There is absolutely nothing to compare to the soulful bugle of a bull elk shattering the calm on a September morning.
That’s why I reserved the week around Sept. 15 for archery hunting in the high country with my pal Erwin. I am reminded of this today because young Natty Bumpo down at the office is clearly suffering from the same preoccupation. His eyes fairly sparkled on Monday when he recounted his first weekend of archery elk hunting.
I remember that feeling.
Our spot was a magic place filled with elk wallows, rubbed trees, and thick timber laced with elk trails. The first September morning we hunted there, we looked down from the ridge and watched four bull elk bugle back and forth in the early golden sunlight.
I have many memories of that place and the nights we laid awake listening to bugling elk. One day stands out in particular.
Erwin and I couldn’t go in until Friday night. Our pal Tell had gone in early to scout and set up camp. When Erwin and I arrived in the dark there was no camp. Tell’s pack leaned against a nearby tree while he tended a roaring fire.
“Am I glad to see you!” he exclaimed.
“No elk around here. You guys rest, then we’ll head back down the trail,” Tell announced.
He told us how he had been scouting that afternoon and was surprised at the lack of fresh elk sign. Then he glimpsed something big, black and silver moving nearby.
“Figured it was a moose at first,” he said.
When the “moose” started toward him, Tell revised his opinion. It was the largest bear he had ever seen. Tell quickly took his leave. Only then did he notice how the whole basin seemed to have been torn up. He spotted overturned rocks and logs and piles of bear scat all along the way back to camp. In the soft mud he saw huge bear tracks. Tell decided to wait for us so we could all hike out together.
But we didn’t. The bear would be gone now, Erwin and I reasoned. Elk would move back in directly. Tell should consider himself lucky to have seen that bear, we told him.
When dawn broke the next morning, Tell and I were perched on a ridge we called the “meat bench” high above the basin. Erwin was working through the brush, below and more or less parallel to us. As our eyes worked to pick him out in the tangled alders we spoke simultaneously.
“Is that Erwin?” Tell asked.
“Is that the bear?” I asked.
After a short pause, we looked at each other, and then we looked again toward Erwin.
Down there in the brush we saw a huge dark shape moving on a collision course with the camo-clad form of Erwin. They were perhaps 15 yards apart now and still unaware of each other.
There was another pause. A thought flashed in my mind: I will never see anything like this again!
Then Tell and I both began to scream, though I can’t remember exactly what we may have shouted.
The great bear stood up, swinging its head in apparent confusion and trying to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. Erwin dropped into a sort of crouch. Then each of them took off at a sprint in opposite directions.
The bear plowed toward safety in long, loping strides that sent muscle and fat in silver ripples down its broad back. It hit the edge of the timber like a garbage truck, with trees parting in its path and wobbling in its wake after it was gone.
We watched in awe.
Eventually, Erwin scrambled up to the meat bench, gasping.
He never saw the bear. He had heard our shouts and the bear crashing as it fled.
“Wow! Now that’s what I call a big griz!” Tell gushed with a relieved grin.
The next spring, a big grizzly was killed soon after coming out of hibernation. The unknown killer took only the claws. We read that the bear weighed somewhere in the 800-pound range, even after a long winter denned up. We have always wondered whether it was the bear we saw. And to this day, we have always hoped it was not.
We quit hunting there long ago. But when mid-September rolls around every year, that place, that bear, and that moment return.
Sometimes I think that maybe Erwin and Tell and I should give that basin one last try.
Then again, maybe I’ll just tell the Bumpo boys how to get there.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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Dave A wrote on Sep 15, 2008 9:45 PM: