Wait have you read Year 1 yet?
A detailed journal of my 2nd year and the one that got away as a novice hunter in the rugged British Columbia Interior.
YEAR 2
Studying Elk Behavior
In 2013, my friend Yves and I both bought crossbows and began to collect the gear we thought we would need for a hunt. I bought a bugle, scent cover, made a nice survival kit, bought a good pair of boots, and studied elk hunting online. I was starting to think about strategies, plans and ways to get into position. I also learned about elk behaviour, habitat, and how they conduct themselves.
I felt like I was getting to know a distant cousin, someone from my family though our ancestors had drifted apart a long time ago, but who was still kin. We were mammals after all. The scientist and the hunter in me blossomed. The same number of vertebrae in our necks, the same looping vein that does its strange vestigial course through our neck and chest, a throw back from when some even more distant ancestor was a fish. I soaked up the theory but needed more experience.
Sacred Hunting Group
In the late summer, I met up with a sacred hunting group in the area. I was happy to meet folks who spoke about hunting in a way that I could relate to. People who saw it as a spiritual process, as self-exploration, and a means to connect and gather sustenance from the forest. My atheist leanings still needed translation work to move the stories from religious or spiritual into myths and wisdom that I could easily digest. Their passion was closer to the ethos that I needed for hunting mentorship and direction.
I was deeply relieved to finally meet people who spoke not about “Sticking him good”, or “Blasting an elk” like I had heard other hunters speak. A hunting ethic I felt revelled in the domination of another being, and reinforced a shallow and a vacuous version of the masculine where too often men are typical, hard, and callous toward life. The sacred hunting group was a group of people who spoke instead about reverence, awe, personal narrative and growth, while remaining sensitive to the elation and tragedy in the experience of taking an animals life.
In the sacred hunting group, I gravitated to the meaning that each person took from the hunt, like a fingerprint of their own process and experiences. Often a single motif would arise in their talks about the hunt. The myth of the animal giving itself to a worthy opponent. This was the story of the hunter and hunted dance leading to the perfect alignment of wills. A sacrifice of self in a moment, and the opportunity for the hunter to respond, by placing a lethal shot into the heart and lungs for a sacred kill. This myth appealed to me and it was foundational to my first outings that fall.
First Hunt of the Season
Brock, Yves and I set out through a cut block at 5 in the morning in a location where Brock had seen an elk heard moving in the spring. We set up against a steep thickly treed ridge and bugled at dawn to see who we could call in through the cut block. We agreed that I would be the shooter. Within moments we heard a call, hopeful that it was the response a bull elk. Moments later a twin pair of great Horned Owls flew low over us and called again. We realize we were also watched by another type of hunter.
We hiked to the top of the cut block moving down slope into the forest. Skirting the crown of the hill making a long loop around and back toward the truck from the opposite side on which we started. We found an Elk wallow nestled deep in a wet dark band of Cedars in which we bugled and listening to the forest where only silence came back to us.
The hike out began steep and densely treed with new growth before we broke into mature forests, with broad Larch and Cedars, open with sparse underbrush dotted with patches of fern. A damp mossy brook cut through the gentle drainage grown with patches of devils club from time to time. We arrived at the truck in the early afternoon having done an 8 km loop. My legs hurt, my ankle was sore, but I felt a great and more capable than I had the year before.
Hunting a Mountain Top
The following weekend Brock and I went to a location on the other side of the mountain from where we hiked the Elk out the year before. We parked in a large meadow area where an old logging road was slowly dissolving back into the forest.
We hiked up to a bench meadow at the base of the peak we looked up to. A mule deer startled at our approach fled into a drainage that rose up the right of us and a frozen elk wallow. Brock led us up a steep climb toward the peak. The slope rose from loose stone and earth patched together by bunches of bear grass before turning to a narrower rocky and boulder-strewn ridge spattered by juniper and stunted spruce.
We hit patches of snow clung to the shaded parts of the ridge as we climbed higher. The ridge tapering into a knife edge ridge with 20 – 50 meter sheer drops on the north side that fell steeply for hundreds of meters into the drainage on our right. The left side dropped off for 10 – 30 meters into steep slopes that were barren from the avalanche shoots and paths the kept the mountain dangerous in the winter. Our ascent quickly turned into free climbing as we scaled 3 meter faces with crossbow and rifle strapped to our packs. The sweat dripping from my brows and the tip of my nose leaving pocks in the ankle deep snow.
We crested the top of the mountain, the ridge fanning out across the large mound of the peak as we looked down 500 meters below onto the now tiny meadow we had started from. I was satisfied, we had an amazing climb and here we were at the top of a peak in the Mountains that wasn’t in any hiking book. From the top, I could see that the peak was part of a gentler looking slope that drained a large bowl toward the south.
The Hunt is On
From the truck and meadow below you could never have seen this hidden bowl, this very “Elk” looking bowl with the thin subalpine forest and sloping meadows. We rested on a shale rock tumble overlooking the bowl and bugled. No bugle throughout the day had gotten a response. Brock called a strong 3 tone bugle tapering out into a series of several sharp grunts. The sound bounced from the sides of the bowl drifting away to a brief moment of silence before far below came the unmistakable yet distant call back from a curious bull.
My heart jumped. Brock did a fist pump and an excited “YES!”. We quickly decided I would shoot if presented the opportunity. We also decided we would follow the ridge line down to meet up with him in a decent shooting lane.
Brock mentioned it would be a brutal pack out from here, and I agreed, knowing all too well that my excitement and inexperience were not tempering my enthusiasm in the hunt.
We ran through the forest my crossbow in hand descending toward our meeting. The bull called back to us clearly having closed more than half the distance from our initial contact. We moved down slope into the bowl and found a stoney outcropping that gave me a downward vantage atop a 3 meter ledge in the rocks. The wind was still carrying our scent in a good way up slope from the bowl.
The strategy was for Brock to call from behind me as I perched over the lane for a shot. There was a cluster of spruce on my right blocking a long view onto the western part of the bowl from where he would, hopefully, approach. Brock bugled again answered within moments like he was only a couple hundred meters away.
My heart was pounding. My breathing rapid. I worked to calm myself and steady my hand like every hunter does and I waited. I spoke silently to the elk and asked him to come to me. To offer that perfect moment to mythically give himself, while every instinct in his body would resist and fight to live on. Brock was behind me past the Spruce blocking my view sitting in a pen of fallen trees around an open stand of twiggy trees. I suddenly heard the crashing and crunching sound of an approaching elk, and then to my dismay I heard him stop.
I heard him breathe, snort, and his teeth clacking as he stood somewhere close beyond the trees and waited for the elk he was talking to show himself. I looked to Brock stark still in the pen gaze forward and knew he was looking at him. I hoped Brock would take the shot if he could. Time moved slow as I sat hopelessly close but unable to see him.
Within a few minutes, there was a slight change in the air and he suddenly bolted away with a loud alarm call. Followed shortly after by another, and then another. He crashed off into the forest fleeing the strange odour that set him off. Brock came to me and said he had been about 20 yards away and that he stared at Brock for a long time. He was almost certain that he was only a 5-point bull and almost certainly not legal.
Empty handed Return
I was grateful for the experience and not disappointed at all. This had been a good hunt. Not being able to see him was the only thing that really stung, but I later realized this was part of the meaning, part of the myth, and the magic of elk hunting.
We descended a steep traverse along the slide path making for the truck along open avalanche slopes. Past arm thick mazes of slide alder gouged by the occasional steep drainage shoot. We got back to the truck footsore and tired having ascended 578 meters over 2.2 km with a return hike back down over 2.7 km. My ankle ached, but I felt happy I had been capable of the effort. I was happy that I had come close to a bull Elk in the forest. 2013 closed with neither Brock or I shooting an elk.
Continue reading with Year 3.