Some of you Hunt WA cats have been asking for a story of my 2019 Idaho hunt/bull, so here ya go
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My hunting partner of some 18 years (we met on the elk mountain the day after 9/11/2001) and I left the comforts of our homes in W Washington for a Gem State archery elk hunt on Thursday, 12 September. That evening and the entire next day was spent setting up our base camp (12X16 wall tent, rain fly, wood stove, gazebo off the porch end for cooking, shower enclosure (which didn't get used as much as it should have), and that most important final touch of hanging up the American Flag at the entrance our camp).
Enough work and no play though. Saturday the 14th, we drove to a high point and headed in on an old pack trail to set up our spike camp around three miles in.
That done, we headed over the ridge to see if anybody was singing and yes…… we heard two bulls, way, way off across a steep draw. That night, “the whistler” as we called him, would periodically wake us up with his high note, down to two note bugle; he took great pleasure in coming close to our tipi and shrieking at us, making for a very restless night. A bit annoying but still fine and dandy as well, you know… he was a bull bugling below camp. The next morning’s Jet Boil coffee was slurped down and off we went down from camp, onto a long ridge to the west with a nice flat saddle on it about ½ mile down from camp.
As we moved down, we could hear two bulls singing across the draw, paralleling us, on their way to bed. We messed around on the saddle a few hours, seeing if we could get any answers from the north to no avail. That was pretty much just to kill time before we headed farther down the ridge, and then dumping off to the south, across the draw that separated us from the multi-fingered draw that held the vocal bulls we’d heard earlier. I stopped once on the hike down to the creek to see if we could ball park the bull’s current location and yep, a few really loud cow calls on my part were met with a few cow chirps, and, one bugle response. We didn’t get down to the creek bottom until around 2:30. After filtering/filling up our water bladders (good thing we did this with what was to come), we slowly crept up the side hill and sat just above the creek to listen and wait for the thermals to start to switch.
Around 4:00, the thermals started to move down into our ugly mugs and we started moving up and chose our first set up spot. A handful of cow calls were met with silence from above so I touched base with Joe and we moved up another good piece of real estate to the next set up/calling spot. I placed Joe and moved back down, to the right a bit and this time I became a bull with a few cows. Cow calls, some trophy raking, and finally a nice screaming bugle… brought an immediate response from a bull above us perhaps 150 yards. After waiting a few minutes and realizing the vocal bull was not coming to me/us, I figured Joe would be moving up on the elk as I continued to call/move a bit closer towards the bull. Now things become a bit interesting. I moved up pretty quickly (again, assuming Joe was moving on the bull), to where I thought I was within 75-80 yards of the vocal fellow. I was just getting ready to do some raking/calling when I saw a tall chunk of alder moving up the hill side above me, a bit to my left. “What in the heck is Joe doing that far up there, and why is he doing non-verbal elk sounds when I’m the call… when I’m the call…, umm call....caller”? Oh……., it’s not Joe, it’s a bull going to town knocking the snot out of that alder! Each time the bull raked, I would quickly move up 10-15 yards or more as the span of raking allowed.
Once within 30 yards, I could fully see the bull’s body, but not his entire head/antlers. From the bit I saw, it looked like a decent bull. I knocked an arrow, moved quickly to within about 25 yards and after watching the bull knock some more stuffing out of the alder patch, seeing him palpitate all over himself, I was just getting ready to draw and take my chances with the one or two vertical wispy twigs in front of his vitals when I heard Joe, back down to my left give two cow calls. BAM, the bull left his alder abuse mission immediately and took a few steps straight down the hill towards the cow he heard. The Darton Maverick II was at full draw within a ½ a second but now the bull made a hard left and here he came straight at me (not knowing I was even in the country). He was obviously heading to the cow calls he’d heard, but, was gonna work around so he could wind what he was hearing first.
It was only seconds till the bull was within 15ish yards from me and I touched off the Magnus Stinger tipped Black Eagle arrow…. the arrow buried into the shirt pocket of the bull and he exploded down to his right like he’d been shot with a bazooka. I immediately threw out a couple of loud, whiny cow calls (I had my cow diaphragm in my mouth still) but nobody or nothing was slowing down that runaway locomotive. After the crashing down the mountain side sounds faded, I gave three quick cow calls (my signal for my partner to join up with me)… we use this when we’re ready to move from a setup, or, to just move back together. No response from Joe so I quickly removed some tracking ribbon from my Exo Mountain Gear K2 Pack lid, marked where I’d shot from, where the bull was standing, and where the last place I saw him running was. At that last spot, I found the last 10ish inches of my 28 ½ arrow laying in the elk tracks and saw the first blood. This was only 25-30 yards below where he was standing when I hit him. Three more cow calls and nothing back from Joe; again, three more cow calls and finally Joe answered back with three of his own. OK, I figured he’s got a visual on where the bull crashed to down his way. Off I went, following the elk’s ground excavating tracks and blood. Once I got to Joe I found out that the elk had blasted right by him, and, I found out that Joe had never heard him bugle back to my calls like I had below. Joe was just over a little rise above a creek and did not hear him where he had finally perched on our last set up. OK, on to tracking. The bull’s tracks were easy to follow as he never broke stride till he fell. Good blood, great tracks, made for an easy trailing job. We found him down around 100 yards from where I had hit him. He was facing back up towards the direction he came from, perhaps to finally stop and think about what may have happened or what kind of monster was behind him, laying on his side on one of the only semi-flat spots in the entire area (it really isn't that flat as we had to tie him off when we rolled him over to bone out side two to prevent an elk sliding down the mountain episode).
I didn’t recover the Magnus BH or the rest of the arrow, but, once we lifted the back of the spine to remove the loins, it was apparent that the broad head had really done its work on the inside of the elk, as evidenced by a good quarter of his body cavity being full of blood. Boning out the elk and hanging the majority of it in game bags took us till around 8:00 PM. He was seriously, the fattest bull I have ever shot.... every part of him that could have fat, did in fact have fat... a lot of it. He obviously ate well the past summer. Off we went with our headlamps on, the antlers, back straps, loins, and a portion of some of the hind quarter meat in our packs. This is what I will tell you about that first night’s pack out. We started out at 8:30 PM towards the track, a mere 2 1/2ish miles away, and did not arrive until a bit before 7:00 PM the next morning. Alder hell I tell you is what we decided to come up through on our way to the truck. I have never had a tougher initial pack out in my lifetime; the bull had his revenge on me though as it was a constant battle to slide, pull, and force that rack on my pack through the brush. The next few trips weren’t as bad but still, two hours to get to the kill site and approximately 5 hours each time to get back to the truck. Brutal is an understatement. On our last trip in to get the remainder of the meat I had my usual “going to a kill site” theme going. .44 MAG on my chest and talking really loud once we got close to the site. Once I saw the last few meat bags shredded off the trees, I know brer’ bear had been there. Oh well, we fed a whole bunch of forest dwellers with the carcass and the remainder of the meat. We got into a handful of bulls over the course of the next week but unfortunately, I was not able to get Joe a shot.
We took most of the meat down the mountain to a processor but kept a loin at camp (of course we did). We ate some darn fine meals from that one loin (Joe has an excellent method where he slices the loin meat very fine and flash cooks it in a hot skillet for literally seconds on each side). Of course, the tasty medallions were lightly sprinkled with Alpine Touch. A handful of days later, we actually took the rest of the loin meat and made a fine stew that filled us up/fueled us up nicely before a monster hike/hunt the next day.
Gonna throw the gear in the big red truck tonight and head out for my 6 day WA ML hunt. Perhaps I'll get to pad the freezer a bit more before the long winter; thanks for reading my ramblings. RJ
