2012 MT Public Land DIY elk/muley

[Sifty]

Scoot, I think we should take up a donation to send you on a couple of hunt's each year just so we get to follow along.

Great story so far can't wait to find out what happens next.

Sifty

[Scoot]

Probably a good thing that 5x5 never presented a shot - I wouldn't have wanted to pack an elk out of that heavy timber! Easier to tell about the one that got away and wait for some better terrain.

LOL- if we'd taken that approach we'd have never bothered to hunt! The pics don't show it well, but the area is 98% covered in deep, dark timber. It's pretty much all thick and nasty. Packing them out of bad areas just comes with the territory- if you want to hunt elk in a public unit you either choose easy going and few or no elk or you dive in deep and deal with the mess you've gotten yourself into. We almost always choose the latter and certainly have no regrets about it.

[Scoot]

Scoot, I think we should take up a donation to send you on a couple of hunt's each year just so we get to follow along.

Sifty, I knew you were smart, but that may be the most brilliant idea I've ever heard! I'm all for it!!! I'll put my wish list together- should I send it to you?

[Archerysniper]

Maybe Rick can send you on a few hunts being prostaff and all the traffic you bring into this forum.

[Scoot]

Maybe Rick can send you on a few hunts being prostaff and all the traffic you bring into this forum.

Sniper, between you and Sifty, I've never heard such wise and thoughtful ideas. I'm all for this and think it's a wonderful idea.

[student]

Scoot,

First off, I love your stories and how well you incorporate the pictures and narrate the play by play of your experiences in the outdoors.

Would it be possible to edit the title to indicate when the story was last updated? I find myself checking the thread everytime I see new activity only to be dissappointed.

[Scoot]

...only to be dissappointed.

Shucks Student, dissappointment is my middle name!!!

Honestly, most days will be updated between 8:00 and 10:00 AM. After that, it's basically a bunch of questions and comments by others and smart aleck replies by me. The actual additions to the story come on week days in the AM typically. I hope that helps.

[engfish]

And the Fan Club grows.

Let me know how all those new hunting trips go over with the Missus...you Big Talker.

"Hey honey, the guys on the forum are going to fund some additional hunting trips..."

"So that I can write about..."

"Sorry guys...my wife says I'm lucky I'm not living out on the back yard already."

You are entertaining, though.

[Scoot]

LOL- Engfish you've pretty well got me figured out!

My wife's pretty great though- if I had a free hunt thrown my way, she'd work out the logistics with me on the home front and make sure I got to do it.

[Scoot]

Day 4

Jon and I went into the big basin near camp. This is the area Gabe and I drooled over while studying the maps- it looked to have it all! There was a nice North facing slope, some flat areas in the bottom, some small open parks, streams running on each side of the bottom- it looked great! Before we left I said at camp that I would shoot an elk this day. In all honestly, I had a feeling, but I had no idea whether that feeling applied to me or either of the other guys shooting a bull that day.

We slowly worked our way along the North facing slope, about ½ way down from the top. Occasionally we’d bugle or lost cow call to try coax a response out of a bull. After lost cow calling, I heard light chuckling 120 yards ahead. It was windy and tough to make out, but it was definitely a bull chuckling. Jon grabbed my shoulder and whispered, “Was that a tree?” Just as I was about to answer, the bull chuckled again and we sprinted into action. Jon ran ahead of me in the shooter position and we both moved in to what we thought was about 80 yards from the bull. This was playing out to be the type of calling scenario I love- get in a bull’s living room and make him mad! That’s exactly how it played out…

I dropped one more whiney estrus call and waited. Two seconds later, the bull responded with a bugle. Instead of letting him finish trying to bugle in this cow, I cut him off with a wicked, loud, screaming bugle of my own. …and just like that, he came storming in! We immediately could hear his hooves pounding the mountain as he came in to fight this bull for the “lost cow”. The mad bull streaked from 80 to 35 yards in about one second- you could still hear the echoing of my cut off bugle ringing through the dense canopy above and around us. Just then, however, I felt the fickle mountain winds blow at the back of my neck. Jon felt the same and hoped the bull would show himself before it was too late. However, the wise old bull tip toed out of there almost as quickly as he came running in and we never heard from him again. In fact, even though he was approaching chip shot range for Jon, neither of us ever even saw the bull. Wow what a rush! So close…

As we discussed what our plan was next we heard a different bull bugling down in the lower part of the basin below us. We dropped 1000 feet of elevation as fast as we could, crossed a small creek, and found our way up a tiny finger ridge near the bottom of that part of the basin. Just as we got up on the flattened out top of the little ridge, we heard a stick snap and looked intently at where it came from. A few seconds later Jon whispered, “There he is.” I immediately saw a bull making his way down the sidehill, across the creek, and towards our direction. I sneaked up about ten yards to find an open area that’d provide a shooting lane to where he was headed. Jon was three steps behind me and we both had arrows knocked, releases hugging the D loops, and we were on extremely high alert. The bull came up out of the creek and walked on a path that would put him 20 yards ahead of us. He stopped behind some small evergreens at 30 yards and surveyed the situation. Just as he started to slowly walk from his stopping point towards my shooting lane ten yards ahead of him, I felt it again- the wind blew from the back of my neck directly towards the bull. “This isn’t going to come together”, was all I had in my head. However, the bull walked forward and as he did he went behind another evergreen tree. I drew my arrow back, locked into my anchor point, and waited for a second. My pin found his shoulder as I could see parts and pieces behind the cover of the pine needles. “Is Jon going to cow call to stop him? Should I cow call to stop him? Should I just shoot him as he slowly walks?” I decided on the latter- he was moving pretty slowly and my pin was locked onto his shoulder blade. He made his way into my shooting lane and I started to squeeze my release- as I sit here typing I can still see my pin held steadily on the back of his shoulder and feel the breeze on the back of my neck blowing directly towards the bull.

A little side note about our accommodations on this trip. We each packed in about 42-45 lbs of “stuff” to where we camped. The majority of this weight was made up of our tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, our food, and the packs themselves. There were a number of other items we all carried, but the lion’s share of weight came from the items mentioned above. Here’s a quick look at some of these items in action.

Here’s a look at camp.

Inside one of our tents- pretty minimalistic, as you can see…

Here’s a look at our food, which consisted of some kind of breakfast bar in the AM, trailmix and a peanut butter/bacon sandwich for lunch, and mountain house meals in the evening. We used small portable stoves that weigh next to nothing and take up little space- they’re pretty cool little gizmos. There are lots of options for these and the three of us actually carried three different stoves. Here are a few pics of some of the food and food prep equipment.

My grub for the day.

Jon’s food for the day.

Evening grub with stove in bag.

[Scoot]

The peanut butter/bacon sandwiches don’t do too well at the bottom of a pack over the course of a week or more.

Mmmmm… doesn’t that look good?!? …and that’s a pic of one on the second day of the trip! They got much worse!!!

Jon’s stove.

Me making a little food at night- don’t I look like a completely wiped out pile o’ poo?

Gabe “cooking”.

Back to the story… Almost simultaneous to my shot, the bull took a firm left-footed step and snapped his head in our direction. My arrow was in flight and the bull was stopped, locked up, and looking and smelling our way. He had smelled us, but just a microsecond too late. “Whack!”, the arrow made a very loud noise at impact and I almost immediately turned to Jon and said, “Man, I hit him in the back of the shoulder” (well, that’s the G rated version of what I said). Jon tried to find an opening for a second arrow, but the bull had wheeled and looped around and away from us just a little too far away for a shot. Jon quickly cow called and then the mountain went silent.

I had a frustrated, irritated, disappointed kind of reaction- I’d just been given a gift of a chip shot opportunity and I figured I’d blown it. Far, far worse than missing an animal is hitting one poorly and given the sound and what I’d seen, I was sure I’d done just that. We marked where we last saw the bull in between some trees about 60 yards away and we sat down to discuss the details of what had just happened. Essentially, Jon saw none of the shot or where the impact was- he was immediately behind me and was looking for a shooting lane just past mine, in case the bull kept going forward and I missed or failed to get a shot or even if I hit him, Jon figured he might get a chance to get a second arrow in him.

We waited for 30 minutes and agreed to track him up to the point where we had a strong visual on him. We heard him go further than this, so we knew we could at least start on the blood trail to that point and not worry about bumping the bull from his bed. Once we reached the point where we’d seen him last, we would stop and wait for at least two hours from the time the bull was shot.

We recreated the shot and determined where the bull was when I shot. This is the view I had when I shot. The bull was just beyond my bow (you can see the arrows and cams just past the big log). It’s hard to tell from the pic, but I had a very open shot at the bull- he was well above the sticks towards the bottom/middle of the pic and to the right of the bowed branch in the background. It was an easy shot at an even easier distance and I’d managed to mangle it.

After impact, the bull wheeled back behind the bow to the left, then across to the right, making a big, wide semi-circle before he disappeared. I’m colorblind, so I’m little help tracking. Jon, on the other hand, has sharp eyes and is a good tracker. He found no sign of blood for almost 15 minutes, but soon I spotted my arrow about 20 yards from where the bull was hit.

This will give you an idea of how much penetration I got on the shot. There’s about 3-4 inches of blood on the arrow past where it broke off, so we guessed I’d gotten 12-14 inches of penetration total.

Fifteen minutes later we still had no sign of blood, but I spotted a fishy looking spot on a log that Jon soon confirmed was blood. From there it was nearly all Jon- he tracked pinhead sized drops of blood and hoof prints in the tiny yellow plants and dirt for over 60 yards. The going was extremely slow and by the time we reached the point where we’d seen the bull last, it’d been nearly two hours- not a good sign. I wish I’d have taken a couple pics of the pinhead sized drops Jon was tracking- it was really impressive! I didn’t have my camera when he suggested we take a pic of one spot he found and forgot to take a pic later- dang it!

After being stuck for almost 15 minutes I looped ahead hoping to find something. I spotted a couple of questionable marks on a rock, but saw this a few yards later- even I can identify this with my colorblind eyes!

From there we had about 60 more yards of a pretty good blood trail. However, the floodgates seemed to open up after that and Jon was literally tracking at a fast walk, seeing blood all over the trail five and ten yards ahead of him at a time. Sixty yards of this and we found the bull! We’d have never found this bull without Jon’s sharp eyes and awesome tracking job- I owe him big time! Here’s his final resting place.

I've got several more pics of the bull that I'll share, but I've got a friend who's a photoshop expert who's working on cleaning up the pics a bit. All he's doing is removing the blood from the pics so they're a little more presentable. I'll either wait until I get the cleaned up version of them to post them or, if I don't have the tweaked up versions soon, I'll post the originals then swap them out once I get them cleaned up. Either way, I'll have them posted in the next hour or two.

[CrewJones]

Great work !!! that looks heavy !

[DonBo]

Awesome, awesome, awesome! Was a little dissapointed when you were squeezing the release only to break away for sleeping bag and mushed sandwich photos, but this was a great (and quick) follow up. WTG Scoot!

[student]

I thought it was a regularly scheduled commercial break sponsored by bacon and Mountain House. Great read, makes me want to get out into the woods.

[Scott K]

Good job guys!

[jerkin'm]

Sweet story, almost like being there...am I blind, or did the antlers fall off when he hit the ground???

[BRULEDRIFTER]

I see no bone, nor do I see a "package" either.

Either way, sweet story and congrats on connecting! Uber jealous!

[Scoot]

Hey, don't you guys be commenting on my bull's "bone" or his "package"! He's got both bone and package. It'll make a lot more sense when I get the pics posted. DTro generously offered to fix them up for me and I should be able to get them posted today sometime.

[student]

That right there is funny.

[dukhnt]

Awesome story and great tracking!! Keep it coming.

[DonBo]

Wondering what kind of "Photoshop" job we'll be seeing? Just givin' ya hard time Scoot. You've come to expect nothing less.

[Cheetah]

Am I blind, or are the antlers missing?

[Scoot]

I thought it was a regularly scheduled commercial break sponsored by bacon and Mountain House.

LOL- now THAT's funny!!! I wish was I had Mountain House and bacon as sponsors. Of course, with a world wide shortage of bacon on the horizon, they'd probably drop me in a heartbeat... Plus, I'd have to be honest and talk about what Mountain House does to my (and Jon and Gabe's) GI tract- they'd drop me in a heartbeat. I'll spare you details, but it's really not pretty...

[Scoot]

Am I blind, or are the antlers missing?

Blind. I'm working on the pics that'll make it all make sense. However, in the pic above, you actually can see some antler. However, it's not what you'd expect to see...

[jerkbait]

Cool beans Scoot, Congrats!!!!! I am loving the story as well. As I usually do with your stories.