Chad... there comes a time of day when the color fades from the sky, but there is still shooting light left.
Vance and I headed down the ranch road for home and were just coming down through a patch of aspen when we spotted a pretty nice buck antelope feeding among the sage.
Realize that at that point the aspen are the only trees around and those are scattered around in large expanses of open ground.
Vance shut down the "burb" and quickly moved off into the sage behind a covering rise of ground. With luck he hoped to catch the feeding buck just beyond that rise.
I watched from the warmth of the vehicle as he finally rose and drew his Shrew in one fluid move. The shot was away.
About this exact same moment I noticed movement down the hill in front of the vehicle... a hundred yards or better and there was NO cover in that direction.
My first impression was of a large group of horses moving up the hill at a right angle to our line of travel. Boy! Was I ever wrong!!
As my focus sharpened in the waning light I realized that what I was seeing was a large herd of elk....doh!!
They were out where no self respecting hunter would ever expect an elk to be. I mean clear out in the open sage and they had our number.
I hissed at Vance to get his attention and watched him melt into the low sage. But it was too little too late.
With increasing speed the herd, which I could now see clearly through my binoculars, moved up the hill and toward the closest aspen patch.
Trailing the herd and making sure all of his girls were accounted for was a bull that would make any hunter drool in his stew.
I couldn't count points... there were just too many and the light was getting poorer by the moment... but I could tell that he was wide and long and heavy of beam.
We'd come back and look for him the next day, but without really finding him. At one point we heard a distant bugle and from it's location we assumed it might be him, but once again, daylight, or rather the lack of it, put an end to our hunt. :mad: