For the last couple of years, the general elk season has been challenging for me. My small farm requires a lot of attention in fall, and my wife takes time off of a regular job to stay home with our kids and hold down the farm, so that I can go hunting. The time I spend in the field isn’t without pressure, and every hour I hunt is an opportunity cost, loss of income, or one less hour I spend harvesting fall crops and preparing for winter.
Because of the difficulty justifying time away from the farm, my hunts are not trophy hunts, and I commit to taking the first legal thing I can. I don’t have the luxury of passing on perfectly good meat, and a current shoulder injury prevents me from drawing a bow, so the rifle opener is about all I get to do.
The afternoon before the rifle season started, I drove a few 4×4 roads, parked out of the way, and packed in a small camp to an area that had promising sign about two miles in. I quickly set up my site, and then spent the late afternoon and evening looking at sign, and formulating a plan and contingencies for the morning. After dark, I did next to nothing, then tried for hours to go to sleep.
At around 10:50 PM, while half-conscious, the silence of the night exploded. A few hundred yards away from my camp, I heard the horrendous wolf ambush on a small herd of elk. Silence erupted into distressed calls from cows and calves, barks from both wolves and elk, and intense wolf howling. The cacophony of sounds I heard is still very confusing, which included a single bugle, but what was clear that night from everything I heard was that there would be some seriously edgy and shy elk in the morning.
I started my morning a couple hundred yards from my camp and made some locate and distress calls. I heard some movement and breaking branches in some timber, but never got eyes on a critter. I decided to relocate to a spot on the edge of a meadow, further from where the elk had been pressured by wolves the night before.
I positioned myself inside a small island of trees, made some calls, and within a couple of minutes heard something approach and work around me. Finally, a spike made its way into a clearing ahead of me, less than 200 yards away.
Two other small stands of trees stood in my way of a clean shot, and I waited a few seconds for the spike to make its way into a small window through which I could take an unrested shot. The first shot deflected low off of a branch that I thought I’d be clear of, and passed through the elk’s opposite from leg. The spike made no reaction whatsoever… Not having completely registered what had happened yet, I stood up and slowly strafed to my right until I could get a clearer shot, and as soon as the opportunity was there, I shot it broadside.
The shot was a double lung, and because I thought my first shot might have been low due to my scope being misaligned, not realizing it had been obstructed by a branch, I compensated a bit. Again, the spike made no reaction, although the double lung placement was obvious, so I immediately sent another double lung shot a couple of inches away from the first.
The elk never shuddered, winced or reacted to any shot I took, and I began to really question if this elk was actually a zombie. Following the second double lung shot, I could finally see it respiring heavily in the form of steam in the cold air. It then made a casual 180-degree turn toward the tree line it came from, and I started to wonder if I should detach my scope to use iron sights and take a head shot or anchor a shoulder. However, after casually walking about 12 feet, it collapsed and keeled backwards over itself to the spot where it had been standing when I shot it.
I was relieved that it was not some crazy zombie elk, and it wasn’t bulletproof. Inspecting the elk confirmed the first round went low and right, and the two double-lung shots never struck bone, so the exit wounds weren’t as large as I’d like to see. At sub-200 yards, my hot-loaded 270’s solid copper bullets didn’t mushroom like I had hoped they would. The elk would have died after the first double lung shot, and the second was insurance, but striking a rib on the way through would have ended respiration much quicker, and probably caused a reaction from the elk.
At about 8 am, the real work began. I punched out my tag, unpacked knives, put on some nitrile gloves, and delayered. The sun was warming things up, so I drank the 2 ounces left in my 16-ounce water bottle and got to field dressing and cooling meat off as quickly as possible.
During the field processing, I managed to break 3 small Havalon blades, dulled up one fixed blade, and barely got through the process. With a dull knife, deboning quarters was no longer an option. I stored the quarters in game bags in the shade, after loading one onto my pack, and began the trek back to my truck.
On the way back to my truck, I stopped at a creek to filter some much-needed water, just to discover my filter wasn’t working. It hadn’t been used in a while, so I can only imagine the membranes were hydrophobic or gummed up with minerals. Fortunately, each pack trip was only about a mile from the kill site, with a couple hundred feet of gain. During my first dump at the truck, I was able to hydrate from a FastRack 5-gallon jug, and also mixed up a caffeinated Taste Salud electrolyte pack.
Four more trips, including one longer trip to pick up and carry out my overnight camp, and the truck was loaded. I was finally ready to head home. It took 12 miles of hiking, half of it loaded, and almost a full day, from putting an elk on the ground to heading home with quarter bags full of meat.
A spike adds another 120 pounds of processed meat to the freezer, and while a mature cow or large bull would yield significantly more, I promised myself, and my wife, I was helping fill the freezer, not trophy hunting. I stuck to that promise of taking the first legal elk I could, and now I get to enjoy hunting other things for the rest of the season. I have no pressure to put something else in the freezer, can get back to my farm chores, and nobody needs to take additional time off work so that I can be in the field.
PS. I am in the market for a new fixed blade, and I’ve replaced my water filter with a Sawyer Mini. I’ll also be going to the range to ensure a few of my go-to hunting rifles are sighted in perfectly.
Tags: elk hunt, hunting Comments
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