At first light W and I were sitting the glassing point above the drainage that I saw the big bulls the morning before. There wasn’t anything moving for the first half hour or so. And then a couple cows popped out of the trees and we dove off the ridge hoping the bull would follow them out. We made our way to the bottom of the valley and set up for the elk to work their way across the three open faces and three dark pockets of timber. They were well on their way and the bulls started to fire off. There were a minimum of 4 different bulls bugling.
I pulled out the two dice I keep in my bino pack and handed one to W. Told him to roll and he laughed. I rolled a 5 and he rolled a parrot with pistol. At first I thought it was a one but after examining the dice we realized it was a six. W was up first:
We started to call and then heard branches snap behind us. We made the move only to realize that it was two hunters and a guide side hilling above us, and then noticed three more on the ridge above us.
WTF! We are over 7 miles back, what are all these people doing.
At that moment the growly bull rips a huge bugle and W looks at me. He said that he would like to go in after them and hunt hard. It was like music to my ears and part of the process of feeling out new hunting partners.
I didn’t even hesitate and started getting my gear ready. Let’s go!
We basically sprinted through the first two sections of dark timber before needing to cross the large avalanche shoot that they were feeding out of.
For some reason they had worked back into the trees. We checked our wind and then crossed into the dark timber. Step by step. Check wind and glass. We started calling and had multiple bills calling back. We closed into about 80 yards with a clearing between us and the bulls. They stopped movie and the bugles slightly changed. Calling from their beds. We could see the shadows of the antlers and an ear twitch.
We waited.
We would occasionally call for the next 30 minutes or so and the one growly bull would respond. The others seemed to be getting further away.
Then silence for a while, over 30 minutes. We started to discuss going in hard and fast but then heard a long off bugle. The hunters on the ridge above us must have had their sent come off the ridge because the elk were all moving far and our wind was never bad.
We chased the bugles as long as we could until W called it. Said we probably shouldn’t chase them anymore with the elevation drop. We had already lost over 1200 vertical and following them would have required dropping another 1000 vertical. They weren’t stopping anytime soon.
We hiked back up the ridge and W ended up taking a nap after I stopped talking long enough for him to sleep.
