It was the first rifle hunt in Colorado. I was hunting with a new rifle, a Weatherby Mk. V stainless synthetic in .375 H&H that I had acquired for a trip to Africa scheduled for the following September. I was anxious to blood the rifle and see how the 260 AccuBonds would perform on elk-sized game. Opening morning, I slipped up on a small spring concealed in a canyon that I had found the year before. There was no sign that a hunter had ever been in there and I was certainly the first one that year. I picked a spot where I could see both slopes and sat down to glass.
Within about two minutes, I saw a decent 6x6 bull working his way along a trail across the canyon. If he stayed on the trail, he was going to pass about 150 yards from me on the far side. Based on past experience hunting this ranch, I figured that he was about as good a bull as I was likely to see. When he was just about opposite me, I shot him behind the shoulder. He stopped walking. I quickly slicked another round in the chamber and shot again, hitting about two inches away from the first shot, as it turned out. He took about two staggering steps backward, then reared up and fell over on his back, burying his top forks in the dirt.
I spent the next morning helping a buddy hunt another canyon. That afternoon, I decided to take a small camp chair and my spotting scope and binocular and return to that spring to see what might come into as it got later in the day. I got set up a little higher on the slope on an old abandoned road that was grown up with brush and trees that provided a flat spot to put my chair.
As the sun went down behind the mountain to the west, I had seen nothing but a bear that came to the spring to drink and splash around. I was thinking about pulling out so that I could make the trip back to camp before dark. As I reached down for the case for my spotting scope, I saw a cow elk standing to my left about 60 yards away on the old road bed. Almost simultaneously, a bull bugled so close that it was all that I could do not to jump out of my chair. I slowly raised my binocular and saw that there were about 20-25 cows and calves strung out along the trail.
The bull bugled again and stepped out from behind the lead cow. He was a huge 6x7 with incredible mass. He bugled again and again, and each time he did the long terminal forks of his antlers laid along side his back almost to the base of his tail.
I couldn't believe it. Here I was 67 yards from the bull of a lifetime in an open season without a rifle or a tag! I know that he was 67 yards, because the elk lingered for five or six minutes, as though taunting me. For lack of anything better to do I pulled my rangefinder out of my pocket and ranged him. Finally, the lead cow decided to move on off, leading the group up slope and and through a little saddle into the thick conifers above. As they moved off, I could still hear him bugling as the light faded.
Not exactly a mistake, but if I had to do it over again, I like to think that I would do it differently...
