It's going kind of slow right now. You know? Huntin!
Yesterday I had still hunted off into some "low" country that had held elk in my youth.
My thought was that possibly hunting pressure had not been as great.
I found long ago that often hunters follow conventional wisdom... "Get beyond where the other hunters are willing to go", the outdoor writer types are want to say.
Anymore, it seems that everyone is reading that stuff and taking the advice. "Back beyond" can be pretty crowded at times with energetic hunters trying to escape the crowds.
In the case of elk, "they just have to be up high". Not always so!
This place I hunted is one of those "drive right past it on the way to the good huntin spots"... it has always shown good sign for me.
Lots of aspen there with a pinch of pine thrown in for aroma. What I found was a surprise to me.
Sunk in a little bench on the mountain side was a natural water hole... and it still had water.
As I spotted the glistening little jewel through the quakies, I stopped where I was. I'd been seeing elk sign along the trail I was following. There was no need to mess up the area with a lot of tramping around.
Nestled into a little circle of lodgepoles I surveyed my new domain. Within half an hour, a slight movement up the mountain caught my wandering eye. I focused my Leica's on the spot.
A small racked fork horn muley was busy destroying a bush. He must have been feeling pretty froggy, because he spent a good fifteen minutes at it.
I followed his progress up the mountain. He'd obviously been at the pond earlier and seemed happy to move 30 or 40 yards up the hill. At each stop destroying whatever sapling struck his fancy.
At one point I thought I heard the mew of a cow elk in the distance, but I couldn't be sure. I figured they had to be using this water source.
As the morning wore on, nothing showed, so I moved down to check out the perimeter of the water.
Elk, deer and moose tracks pocked the damp earth.
At the far end of the pond and opposite from where I'd approached was the extension of the trail I'd followed.
Another heavilly used run came up the hill from more open cover and another snaked it's way up the mountain.
On the trail which led in the direction I'd heard the suspected elk calls were the tracks of elk and the shiny, fresh, green droppings of that critter. hmmmm!
I went back in there yesterday afternoon and sat until dark. Quick work with pruning shears had a hasty blind built on the down wind side of the waterhole in no time.
Along about an hour before dark I thought I heard the distant crunching of gravel under truck tires. I expected to hear the growing noise of a vehicle moving down the distant road.
But the character of the noise changed and I soon realized I was hearing something big moving clumsily through the timber... note to young guys: TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR HEARING OR PAY THE PRICE LATER.
A careful glance over my left shoulder and I spotted the cause of the noise. A young bull moose was clutzing up the mountain.
His path brought him just to the edge of my scent stream and the jig was up for me. Those big black critters may look dumb, but they are nobodies fool.
He stood just out of camera range for a long time and finally drifted away.
Nothing else showed and with the cold air spilling down the mountain I pulled on a jacket and headed for the truck in the dark.
Topic: The Way West...a bowhunting journey. (Read 53134 times)
