Snap, crackle, pop. They’re not just the sounds you hear in your bowl of cereal every morning. They are the sounds you want to hear, very loudly, when you’re sitting in the dark timber at oh-dark-thirty waiting patiently for a 600+ pound elk to walk up on your position. Crash, bang, boom - as the sounds gets closer and closer the hair on the back of your neck begins to rise and your pulse quickens. Suddenly you’re aware that you’re breathing faster and faster despite your best effort to remain perfectly calm. You double-check the chamber on your rifle to make sure you’ve already got a bullet loaded. It would really be embarrassing to pull the trigger and hear “click” instead of “BOOM!” You double-check the safety on your rifle to make sure you haven’t forgotten which side it’s on. You look down at your scope, making sure the lens covers are off and the variable zoom is set no higher than 6x. It would be darn frustrating to look through the eye piece and see nothing but the knot on a tree 100 yards away instead of the elk you’re targeting.
You say a little prayer to the hunting spirits asking for their blessings because you’re not sure if the last time you bumped your scope against a tree while you were stumbling through the early morning darkness you didn’t knock it loose and mess it up. From directly behind the tree you’re sitting against you hear what can only be a herd of elk slowly trotting through the woods. You check your watch to confirm that shooting hours have started; there’s no sun in the sky yet to confirm what you’re pretty sure you know. You take a deep breath and slowly exhale. The sounds of snapping twigs and disturbed earth only grow louder. You decide that the time has come to take a look behind the tree and possibly take your first shot in three years. You slowly lift your rifle, putting one eye in the scope and the other wide open to take in the whole scene. As you ever so slowly swing around the tree you can feel your heart pounding in your chest as your walk down the mental checklist you’ve reviewed over and over for the last 11 months – where to aim, confirm a good backstop, safety off before you pull the trigger, squeeze the trigger slowly, keep breathing… OH CRAP!
There, sitting upright, perfectly in your scope’s sights is the fattest squirrel I’ve ever seen. So fat, that it just might be worth shooting it to make up for the fact that I was convinced it was an elk. Grrr. There is no elk anywhere in sight. I put the safety back on, drew a deep breadth, and wondered how any squirrel, no matter how fat, can make that much noise in the woods. Dang squirrels. It is amazing how a few days away from the television, radio, computer, and cellphone (and all the other noisy distractions like the wife and kids) lets your hearing become more sensitive to even the smallest sounds. When I talk to other elk hunters, particularly those that have actually seen and shot elk, they tell me that an elk walking through the woods is a fairly noisy animal. I guess it would be hard to be “light on your feet” if you weighed over 500 pounds. Now I know that elk make more noise than squirrels. How much more, I’m not exactly sure, but I’m betting it’s a fair bit more. Dang squirrels.
This year I was fortunate to get out hunting twice – once during the first rifle season with a bull tag and once during the second rifle season with a leftover cow tab. Despite hunting two seasons I came up completely empty. Grrr. My best guess is that the weather has been so good going into October that the bulls went their separate ways after the rut and haven’t been pushed lower to look for better sources of food and water. Without a big snowstorm in September to kill off the grasses in the high meadows, bulls and cows are pretty content to stay put and only move when absolutely necessary. In between hunting seasons I had to work at a tradeshow in
Now don’t get me wrong – despite not filling either tag I still had a great time. All the BS you hear from men about “its just great to get out (of the house) and spend time in the woods (playing poker and drinking beer) is honestly true. For me the best part is getting out of the usual routine (wake-up, feed the kids, make coffee for the wife, send everyone off to school) and having some time to commune with nature. While I was out during the second rifle season, hunting up near Walden, I saw more moose than you could shake a stick at. This is the same area where moose were reintroduced a number of years ago. From what I saw, the reintroduction is working just fine. Over three days hiking around the woods I counted three bulls, four cows, and at least one calf. One of the bulls must have been at least 4-5 years old. He had a gorgeous rack and looked like he weighed around 1,200 pounds or more. Even though elk hunting is still my greatest pursuit, I’m starting to think it might be worth the effort to start accumulating preference points for a moose hunt. I hear they taste just as good as elk, if not better.
For me elk hunting is done until 2009. I don’t have the cash or the time to pull another leftover tag. My three year running score is: Elk 3, Drew 0. No matter, I’ll be the first one to call all my hunting buddies when the 2009 big game brochure comes out so we can get together for a beer at Roy’s and start planning for next year’s hunt. Hopefully NEXT year I’ll finally fill a tag instead of running into any more giant squirrels. Grrr.
