Elk Hunt 2009: Murphy's Law

In the first gray light of dawn, I saw the bull at the exact instant that he saw me. He was a six-point, and the master of his domain. He squealed and everything erupted into chaos. He seemed to go instantly from placidly standing broadside to a full-tilt, all-out run. Things happened way too fast to think about them. At times like this, there is no real thinking. Your brain is simply processing information and you are reacting by instinct or else it's over. I remember thinking that he was a bull and a nice one...that's all my brain registered. The rest was just gauging speed and distance, calculations that were performed by instinct and experience in less than a nanosecond. I raised the .280 to my shoulder and fired. I heard him go down, in a shattering of branches, behind a big granite boulder in the timber a hundred yards to my left. He tried to rise once, twice, and then lay still...

Yeah, that was the way it was supposed to be...the way I had it all worked out in my mind. Here's how it really went:

James and Chad and I left the cabin at 4:30 AM, the same time we always do. We drove to the trailhead and noticed that nobody in the other camps was even close to being up yet, just like we always do. We hiked to the big meadow, just like we always do. We left the trail and set a course for the gap in the mountains, looking for the little footbridge across the creek, just like we always do. But that's when everything went south...

We wandered in the darkness, unable to find the bridge. We looked up. We looked down. We finally gave up and forded the creek. We crossed the meadow and missed the sheepherder trail. Then we missed it again. And again. Finally, after almost an hour of wandering aimlessly in the dark in a place I'd been hundreds of times, I found the gate in the new allotment fence and got us on the trail. We were late getting into position - a situation a lot like missing the kickoff. You feel like you missed the whole game.

An hour later, we were in the same meadow that has blessed us with an elk almost every year. No elk. No tracks. The next meadow, the one we killed two in last year - no elk. No tracks. The next one - same thing. The next one - ditto. By now, the calf muscle I tore this spring was screaming. We put Chad in the saddle while we worked the timber and smaller meadows that simply had to have elk there. Nothing. Nada. Zip. And my left calf is on fire. I can scarcely lift it and I can only walk about a half mile between rest stops. Took a fall on a snow-covered aspen log and bulls-eyed a boulder with my ribs. Now it hurts to breathe.

Q: How can it get worse than this?
A: About that time, it began to snow. Not just a little bit, either. A lot. Big, fat, fluffy flakes. The kind of snow that piles up fast and covers everything.

Over 40 years of hunting in this country has shown me that elk find a place to lay down and just wait it out when it begins to snow like this.. When it quits, they come out, but until then, you aren't going to find them. Chad and I walked out the West Fork, with me taking about a dozen rest stops to let my leg quit hurting. James hiked back to the trailhead to get the pickup and come around to pick us up. For the first time in three years, we were elkless on opening morning. Worse yet, it was clear that big snow was coming and that I was not going to be able to walk much. We went to the cabin and took a nap.

This scenario continued to play out over the course of the next 5 days. No elk. No tracks. More snow. Still more snow. Can't walk. Can't hunt. Can't show these young guys where to find them when the elk are holed up like rabbits to get away from the storm. Still elkless...still all crippled up.

Only about 40% of Wyoming elk hunters actually kill an elk in any given year. Over the long haul, we're at 78%. Not bad, but not much consolation when your leg is screaming and you're sitting in the cabin watching it snow. but the good news is that the cabin is a pretty great place to be. First off, my sweet wife is there. That's good. There's no sweeter sight in the world than my wife's beautiful face at the end of a day like this. She has retired from hunting these elk, but she runs our elk camp flawlessly, just as she always has. We live like royalty under her direction. Beth is there. She is a Wyoming girl through and through and through, never flustered by snow or uncooperative elk. Her solution: When it's like this, you just have to work harder if you want to kill one. And our grandchildren are there. We don't believe in making the annual elk hunt some sort of male bonding things. We take everyone who can go, from babies on up.

So even when we're having a hard time killing an elk, we're still having fun. I called up a couple of moose, grunting and breaking branches and shaking saplings like a bull in rut. I took Connor deer hunting down in the sagebrush. We collected aspen leaves and made pictures. We read stories and played games. And all the while, we're teaching. We're teaching about persistence and hard work. We're teaching about the beauty and blessing of wild things and wild places. We're teaching that both boys and girls can be hunters. And we're teaching that in our family, we love and support one another even when things are hard.

We never did get an elk, but it was a great week.

Walt Gasson
Executive Director, Wyoming Wildlife Federation