When my feet hit the ground in elk country I was toting a fairly new Rem 700 CDL in 35 Whelen. It was loaded up with 225 gr TSX's. No elk that year.
The 225 gr. .35 caliber TSX is one flat out elk slayer. Just ask me how I know.
My very first elk hunt was in IIRC 1975 or 76. Toehold memory banks don't work quite as well as they used to.
Any, after reading elk were irc lads I convince my wife I need something bigger so I bought a Mark X Mauser in .375 H&H. I've shot .375's before so was no stranger to the recoil. Practiced on pocket gophers prior to the hunt and considered myself good to go.
First day of the hunt I'm on stand at the edge of a clearing and off a bit to my left are two trees a few feet apart with a fallen tree making the whole scene look just like a door way. My thought was wouldn't it be cool if an elk popped out through that "doorway"?
Well about 45 minutes later that just what happened. A legal spike came right through that doorway and I was set up just perfect for a shot. Here I have a spike elk stopped dead still staring in my direction, my crosshairs smack dab in the middle and I squeeze off the shot and it's a miss.
Mr. Elk flees the scene before I was able to get off another shot.
Comes now the rest of the story. I'd set my rifle down to go take a dump away from camp. While I was gone the recital orifice and messed with my scope adjustments. All of us were from the same town in Nevada and he and I really didn't get along. I didn't find out about it until we'd come home after the hunt when someone told me about it.
I still think I should have called him out on it but my wife talked me out of it. I did tell him that I knew what he did and he'd best not do it again.
That started a very long 35 year string of bad luck elk hunts that finally ended in 2010. Shot one elk and when I went to get help gutting it it gets stolen. The rest of the time if I had cow tags, I only saw bulls. If I had a bull tag, I only saw cows. Finally did a landowner hunt in New Mexico and broke my jinx, almost. Got the animal to the butcher shop and the meat was bad de to an infection and smelled rotten. The game warden was on his day off and refused to come out to certify the animal bad and issue me a new tag.
Went again the next year and things have been 100 percent ever since. Be going again next January. Oh yeah, my "lucky" rifle is a custom Mauser in .35 Whelen. I won't leave home without it.
Paul B.
