Growing up, in Elk Country

Copyright 2008 Lem James

Bravado Outdoors

Hunting is at once intensely private and intensely social; there are opportunities for glory, and for shame or ugliness. Most of us have experienced both at some level. As hunters, many of our closest friends and family share our successes and failures, and these experiences are shared both in the field and in the stories that are shared. In outdoor-centric families there is no surer measurement of a child’s growth than success and independence in the field. Usually the father or another close relative acts as guide and instructor, for years in most cases. Because of the life and death nature of hunting, and the time involved in successfully training a new hunter until they are self sufficient, the relationship is usually more influential than just teaching the skill set for hunting.

This is where kids are trained how to be adults, how to make hard decisions, and follow them up with decisive action. Most of these families have some kind of progression that leads into deer and big game hunting. Fishing, small game, turkeys and waterfowl all lead up to hunting with your mentor, in my case my father, for big game. Bagging a deer with your dad is, for many, the first opportunity to “bring home the bacon.” This success shows a skill set and the endurance, work and perseverance to provide for your family. The next and perhaps biggest step to becoming a hunter is to bring home your own game. In the Pacific Northwest, indeed across the western United States and beyond, there is a level just past bringing home your own buck. At the risk of extreme accusations of sexism, being invited to Elk Camp is akin to being issued your “man card.” There are many women who love and live the grueling nature of elk hunting as well.

Off the bat let me acknowledge that there are easy elk hunts, at least I have heard of them...  Where I live, and in most Elk country, elk hunting is a test of physical and mental endurance, long hours, wet cold weather, days or seasons without ever getting an opportunity to shoot, miles that are also measured in vertical feet, hillsides that are choked beyond passage with vine maple or rhododendrons. If you succeed in tagging an elk you can multiply all of these obstacles by ten with 80 plus pounds of elk on your back. By the time an elk reaches camp, multiplication no longer applies, this is sheer exhaustion.

My second elk season was significant. I had wrangled a couple of days off of work to hunt before heading out of state for thanksgiving. It had been a year of last days from a sporting perspective. The only thing I shot early was my agricultural doe. My buck came on the last day of season, hunting with my brother in law. My dad was the pastor at a country church that also bears the name of the hunting unit. It was my first elk season hunting alone, but my dad and brother were both available for packing duties if needed. The weekend was all early mornings and wet, sloppy, steady, soaking rain. Monday evening found me wet again and I hadn’t found elk yet. Tuesday morning, my last day, came and almost went... My alarm failed me, or I failed my alarm, and the temptation to roll over almost won. But I made the drive and found myself alone on the mountain around 8 am. That set the pace for the day: slow.

I was hunting a hill that doesn’t get much pressure, on a logging road that turns right before the main hunting pressure starts. My dad and his partner had seen two rag horn bulls on the mountain while scouting from the truck during deer season. I started in to the Rhodies and old growth forest two hours after dawn. The hill was steep and the going was slow but quiet. For the first time this season it was dry, the visibility was good for coastal Oregon, and two ravines unfolded so that every few steps I could see new country through the tall trees and patches of rhododendron.

Every time a new patch of ground would come into view I would stop, often sitting down, to watch the new area. For some reason, I knew or believed that something was imminent. I have killed big game by using at least three senses and, sitting on a blow down watching, it was my ears that did it. It took a moment to register the heavy breathing, almost labored breathing. The sound was coming from the ridge above me but I couldn’t pin the location at first. Then it was gone. Now my senses were at full alert, knowing an elk or bear was very close and I couldn’t tell where. I sat still and really picked things apart with my eyes, nothing. I kept the pace, slow, moving up and watching. I heard the breathing twice more, just hints but definite enough.

Two more moves forward and uphill, pausing, but I couldn’t spot a thing. Coming to a small trail through thick dog firs, I eased in, restricting my view for the moment. It might restrict a rifle shot as well. I could see the forest would open back up momentarily. Slow steps, stopping to listen. Once again my ears tuned in, this time it was exact; four footsteps, slightly uphill and to the left, CLOSE! Just around the next tree trunk in fact. I eased around, and found myself looking directly at a bull elk, broadside, at forty paces. It only took a cursory glance to tell that there were more than the mandatory three points even through the branches which partially obscured the antlers. Deer hunting had made my rifle an extension of my thoughts and the brush was now behind me. The cross hairs settled instantly behind the front shoulder, bang, elk step, bang. The light 243 cracked three times, and while the elk never flinched but my confidence was unshaken. Elk are tough, but this one was done for.

After the first two shots I switched and shot for the neck, I wanted to anchor my bull. To my complete surprise, nothing happened. The elk started to jog up the hill, luckily for me, through open forest. I slid four more shells into the magazine and dropped to prone position. My completely misplaced confidence in the first shot hadn’t changed, and when the bull stopped, now just over one hundred yards, the crosshairs settled between his eye and ear. The bull dropped like only a headshot will do and never flinched. The drama was quick, under a minute, but in retrospect, when I couldn’t find a single hole or damage in his bread basket, I thought, damn that was close. Evidently those two first .243 bullets found enough branch to explode. I’ll never know that whole story, but suffice it to say that my gun was upsized the next summer. There is still a fondness in me for that sporterized mauser .243 if the money had been there... It would still be in my cabinet today, tack driving machine that it was. I now rifle hunt with a seven million meter Remington manglem, and elk hunt almost exclusively with my bow.

By this time my excitement was over the top, approaching the elk whose head was propped up on a log and staring directly at me, although with unseeing eyes. I shot him once more in the head from 30 yards. The two head shots were within half an inch of each other. The adrenaline as I approached that 4x5 bull has rarely been equaled in my lifetime. It took some time to wrestle and clean that elk. I was working rather frenetically for a while and I had to sit down to settle back into safe zone for knife work.

The excitement I was met with at the church parking lot with the rack was an even match to mine. Dad has hunted a lot of years and killed some elk, and he wouldn’t have been more thrilled to have pulled the trigger himself. After a few minutes of congrats and a quick telling of the story, he made a call to get my brother out of school. There were chores to be done.

Things are coming back around now. I am the father and the milestones are those of my sons. My dad, with his one arm and that shoulder now weakened by post polio syndrome, is finding it harder to be an efficient hunter. He is still deadly with his dirty aught six tied onto the “contraption” which supports his rifle in offhand position while he walks through the woods. My oldest son has deer hunted for two years and been work-hardened by football and laying paving block with his uncle in the summers. Josh kept up with me well the first year of deer hunting even though it was a tough year and the first zero we have scored as a deer camp. This year I was sitting beside Josh behind a log overlooking a high desert draw. My brother was a couple hundred yards down ridge as we glassed for mule deer.

Josh spotted the four deer below us in the draw; they moved out but stopped behind some trees on the open hillside across from us to feed. We had to wait them out, twenty minutes or so, leaning over a backpack with a rifle and a pair of binoculars. Picking out the horns on the small buck was some binocular work! The does fed out from behind the trees first, one hundred and fifty yards. The first time the buck paused, Josh surprised himself by forgetting to flip the safety off. The buck paused again and rolled twice downhill. My brother Nate and I were grinning as big as Joshua, all the way back to camp and beyond. Josh has more learning to do as a hunter, his version of the story was one sentence! “He stepped out and I shot him in the heart.” Well, he’s thirteen going on seventeen; he has time to develop the storytelling.  

Year upon years of hunting, this one has been great. Joshua got his first buck, I arrowed another bull and my brother got a nice deer as well. Josh spent his first elk season with Nate and Dad during rifle season, not far from where I killed my first bull mentioned above. That’s also not far from where I killed my four point this year with my bow, but that’s another story... Joshua says that “hunting is not just a sport, like they told us in hunter safety, it’s a way of life.” Some things are sinking in. Hunting sustained the life of ancestors before us, and with our help will be sustenance for generations to come. Rarely is there an opportunity to more profoundly build character, than in the days, seasons, stories and hard won miles spent growing up with family and friends, in elk country. 

Author Bio:

Lem James lives with his three sons on the North Umpqua River in central Oregon. His day job in construction management supports his passion for the outdoors which in turn sustains his soul and freezer.

Bravado Outdoors Publishing.

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