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This story is republished because it initially appeared within the August 1992 challenge beneath the title, “Break the Guidelines for Bulls.”
IT HAD BEEN probably the most irritating, and but probably the most superb, week of elk looking possible. The actual part of southwestern Montana that I used to be looking was merely crawling with elk. I used to be into bulls every single day—generally a number of a day—and but by the sixth day I hadn’t even drawn my bow.
Oh, a half-dozen smaller bulls had are available in, and I may have taken one had I chosen to take action. However I used to be after an excellent bull, a kind of elk with many winters—and plenty of looking seasons—beneath his belt. I had known as up a handful of those large boys up to now, however every time they wouldn’t fairly are available in shut sufficient for a shot. They’d grasp up within the brush 80 yards out and rake their antlers, or cease and peek round a pine tree, or circle the wagons and attempt to get my wind. There’d been a number of motion and loads of pleasure, however no cigar…not but.
That’s why I’d determined to strive one thing radical. On this present day I strapped a smallish five-point elk antler to my daypack and went to an space the place I’d seen a closely antlered 5×5 bull two days earlier than. At daybreak I used to be in place, champing on the bit for sufficient gentle to see my sight pins. When it was shiny sufficient I bugled, and a bull responded immediately not 100 yards down the canyon. I aggressively closed the hole, and we started a verbal sparring match that clearly incensed the bull and despatched the hackles on the again of my neck straight to consideration.
Thrashing and crashing, the bull got here in, however like most of the others he hung up simply out of vary, up the alternative aspect of a small creek. I may see his antler tops above the comb as he raked and chuckled, exhibiting off his muscle. It was the identical large 5×5 I’d seen beforehand.
Taking my little five-point antler, I poked it above the comb pile I used to be arrange subsequent to, bellowed on my bugle and pawed the bottom with my boot. All of the whereas I twisted and turned the antler in a shadow-like imitation of the massive bull. I noticed my “rival” increase his head, and when he noticed the antler above the comb he was offered. He got here rumbling down the creek financial institution like an antlered tank. Because the bull plowed into the underside, I dropped my antler and readied the bow. He then charged up the opposite aspect and paused, on the lookout for the pipsqueak five-point that had been there only a minute earlier than. My arrow centered the bull’s lungs, and half-hour later I used to be guffawing with glee.
If the elk gained’t play by the foundations, then why ought to I?
TODAY’S BULL ELK are smartening up. Mature bulls—those that have lived via greater than 4 or 5 looking seasons—have seen the entire tips. They’ve heard bugling good and dangerous, smelled the woodsmoke of camps massive and small, seen the annual invasion of their mountain houses by hunters wearing every little thing from complete camouflage to pumpkin orange. They’ve been stalked, pushed, chased, bushwhacked and run across the mountain greater than sufficient instances to ever overlook. They’ve carried out greater than learn the textbooks on elk looking—they’ve written the chapters themselves.
That’s why at present you might want to be prepared to present elk one thing they’ve by no means seen earlier than. Not that textbook maneuvers gained’t work. In fact they’ll. However nothing works the entire time; and when the textbook comes up with a solution of “5” to the query “two plus two,” you realize it’s time to throw away the ebook and check out one thing radical.
Merritt Satisfaction, who runs Misplaced Fork Ranch out of Cameron, Montana, is a longtime information and clothing store and one advantageous elk hunter. He additionally isn’t afraid to strive one thing totally different to get a bull inside vary.
“One time I bugled a pleasant bull in for a bowhunting consumer who had a flowery bow with an overdraw and all that,” Satisfaction recalled. “When the consumer went to attract, the arrow fell off the remaining—clank!—and the bull trotted off. The opposite bulls had been performing humorous that week, so as an alternative of cow calling or bugling, I gave the alarm bark of a cow elk. Everybody says that when a bull hears this, he’s gone. However this bull got here proper again in.
“The hunter was so amazed that he let the arrow fall proper off the remaining once more—clank!—and the bull bolted off a second time. I couldn’t imagine it! However I barked yet one more time, and the bull stopped and got here again—slightly extra cautiously this time, however he did come again. My hunter lastly received it collectively and made the shot.”
Then there was the time Satisfaction and I had been looking as a group. We had gotten an excellent bull getting into a spot so brushy that you might barely see your hand in entrance of your face. The bull had a small harem of cows with him, and the group was above us on the aspect of a small timbered ridge throughout a creek reduce. Because the crow flies, the elk had been 75 yards off. Because the hunter walks, they had been 200 yards away.
The bull strutted backwards and forwards throughout the face of that ridge, bellowing and ripping up brush. As he moved, we moved, staying parallel and never letting him get what he needed—the wind. This went on for maybe a half-hour, when lastly we heard some rocks clatter. The bull had had sufficient, and he was going to take his cows over the ridge and away from this noisy madhouse. Satisfaction and I each realized what was occurring on the similar immediate, and when the information checked out me with bug eyes and an expression that mentioned, “Now what?” I whispered, “Let’s cost ’em!”
So I did. As Satisfaction known as and raked like a demon, I crashed via the comb as quick as I may proper on the elk. I hoped the herd would assume the noise was one other bull that was lathered up and able to do battle. After I got here out of the thickest brush right into a smallish clearing, there was the bull, not 40 yards off-and he was a dandy six-point. Surprised to seek out that the Cost of the Gentle Brigade had labored, I stumbled over a fallen log. That broke the spell, or I’m positive I might have had an excellent shot at that trophy.
It looks as if elk need to see elk, or at the least one thing with 4 ft that doesn’t resemble a hunter. If they’ll’t see one other animal, they usually get as cautious as a cat stalking a hen in your entrance garden. Any little factor that will get them to imagine that you’re actually one other elk, and never some bozo straight from the espresso store on the town, is commonly sufficient to win the day.
Take horses, for instance. I’ve had a couple of bull bugle on the sound of my horses’ hoofs as we clompity-clomped down the path. I can bear in mind one rifle season in New Mexico when my accomplice and I had been using alongside via some rolling mountaintop meadow areas dotted by a number of islands of heavy timber. Coming across the nook of 1 such timber stand we ran smack dab into the center of a herd of 30 elk, 5 of them good five-point bulls. The textbook says to cease, slowly flip the horses round, trip into the timber, dismount and make a stalk on foot.
Not us. As an alternative we continued to trip proper on the elk, who stood their floor attempting to determine simply what on the earth we had been. After we received to inside 150 yards, I turned my horse broadside, tossed the reins to my accomplice, who had moved his mount in between the elk and me, stepped off the saddle, sat down, and because the horses cleared my place, shot the most important bull within the bunch.
Textbook elk looking? No approach. Efficient? You betcha.
AN ELK HUNTER’S worst enemy—after his personal clumsiness—is the wind. Bow season, rifle season, muzzleloader season, it doesn’t matter-if you don’t have the wind in your favor, you don’t have an opportunity. How good is an elk’s sense of scent? Jack Atcheson Sr., the veteran reserving agent from Butte, Montana, has shot extra large bulls along with his rifle on public land than simply about any man alive. And Atcheson has a fairly sturdy respect for the elk’s nostril.
“Elk have a way of scent like few different animals you may hunt,” he mentioned. “Let me offer you an instance. I noticed a band of elk feeding alongside in an open meadow a half-mile from the place I used to be standing. Suddenly I felt the wind swap, going now from me proper to them. The second that breeze—and it was a delicate breeze, not a robust wind—received my scent to these elk, they threw their heads again, noses within the air for simply an immediate, then bolted into the darkish timber. At a half-mile! What number of elk do you assume scent most hunters in the course of the season and skedaddle earlier than the hunters ever even know they’re within the neighborhood?”
Elk stay in swirling-wind nation. Many longtime elk hunters—myself included—imagine that elk purposely mattress down in the course of the day in areas the place the wind all the time swirls as a method of additional safety in opposition to assault from all sides. Textbook technique says to remain out of those unstable wind areas so that you just gained’t spook elk in a foreign country along with your evil odor.
However when it’s scorching, dry and the bottom underfoot is as crunchy as a crumpled-up newspaper, the elk don’t transfer a lot throughout taking pictures gentle. If you would like a bull, it’s a must to go in after him. The way in which to keep away from the swirling wind is to borrow a web page from the whitetail hunter’s textbook and get above the breeze—in a tree stand.
In scorching climate, elk wish to stay close to water holes and/or wallows, which they use to assist them keep cool and comfy. Scout round and discover a wallow or water gap that’s peppered with recent signal—often tracks and droppings. Take a transportable, backpackable tree stand and set it up close by. Attempt to transfer in and place the stand when the breeze appears to be blowing steadily in your face, however as soon as the stand is up, plan on spending the whole day there. Take lunch, an empty bottle for “emergencies,” and an excellent paperback ebook to assist struggle boredom, strap your self in with a security belt, and be affected person.
Give the stand a pair or three days, if obligatory. Throughout that point you’ll be stunned at what you’ll see out of your perch. On a latest hunt in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in the course of the opening week of rifle season, a good friend staked out a water gap beneath scorching circumstances for 3 days. He ended up seeing not solely elk, but additionally mule deer, whitetail deer, a coyote, a lone black bear, a mountain lion, plus quite a few raptors, songbirds and small recreation. In so doing, he shot the most important bull of the hunt, an eye-popping 6×6.
ANOTHER TRICK borrowed from the whitetail hunter’s handbook that may be fairly productive for elk is rattling.
Looking in New Mexico in 1990 with U.S. Outfitters and my good good friend Archie Nixon was when the rattling gentle bulb went on in my head. With a bow I had taken an enormous bull that scored 345 Boone and Crockett Membership factors two days earlier, and I used to be now serving to Nixon information one other of his shoppers. One morning we regarded down off a hillside and noticed a really massive 6×6 bull stalking a lone cow. All of a sudden, one other large 6×6 appeared, and it was apparent that we had ringside seats for what was going to occur subsequent.
The bulls circled one another briefly, then locked horns in a for-real, somebody’s-going-to-get-hurt battle over that cow. They spun in a giant circle, clacking their antlers, pawing the bottom, and making a ruckus that may frighten a lifeless man.
As if by magic, out of the comb popped the pinnacle of one other good bull. Then one other. And one other. And nonetheless yet one more. In a matter of minutes 5 good bulls along with a few cows had come to the sound of these bulls battling. Why they got here—whether or not it was curiosity, the breeding urge or no matter—who can say? However come they did.
Elk hunters have usually raked and banged timber with limbs reduce from different timber in an try to mimic a bull raking his antlers. That is advantageous, besides that the sound doesn’t carry very far within the dense timber or over uneven floor. The sound of rattling a pair of deer antlers collectively carries significantly better, is sensible, and it really works. Not the entire time, in fact, similar to rattling for deer doesn’t work each time, but it surely’s yet one more trick to drag out of your bag when the looking’s robust and the textbook solutions don’t get the job carried out.
I’m not via experimenting with off-the-wall, radical elk methods, both. For instance, I take note of for this fall a pleasant secluded little wallow on a small creek that’s not removed from a logging highway. If the elk signal is there the way in which it has been the previous three years, throughout bow season I plan on establishing a tree stand close by and inserting a standing elk decoy within the wallow. Decoys have labored for me after I’m looking whitetails, so why shouldn’t they work for elk? In fact, I’ll flag the decoy with some fluorescent orange ribbon for security’s sake, after which I’ll spray slightly business elk-in-heat scent round and bugle from my tree stand.
Will it work? Who is aware of? The one factor I do know is that if the elk gained’t play by the foundations, I’ll throw out the textbook and play the sport any approach they like. In relation to looking at present’s well-educated bulls, it pays to get radical.
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