It was the first day of the season and two high school buddies hiked up on top of a rock with a good view to glass the small high flats below them.
Now in their 50s Ben had been hunting the area for 30 years, he not only knew every patch of public and private land but had permission to trespass and hunt from quite a few of the landowners. HIs buddy Dan having survived a heart attack and divorce was on his second trip out to Colorado with a cow elk tag in his pocket and a friend for a guide who was a magician at finding elk. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for a similar experience, Dan had it all for the price of an out of state license.
They lay on that rock for an hour squinting into the binoculars looking into every edge of clearing and trying to see down between the trees. The herd of sixty elk had been in that meadow at sunset but was nowhere to be seen. To rest his eyes Ben turned his glasses on to the rooftops and driveways of people he knew. The wildlife biologists long ago gone to work, the out of staters with driveway plowed but untracked, the retired bar owner with smoke coming from her chimney and sixty head of elk lazing on the open hill behind her house.
They called the retired bar owner on their way over there, Ben just happened to have her number on his phone.
When they got there.. no elk. They’d retreated from the now sunny hillside and were nowhere to be seen and no way to track them across someone elses land. Ben and Dan drove around to a piece of Forest Service land that was in the direction the elk were headed and spent all day walking in and waiting for the arrival that never happened.
In the now long shadows of late afternoon they again checked the retired woman’s hillside, and there were the elk as if they’d never left.
Ben and Dan coasted into the driveway and gently shut the doors of their truck. Elk are funny when on their winter range in a large herd. They are affected by what’s called “the selfish herd”. Despite the presence of two of the deadliest predators on the planet the chances of any one individual elk being preyed on by these humans was very low. Many humans drive up to driveways, and even if there was ill intent chances are the humans would pick someone else.
NPS photo by Charlie Baker
Ben had a bull tag.
It’s not as easy as it might sound, to shoot an elk in a herd at 80 yards. You can only shoot one, no pass through and hit another, no ricochet and hit another. You can’t just shoot the elk, or even just kill the elk, you have to shoot it such that the meat is saved, and so the very large animal dies as quickly as possible. Some might look for the largest bull. Ben looked for the very easiest to shoot and legal bull he saw. You might get only a few seconds in which to make a good shot. The herd that ran away from right in front of you is only good for stories. He shot one and it dropped to the ground.
Ben uses a 300 Weatherby for everything. Yes it has a tremendous kick and yes he doesn't need so much gun as he never shoots over 100 yards. He claims there is no felt recoil when it’s an animal not paper. Must be because he’s horrible at paper and great at animals. In any case it sure does the job without much fuss.
The elk were moving but not in flight, more like a churning. Dan shot and Ben swears he saw the cow go down but lost track of which one what with all the stomping and running of so many large animals as the herd now took off.
As the herd disappeared and was gone Ben and Dan were left with a bunch of trampled snow and a 4x4 raghorn bull dead on the ground. They went over to where Ben thought he saw the cow go down and looked for blood on the snow. None.
They slowly walked in ever larger circles bent at the waist and then back and forth crisscrossing the path the herd took. They both stared at the ground never walking further than five feet from their last path across the track of the elk herd. They probably would have seen one drop.
Ben has an uncanny eye for things. Once on a drive he spotted game out the window 13 times before I did, and I was looking, he was driving. He notices subtle differences in tracks, the “shine” to the one laid down in the afternoon compared to the “rough” of the one that morning where the tiny soil particles are beginning to dry and stand up. After a half hour of the headlamps they winched the bull onto the truck, drove it over to Ben’s land, gutted it and drove home.
I’ve seen plenty of people miss closer shots, even when braced across the hood of a warm pickup. Eighty yards isn’t so close when a cow has to stand still for the three seconds for you to squeeze one off and place it through both lungs. The cow that seemed to have gone down might have just been one stumbling on a rock. I’ve certainly missed easier shots.
In the morning they took the bull down to the processor in town and hunted that piece of Forest Service land in the afternoon. The next day they glassed in the early morning then went over to that retired bar owner ladies house to make a gift of some backstrap. As soon as they pulled in the drive they saw the ravens.
The cow had piled up beside that one big old Juniper with the big boulders around it and the branches almost to the ground. It was not sixty feet from where Ben had seen it go down, right in the middle of the opening. It’s gray rounded back looked exactly like the boulders it was next to, head and feet towards the trunk hidden by tall grass in plain sight. They’d walked within ten feet of it studying the ground.
Elk often leave no blood trail at all, from a shot that passes through both lungs and out the other side filling the body cavity with blood. The winter hair coat is about an inch or so thick and very tightly matted, the hide is tough and thick too, under it is a thick layer of fat.
It was a mess, something big had gotten to it, probably bigger than coyotes though they’d no doubt helped. It’s guts were all over and the two quarters on top half gone, guts all over the remaining animal against the ground. No salvageable meat.
Dan slit the part of his tag for the day and the month took a zip tie and securely affixed his tag to the carcass. Then they pushed the stinky guts and rolled the carcass onto a tarp, attached a rope to the neck of the cow, pulled the whole mess onto a piece of plywood and winched the thing up onto the bed of the pickup, drove it over to Ben’s land and dumped the thing there to feed a different set of coyotes.
Then Ben called the local Fish and Game officer and left a message on his machine explaining what had happened. Wasting meat is a felony. They’d acted in good faith but it’s the kind of thing you really should tell someone about. Everyone knows everyone and there is plenty of mutual respect flowing both ways, I’m sure nothing will come of it, it’s just one of those things you wish hadn’t of happened.
Update to the Update: I guess Dan didn't drive back home after all, had to meet with the fish and game guy. The upshot is the Fish and Game Officer gave him a new cow elk tag. I'm not at all sure Dan will be so lucky as to find another elk but it's real nice of the F+G Officer to give him the tag. It's not just the opportunity to fill a tag, but the idea that he is welcome to hunt in CO, and that even though it's a shame to waste meat he tried to do the right thing.
I should also say not all the details of the story are true, I don't know what houses Ben looked at with his binoculars before looking at the retired bar owner for instance. I'm not sure about a tarp to push the dead elk on to but I've helped with the plywood before. They both shot at the same time I now learn, not staggered as I tell it. FYI I now know Dan was using a 30 06. Mostly it's as written though. Time of day, place, etc, as it happened.
Thanks again for the rescue.