Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting An accounting of 4 Idaho bulls

continued….

A buck interrupts the elk hunt

Matt (IDnative on this thread) and I loaded up the groceries and headed north to camp once again. There was just enough daylight left when we arrived to make a wood run for the storm that would be arriving sometime the next day.
A couple of beers followed a couple of hamburgers, and soon my eyelids grew heavy. I managed to stay awake long enough to stuff the wood stove as full as I could and turned down the damper to get a long burn for the night. I crawled into my sleeping bag with visions of big bulls in the morning. Matt said I was snoring in about 30 seconds. I’ll have to take his word for it of course.

I knew something wasn’t right when Matt’s alarms when off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. We had a quick breakfast of banana bread and fruit and grabbed a coffee for the short ride to the same trailhead we’d chased Tim’s bull on a few days prior. I was 50 yards down the road before I realized the clock in my pickup said it was nearing 7…we were an hour behind schedule! Matt had accidentally set the daily alarm on his phone instead of the hunting alarm (to go off at 5). Ironically, I had done the same thing a year prior on the morning my son killed his big bull. I immediately started backing the truck up.

“I’m going to take the dirtbike and hunt the low country below camp” I told Matt. He understood, and said he’d slow hunt his way towards our usual haunts above me. I hate to be late to a hunting spot. I know people take animals mid-morning all over the world,…but it simply never happens for me. I swear that 95% of the game I’ve killed over the years was taken in the first 30 minutes of shooting light. If I rode hard on the dirtbike, I figured I could juuust make it into a spot down low I’d scouted the month prior, before daylight broke. I kicked the bike over and took off as fast as I dare in the direction I wanted to hunt.

The spot I was headed to really wasn’t that far off the main road, but it was down about 2,000’ vertical feet. Most folks simply don’t want to get that deep, knowing that will have to pack anything they might shoot back up the same, steep face. Thirty minutes later I parked the bike and headed out at a brisk pace for my intended location, still a mile distant. It was dark enough I needed the headlamp when I left the bike, but the night soon gave way to a grey dawn and I put the headlamp in my pocket as I continued on. Just as I broke through a thick stand of brush, the country started opening up a bit. I stopped for a second to catch my breath, and looked directly downhill from my location to see a pretty fair buck staring up at me. The second our eyes met, he wheeled around and started across the hillside. One way or another, I could see this was going to be over rather quickly. There was about 150 yards of real-estate between him and permanent escape over a finger-ridge.

In a fortuitus turn of events, I noticed there was a beautiful old Ponderosa Pine about three steps from me. In more or less one motion, several events occurred. I popped the security strap on my Kifaru Gun Bearer and pulled my .280 free. I ripped the scope cover off, and I blindly turned the vertical turret a couple of clicks. He was at about 200 yards now, and moving away at a rapid pace. I braced the rifle off the tree and picked him up in the scope. Just as I flipped the safety off, he paused for just a second to look back over his shoulder. He was already turning his head to leave when I squeezed the trigger. I was greeted with the unmistakable sound of a bullet striking meat, as he turned on the jets and steepened his retreat down and away from me. I lost visual on him as he went into a patch of brush, but I should have been able to see him come out the other side. I waited with my pulse still pounding in my ears for just a second, and then began my own descent towards where I had last seen him. I’d covered about 200 yards when I noticed a leg sticking up over the top of a downed log below me. He had only made it about 45 yards before piling up.

He wasn’t my best buck ever, but he was better than average and I was quite pleased with him, especially given it was an OTC unit with a fair amount of pressure in it.




Further inspection revealed the entrance was exactly where I had hoped it would be. I’ve connected on much further shots over the years, but I don’t know that I’ve ever made a better shot in my life all things considered. I might not be able to make that shot with a hundred more tries in that window of opportunity, but I made it the one time that it mattered most and that's good enough. The entrance is just off the tip of the knife.





It was with a measure of pride that now I went about breaking him down into quarters. I loaded half of him on my pack, and left half for the return trip. The next few hours weren’t fun. It had started to rain and then snow about the time I finished up the quartering process. Even with good raingear I was soon wet through to my base-layer. Cold followed on the heels of wet, and the pack uphill towards the bike didn’t make any of it more pleasant. I’ve started taking pictures of the unpleasant packs the last couple of years, to remind myself of the misery at a later date thinking it might aid in my future decision-making about where I choose to hunt. Here is a picture of yours truly as I started up the hillside with the first load on my back….




After I had the entire deer back to the bike, I started shuttling quarters back to camp. Somewhere along the way I had a spectacular crash on a tight switchback I didn’t quite pull. I tumbled a good 20 yards down the hill and came to rest upside down with my feet facing uphill. After a few seconds to collect my thoughts, I was quite surprised to find both the buck and my limbs had made it through the crash unbroken. When I pulled into camp with the last load, I was relieved to see Matt was back and had started a fire. It was beginning to snow in earnest at that point, and I was eager to get warm again. He emerged from the tent with eyebrows raised and said, “You look like chit. You have blood AND mud on your face. Did you crash again?!” Sympathy from Matt was in short supply, especially given that he had seen nothing that day. I wiped most of the mud and blood from my face and he snapped this picture before I stepped into the warm embrace of the wall-tent.




To be continued….