By Bob Robb
Five grueling days into the hunt, I was wondering why I thought I was 29 years old again, not 69. Everything hurt. I was bowhunting bugling bull elk with an old friend, Rick Wemple, in mid-September on public ground in SW Montana that I’d first hunted in my late 20’s. It is rocky and steep, and the raging wildfire that burned it up 20 years prior had left a mess of tangled, brush-filled blowdowns. The elk love that shit, being that most of the other hunters refuse to dive into it. Hunting it is hard on the body.
On day two, magic happened. At daybreak we’d heard a bull screaming from the road, grabbed our shit, and dove down off a 60-degree slope along a tall timber/brushy burned-out edge to attack. My old Mathews was strapped to my daypack, but when we got in position and I dropped my pack to unstrap the bow, I discovered that the piece of shit Mathews bow quiver had somehow been ripped off the bow by the brush. Fuck me! The bull was screaming at Rick’s bugling as I humped it back uphill, where I found the quiver a hundred yards up the trail. But it was too late. Before I had time to regroup, here he came, a big 6×6 that wanted badly to die. I may as well have had my pants down around my ankles. I never got drawn.
The afternoon of day five, Rick—a few years younger and who has lived and guided in the area his entire life—said we needed a change of scenery. “I know a spot where, by now, the other hunters just might have pushed some elk into,” he said. “It’s a bitch of a hike, but I doubt anybody else has been there. Wanna check it out?”
We got there late that afternoon, and once again, screwed the pooch. The climb was 1200 vertical feet of no trails, rolling rock-covered scree slope, the kind of mountain where the question was not whether or not you’d go down, but how bad the damage would be when you did, so we decided, since it was very late, we’d leave our gear and make a quick scouting run to see if there was any fresh sign. If there was, we’d come back at daybreak and hit it hard.
Jackpot. The top of this part of the mountain led into a couple of deep timbered bowls a half-mile away. The trails leading to them were covered in fresh elk tracks and rubs. We slowly followed them along, ears, eyes, and noses on red-alert. A half-mile in, we decided we’d done enough scouting. “Let me make one little cow call and see what happens,” Rick said. When he did, a bull instantly bugled back, so close we about shit our pants. Of course, my bow was back at the truck. “Run!,” I hissed. We got the hell out of there before that bull ran us over.
We were just barely able to see without headlamps when we left the truck the next morning to again make the climb. Two hours later we reached the same spot where that bull had blown our hats off the evening before. “Let’s start here,” I said, so Rick cow-called one time, and a bull immediately screamed at us, pretty much from the same place one had bugled at Rick the day prior. I hunkered down on my knees in a little clump of trees just off the downwind side of trail, Rick dropped back 50 yards and called, and the bull screamed again, closer now, and in less than 10 minutes there he was, coming down the ridgeline, looking for love. He took his time, bugling, pawing the ground, steam blowing out of his nostrils. When he got to 12 steps—yes, that close—his head momentarily became obscured by the trees and I drew, cleared the limbs, and released. The broadhead pasted him in the ribs.
Few hunting experiences give me the shakes more than calling a bull elk into my lap. It took 30 minutes for the shaking to stop, and 15 minutes later we found the big-bodied, 4 ½-year old 5×5 piled up down the 45-degree slope against a couple of tree trunks. We couldn’t move him, so we took a few pictures, then boned the meat out. All we had were our daypacks, so we packed the meat in two trips, shuttling it up to the trail, then a half-mile to the first steep, 500-foot, 70-degree slope, where we both slipped and fell on the way down, damage thankfully minimal. At the bottom we staged load one, went back for the rest, repeated the pack-and-fall one more time, then took a load to the truck. The final route consisted of a 700-foot near-vertical trailless nightmare down which we both once again went down, hard. Then we went back for the final load. I shot the bull about 8:30 a.m.; everything was loaded onto the truck bed around 7:00 p.m.
Then, we sat on the tailgate, took our boots off, gobbled down some tasteless calories, grabbed a couple of beers each from the cooler, chugged the first, sat back, cracked the second, took a deep breath, and just sat there, exhausted, looking at the coming night.
“I love this shit,” I finally said, grabbing the third pair of cans from the cooler. “Me, too,” Rick concurred before asking, “You get hurt at all?”
“Nothing a cheeseburger and a cold tap beer won’t fix,” I replied, smiling. “Can’t wait to do it again next year.”
