shallow, rocky trickles of water that branched off the main stem of the stream. When he got to a spot where he could see several elk feeding in a meadow, he contemplated taking a shot but decided he was too far away. As he watched them, he noticed that four cows were actually coming toward him. He got an arrow ready. The cows walked right down toward the stream, like they were going to cross. The second cow in the line was clearly the biggest. The first cow took a step down into the stream bed, and Matt let her pass. When the second, larger cow got even with him, he drew back his bow. She was twenty-five yards away. He took aim right behind her front shoulder, a little lower than halfway up her body. He released the arrow. It sank into the brown hair and disappeared.
All four of the elk bolted back out of the creek bed and headed back the way they had come. At first, the arrowed elk didn’t act any differently than the healthy elk. Matt watched them run out of view behind a slight rise of land. But when the elk reemerged on the other side, there were only three of them. Matt walked up to where he figured I would be, hoping to intercede before I killed another one; we already had more than enough work cut out for us.
We followed the creek down to where Matt had made his shot. It was getting dark. He pointed to where he’d tied a strip of plastic ribbon on a twig to mark where the elk had been standing. We walked about sixty yards and there it was. The elk was lying on its side, two legs folded beneath it and two legs stretched out. It weighed more than Matt and me combined.
Up until the point when we had a dead animal lying on the ground, I’d been thinking about all sorts of stuff: I’d been thinking about elk, and how they live in constant fear of wolves and then get added stress from us hunters; I’d been thinking about the way the wind changes when the sun sets; I’d been thinking about how a gray jay will clean pine pitch from its beak by scraping it on a limb, just like a person cleans extra peanut butter from a knife by scraping it along the rim of the jar.
But once the elk was dead, I only had room in my mind for the carcass. When I thought about the wind, I thought of how the smell of the elk’s blood was already blowing off into the mountains and perhaps getting the attention of a grizzly. When I thought about gray jays, I thought of how they’d quickly find the carcass in the morning and start squawking about the good fortune and then probably draw the attention of a grizzly.
The year before, two of our buddies were hunting in these same mountains, not far from us, when they lost one-fourth of their elk to a grizzly. A couple of years before that, a hunter to the north and west of us was killed in the Swan Mountains, on Cottonwood Creek, when a sow grizzly caught him in the act of gutting a cow elk.
After the hunter in the Swan Mountains was killed, state and federal wildlife officers went out there and killed the grizzly along with her two cubs. I found the whole situation depressing as hell. That bear had probably stolen dozens of carcasses in the course of her life, from wolves and coyotes and other bears, but that time she stole from the wrong species. The hunter’s widow later sued the government agencies, basically for allowing grizzly bears to exist. The way I see it, you shouldn’t go into the largest piece of contiguous wilderness in the lower forty-eight and spend your day butchering a warm pile of protein if you and your family can’t accept the potential threats. Matt and I have an agreement that if one of us ever gets mauled by a grizzly, we’ll keep the location of the incident a secret.
Keeping game meat safe from scavengers is one of the oldest chores of mankind, and we took to the job quickly. We pushed on the elk together, as though we were trying to get a barrel rolling along, and got it up on its back. The four legs were pointing up. With the elk on its back, I took my knife and cut around the elk’s anus, then made a neat incision all the way up to the throat. With a bone saw, I cut through the center of the rib cage. The chest cavity was flooded with blood. The diaphragm was holding the blood back like a dam. I could see the stomach, the coiled intestines, the liver, all clean and bloodless. It was a vivid depiction of what I’d look like splayed open. I reached up into the chest cavity and, blindly, severed the esophagus. Doing so, I pricked my finger on something sharp. I reached back in there and pulled out a six-inch section of carbon arrow shaft that had snapped off inside the body. I pulled the heart out too. It was the size of a small chicken.
Once I sliced through both sides of the diaphragm, the guts were lying loose inside the elk’s body like soup in a soup bowl. Everything was freed up. I reached under the stomach and peeled away the kidneys, which I set aside with the heart. Matt lifted up on the neck of the animal and I rolled everything out in a great sloppy heap, leaving the bowl of the rib cage clean and glistening with blood.
At that point, it was like we’d released a massive advertising blitz promoting an all-you-can-eat elk special. As we continued to work, we took turns scanning with our flashlights for approaching bears. I removed the two tenderloins from inside the body cavity. A tenderloin is about the size of a hoagie roll: It’s one of the most primo cuts of meat. We rolled the elk onto its side and skinned half of the animal. As Matt lifted the rear leg, I cut through the joint. Then I climbed about fifteen feet up into a nearby tree. I draped a piece of parachute cord over a limb and lowered the ends down to Matt. He tied one end of the cord to the leg and then pulled the other end, hoisting the leg into the tree. There it was safe from coyotes and grizzlies, but black bears, which can climb, were still a threat. Anything else that got at it, such as a marten or bobcat, wouldn’t eat too much. Lions like to kill their own animals and generally don’t mess with carrion.
We repeated the process with the front leg, then boned out the ribs and the neck and removed the loin. The loin was about the size of two pieces of firewood laid end to end. All the boned-out meat went into a meat bag and up the tree, along with the heart, liver, and kidneys. Once the left side of the animal was done, we rolled it over and repeated the process on the other side.
It was early morning, yet still dark, by the time all of the usable parts of the elk were up the tree. Only guts and bone and hide remained on the ground. We knew these leftovers wouldn’t last long. We’ve seen bears eat every part of an elk carcass except for the base of the skull.
We turned off our flashlights and waited for our eyes to adjust to the dark. Matt took a waypoint marking the carcass on his GPS. Then we headed back up to where we’d stashed our food and gear. We were totally exhausted. We ate some freeze-dried soup, washed our hands in the creek, raised our grub back into a tree, and went immediately to sleep.
At dawn we could hear bulls bugling all around us. We probably could have killed another elk, but first we had to get one out of there. Every time we come up into these mountains, we like to pretend to ourselves that we have the balls to backpack our elk meat across the Lone Butte properties and then stash it along the highway. Doing so would cut our walk in half. That plan has multiple problems: We’d have to wait until dark, and flashlights would be out of the question. We’d have to walk to the highway and then get back into the cover of the mountains in the time allowed between sunset and sunrise. A few times we’d gone so far as to stash a car at a place where we might emerge if we did make a midnight run with a load of meat. And we thought of what we’d say if we got caught: “We’re lost.”
Every time we get an elk, though, we have a conversation that goes like the one we had the day after Matt killed the cow along Badger Creek.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “It almost seems like less of a pain in the ass to just hike this bastard out of here. I don’t feel like dealing with some irate landowner…or worse, the sheriff.”
“We should get going then, if we’re going out the way we came in.”
We walked to a vantage point from where we could see if any bears had found our kill. We could see about ten magpies feeding on the gut pile, but otherwise, the coast was clear. At the carcass, the bones were all scattered here and there. The stomach was mostly eaten away, and the elk’s last meal was lying there like someone had dumped a bag of grass clippings. The ground was peppered with coyote tracks, but there were no visible bear tracks.
We went over to the tree and lowered the meat bags and the four whole legs. Because we had to pack the entire animal on our backs, we were forced to bone out the legs. Packing out a haunch or a saddle was out of the question. With the bone in, an elk’s back ham will barely fit into a large backpack. A whole saddle would almost be a load in itself. By cutting the meat off the bones, we could reduce our total load of meat down to just over 200 pounds. That’s 120 pounds apiece, including the heart, liver, kidneys, drinking water, and the weight of the backpacks themselves. After I’ve walked a few miles, 120 pounds makes me feel like dying. A few more pounds and I probably would die. So the bones were staying in the mountains for the bears and coyotes.
Once we got done boning the elk and putting the meat into mesh game bags, we stashed all of our gear and our extra clothes under a tarp to make room in our packs. Later we’d have to come back up to get our stuff. Sometimes we leave our gear in the mountains for a couple of weeks like that.
The packs were so heavy that we had to help each other get to our feet. Once we got under way, we started popping ibuprofen like trail mix. The miles dragged along. We walked until we couldn’t walk anymore, then sat down and bitched and moaned about having to walk more. To go up steep hills, we took baby steps and no rest stops, which is better than moving fast and then having to stop for air halfway up an incline.
We made it to the truck before dusk. I lay down in the dirt for ten minutes. When I stood up, my legs had already cramped. We’d left our sleeping bags in the mountains because we didn’t have room for them. It was getting cold, down near freezing, and neither of us relished the idea of suffering through a night in the back of the truck with no sleeping bag. We walked down to Dry Creek and washed out our backpacks, so that we didn’t smell too much like a dead elk. Then we started walking back into the mountains.
It was a totally moonless night, and thick black clouds were settling in. We couldn’t see shit, so we had to use our flashlights. With a flashlight, your whole world is reduced to whatever’s in the beam. It’s frustrating to travel long distances with the seemingly myopic vision of a flashlight beam; I feel as though I’m going to walk right up on something that I may not want to get that close to.
When we got to Badger Creek, we tried to travel up along the mountain face so that we wouldn’t go near the elk carcass. We didn’t want to get close and surprise a grizzly. We got a little screwed around on our route; when we arrived at Badger Creek, we couldn’t tell where we were in relation to the elk.
“We better cut back uphill,” Matt said. “I’m not sure we made it far enough past the carcass.”
“Sure we did. I think it’s way the hell down from here.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Take a look with your GPS,” I said. “You took a waypoint at the kill site.”
Matt pulled out the GPS. He waited a couple of minutes while the unit conferred with the satellites to figure out where it was. When the GPS found its position, Matt pulled up the kill site waypoint. He pointed at the digital reading. I took a look.
We were forty feet away from the carcass and whatever might have been eating it.
I felt my stomach rise up toward my throat. “Holy shit,” I said.
We walked quietly backward. I half expected to hear the woof of a pissed-off bear, but it never came. We slipped back up the hillside and continued on our way to our stash of gear. We quickly fell asleep.
That night we got six inches of wet snow. At sunup a mist settled over the hills. We couldn’t see any farther than we could shoot our bows. In the early morning the temperature dropped some more and the snow froze to a crust. Walking on it sounded like we were dancing on potato chips. We packed up our wet gear and headed back down. By the time we got to the truck, we were walking on dry ground and it was sunny. Looking back, we could see that the Stinkhole Mountains were still socked in with haze and covered in a crust of icy snow.