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The season was already open, so I wasn't too surprised that we didn't see or hear any elk activity in the main meadow that evening. I decided to focus on the pocket meadows, surrounded by timber below us the next morning. We decided to bring the goats with us, as I'd heard mixed reviews about how elk react to goats. I knew they could be a pain the butt, but I also worry about their safety. That morning, we found one of their benefits in that they alerted to a small herd of deer inside the timber, well before we caught sight of them. As we crept along, we began to hear distant bugles and followed those toward the burn. We heard a few other bugles close by, so we set up over a water hole in a meadow. The goats fed for a few minutes then laid down too. Sure enough a small bull wandered through the timber by himself. I wasn't ready to take him, so we kept quiet, and he ignored us. We dropped off the side of the mountain into the burn and we really got into the bugling. I finally let off a bugle of my own and got an instant response from a good one. As he came up from bottom, with the mid morning sun at his back, I could he was a shooter, but he hung up at 150 yards in the burned timber, never really offering a shot. The goats were up and milling about, so maybe that was the problem. They damned sure didn't help in this case. He wandered off back below the ridge. Never saw any of his cows.
We pulled out of there and headed back towards camp to see how things were looking on the other side of the mountain and focus on other small meadows with water holes as it was going to be a sunny day. As we were heading back out the woman, her dad, and now husband were hiking through. They showed us a picture of the bull, around 320, and now there was no hiding where they were headed, into the burn.



As we arrived at a little pocket with a large wallow and settled in, a cow and spike came out to the water. The cow saw the goats, who were mostly up and mingling about, while me and Adam were behind some little bushes. The cow was super nervous and lighting off barks, but wouldn't actually leave from under 100 yards away. As evening set in and we didn't hear any bugles or responses to calls, we moved down the drainage. It was dusk and we got into bulls bugling from several directions. At one point we thought we had to be damned close to one, but he hung up inside the timber above us. At dusk, just across the draw, about 200 yards away, we saw three raghorn bulls. Neither of which were worth getting too excited about yet.




The next morning, we had another visit by the bull moose as we were preparing to leave.