31 Day Elk Hunt: Part 2, Bad Luck and Good Buddies

On the morning of September 13th, I slipped into the river bottom, only to bump the herd and listen to them splash across the river. I stumbled across an empty treestand that belongs to a local rifle hunter and decided to take the hint. So, I sat in the same area that evening. I am not a patient hunter; sitting motionless waiting for something to happen feels like a mental prison.

With only ten minutes of shooting light left, my patience broke. I’d only seen a few deer, and while I still had some light, I wanted to search for an arrow I’d dropped on a failed stalk earlier that day.

As I walked out into the open stubble field, a bugle erupted behind me. I spun around to see six cows and the big herd bull running into the timber I’d just left, their noses catching my scent on the wind. Had I stayed in my location for 10 more minutes, that bull would have walked directly in my shooting lane. I’d been defeated, not by the elk, but by my own impatience.

This setup led directly to the heartbreak of September 21st and the high shot on the satellite bull, the long sleepless night, and the gut-wrenching search through the river-bottom brush the following morning.

Yet, in the strange, circular way of the mountains, my failure paved the way for Chris’s success. Another friend of mine, Jim, a Bozeman realtor I’d met years back through a mutual friend, had been planning to lead me into a familiar basin miles to the north that day. He’d drawn the same tag himself a few seasons before, and though we never managed to hunt together that year, I’d shown up to help him pack out the bull he rifled solo.

Jim is an easygoing, always smiling go-getter who never seems to run out of reasons to celebrate the day. He was excited to take me to a few places he discovered during his hunt; instead, he immediately volunteered to help me search the river bottom. While we combed the thick brush for any sign of my wounded bull, we lost contact with Chris. Hours later, a single bar of cell service delivered his text: “Shot bull, headed to get my pack.”

We shifted from a search party to a recovery crew, processing and hauling Chris’s biggest archery bull to date out of the tangled cottonwood swamp. It was a shared victory that helped heal the sting of my own mistake and reinforced the bond we already had.

Chris and Paul packing out Chris’ bull.

Five days after that high hit, I was finally able to quiet the guilt I’d been carrying. While glassing a timbered ridge above the same river bottom, I caught a flash of tan moving up the hill and found two bulls following the herd to bed. The one in the middle was the bull I’d shot. He was on his feet, moving with the same aggressive, arrogant stride, bugling like nothing had happened, the red streak on his side already scabbed over into what looked like a superficial flesh wound.

In hunting, carrying the weight of a wounded animal causes sleepless nights and relentless self-doubt. Seeing him alive, vigorous, and seemingly unbothered by my mistake lifted a weight off my chest. It didn’t erase the shame of my rushed shot, but it gave me the ethical permission I needed to reset and continue the hunt with a clean slate.

With Chris’s bull hanging and the river bottom quieting down, Jim and I finally made good on our original plan and pushed north into that high basin. The road to get there is horrendous. It’s six miles that take the better part of an hour to climb.

We hadn’t even unloaded the side-by-side, before a shirtless kid with a southern accent pulled up and told us where he’d just killed a bull, and where not to go: “Don’t go in the trees. Wait for them to come out.” We found his gut pile within the hour, crows and magpies already working it, and made camp a little further up the basin near the trailhead to a well-known park about a mile up the ridge.

That afternoon, a bull screamed his way toward us off a ridge above camp while Jim and I sat drinking coffee in the shade. I grabbed my bow and slipped into the trees to meet him. Based on his bugles, he’d closed to within eighty yards and was still coming until the only other UTV we saw all weekend drove straight through the clearing between us, causing the whole basin to go quiet.

Jim and Paul drinking coffee moments before the bull bugled.

That evening we made a quick hike into that same park, an area known to stack elk, but it was dead silent. All night long a bull screamed and chuckled within 400 yards of our tent, making restful sleep impossible. As the sun came up, the screaming bull moved off, and we listened to howling wolves from the ridge above while we ate. We quickly realized why the park had been so quiet the previous night.

For the rest of the morning, we worked a group of elk following fresh bugles up and over the top of a timbered knob above the basin. It was there that I drew on one of the biggest bulls I saw that season; a heavy, symmetrical six-point walked to 21 yards and stopped in a lane where I could not shoot unless I gained another six to eight inches of elevation I didn’t have.

One slow step to find it was all it took to give myself away. It was the kind of country that makes you earn every inch.

By late October, the screaming chaos of the rut had evaporated. The river bottoms grew quiet, and the elk retreated into the timbered ridges and steep pocket meadows of the high country. The fair-weather hunters had gone home, leaving the mountains to those willing to face the cold and silence.

On the evening of October 28th, Chris and I worked our way up the hill behind camp for a quick evening hunt. As we crested a ridge into a familiar waterhole, I picked out a bull feeding through the timber on our side of the draw, his tines flashing just enough through the brush to make my pulse jump. I never got a clean look at him, but a step to my left to find a shooting lane put a twig under my boot, and the snap sent him out of the country before I ever got him in the scope. We pulled the card at the waterhole on our way out and found the answer waiting in the stored footage: The bull we’d nicknamed Crooked Guy had passed through the afternoon before with a smaller six point. Wide Guy hadn’t been with them, and it stung less, knowing that.

On the morning of November 1st, I left camp an hour before first light, steering my Can-Am up a high mountain pass. At 7,500 feet, this range was a highway for people who hunted with stone. Down on the eastern foothills, archaeologists have uncovered camps proving humans used these mountains for more than 11,000 years. Clovis and Folsom points have been unearthed lying alongside the bones of Ice Age bison and smaller game. Those ancient hunters, and the Crow and Blackfeet who followed them, likely used low, unnamed gaps in the range as seasonal corridors between the high timber and the wintering grounds below. They surely walked the same creek bottoms, observed game from the same rocky knobs, and camped in the same meadows my family owns today.

I passed a Jeep Wrangler at the entrance to a side drainage, its occupants deflating their tires for the rocky crawl ahead. They had bull tags and planned to work the high ridges, but assured me they wouldn’t cross the pass where I was headed. I wished them luck and continued into the head of a nameless drainage beyond the pass, signing in at a Block Management box on the off chance my hunt spilled onto the private ranch land below.

The morning was spent glassing a massive, seventy-acre meadow, a spot where I’d found success back in 2009. I watched a small herd of mule deer, a young fork-horn buck shadowing a group of does until they slipped into the timber around nine. Later, crossing a saddle to the south, I bumped a spike bull and a nice four-point mule deer buck feeding in a hidden sagebrush depression.

I set up my bipod at two hundred yards. He was a borderline shooter, but the fear of spooking any elk bedding nearby stayed my finger. I tucked the bipod away and made my way back to camp by early afternoon.

I tried to nap in the camper, but the ticking clock of the season wouldn’t let me rest. Chris had sent word he might come up to glass that evening, so by 2 p.m. I was hiking the steep, timbered ridges directly above our property, headed for the same small waterhole in the upper reaches of the creek above camp.

During our summer scouting, we’d noted consistent use here; the smaller six-point we called Crooked Guy, and a few younger raghorns, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb. Wide Guy hadn’t shown up on the local cameras in nearly a month, but this waterhole remained the most active trail above camp.

I’d sat this spot several times before, and the wind had always betrayed me. This time I changed tactics, crossing the drainage to climb the opposite, sun-facing slope, betting on the rising thermals to hold steady through a long sit, and on the afternoon sun to help keep me warm.

The waterhole where all the elk action occurred.

I found a vantage with a clear view of the waterhole and the trails winding down the opposite ridge. I gathered deadfall and built a makeshift blind behind a fallen pine. The sun beat down so hard I had to pull my hood up and tuck my hat low. I draped my jacket over my rifle’s stainless barrel like a sniper’s shroud to minimize glare. By 5:45, the sun slipped behind the western crest, the temperature dropped instantly, and the warm air gave way to a biting cross-slope draft. As six o’clock approached, the familiar demons of impatience began to whisper. I had my inReach out, ready to message Chris and call the evening a bust, when a sharp clack echoed from the timber across the draw, the unmistakable sound of an antler brushing a dry pine branch.