Going Elkless (Almost): Elk Hunting near Butte, Montana

There I was, combing the hills several miles from the road on the last day of elk season. I had grown entirely too smug about elk hunting, having shot bull elk four-out-of-five years that I hunted them, and having shot several cows within a mile or so of the highway. Not this year.

Season began with me at a conference in Washington, DC. Of course, conditions were perfect with cold weather and eight inches of fresh snow. The second week, I was complacent. My friend Don was coming to hunt the following week, and so I roamed the hills and even passed up a shot at a cow. Well, it wasn't a good shot, and as my friend and now-retired colleague Dennis Haley counseled, "Hunting elk in timber is a percentage thing. If you are patient and get into them six or seven times, then you will get the good shot you want. There's no need to take those "iffy" shots."

Here's AJ, crashed for a nap in the warm noonday sun after we climbed into a remote (and elkless) Pintler basin:

Meanwhile, I ate my lunch and waited for the tea to boil:

Don Kieffer arrived from upstate New York the first week of November. The weather was beautiful: warm, sunny, and lousy for elk hunting. Up high, the old snow metamorphosed, turning icy and crunchy. Down low, the snow melted away. But we had a great time hiking the hills:

Visiting some of my favorite elk haunts:

And of course enjoying a hot cup of tea come noontime:

As my old friend BAT (aka Bob Thomas) likes to remind me, hunting is a lot more than killing. Especially on those blue sky days when the weather is just too damned good for serious elk hunting, you can lie back and listen to the serenade of migrating flocks of snow geese:

And swans:

Don & I also saw a peregrine falcon, and visited the spot where indigenous peoples mined jasper for tools:

After Don left, I tried to get more serious about elk hunting, but still the weather was not conducive to it. Hunting at such times becomes a good excuse for hiking into spots that need to be visited from time to time, such as these logging-era cabins, probably built to feed the flume that sluiced cord wood from the Big Hole valley to the Anaconda smelter:

And when the elk are hard to find, there is the occasional moose; here, a cow and calf on a remote, windswept ridge along the Continental Divide (folks don't think of moose as mountain animals, but they are in Montana!):

And the occasional fool hen (this one, felled with a rock, made a welcome and savory supper that night):

Finally, though, right at the end of season, conditions turned favorable with new, quiet snow and consistently cold temperatures. I spent a day or two hunting a spot that I had hunted many times over the years with Brent Patch and Dave Carter. In those years, I had not learned the lessons of a good "black timber" hunter, and wasted a lot of time peeking into parks and coursing through open stands of lodge pole pine.

In the timber, you keep your nose to the wind, move slowly and quietly, and check out all those stumps and rocks that look very much like elk:

Two Butte boys, hunting a park along the ridge line, flushed a bunch of elk from the north-side timber just below the ridge. I smelled them out ahead of me, found their tracks, began repeating my mantra ("I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well."), and began still hunting. One mile into the chase, they passed through a stand of dense Douglas fir, meandered about, and I thought sure they would bed down. It took me an hour to track them slowly and carefully through a half-mile wide thicket, sometimes crawling on my hands & knees to be quiet and stay below the branches. I could smell them and knew they were not far ahead. They continued through and fed in a small park. This told me they were relaxed and not worried about a predator on their heels. Very encouraging.

And then there they were, heads tilting and ears twitching, bedded in some thick, snow-covered firs at the park's edge. In timber, one seldom sees a whole elk. Because of the roll of the slope, I could not see any elk shoulders or ribs, my preferred shot. I usually avoid neck shots, since if you don't hit the spine there is not a quick death. But the elk were just seventy yards or so away, and I had a good rest on a tree limb. She never moved from her bed:

An hour or so later, I had the carcass split into two halves, dragged well away from the gut pile where the coyotes and ravens would be less likely to feed on it, and covered with pine branches until I could return:

The heart, liver, tenderloins, back straps, and tongue I laid out on the snow to cool:

Together, they made a forty pound load in my little rucksack. By the time I reached the road, three miles distant, the load felt like one hundred and forty pounds.

At the Check Station, I learned from the nice biologist that there was a Forest Service road within a half-mile of where I killed the cow. The next morning AJ came along to help me, and his good company and a sled made for a pleasant down-hill drag:

"I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well." This promise began with a supper of elk liver and onions last night, the heart is ready for pickling, and there are already plans for barbecued ribs, grilled tenderloin, back strap schnitzel, and roasted tongue with huckleberry glaze. Elk are great animals, and deserve the honor of a great (and arduous) hunt.

Montana Mule Deer Hunting

Mule deer hunting is to elk hunting as an easy morning hike is to a three-day peak bagging trip. Both mulie and elk hunting are wonderful pursuits, but they differ enormously in scale. And of course there are exceptions, such as the high-country, wilderness, "pack 'em out six miles" hunts that my young friend and superb bow hunter Chad Krause engages in.

A word about ethics: since I am talking about hunting and not mere shooting, I'll omit any serious consideration for the way that many of my fellow Butte residents "hunt" mule deer. As one good friend and former student (and a pretty good guy in most ways) puts it, "Hell, elk hunting is about hunting. Mule deer? We road hunt them fuckers."

Mulies inhabit a wide range of habitat in the Northern Rockies, from the flat sagebrush prairie to the jagged, broken foothills to the alpine meadows and goat rocks. Thanks to my friend and former hunter Dave Carter, I learned of a jagged, broken ridge that fits my ideal for a perfect mule deer hunt. It is far enough away from roads to keep the riff-raff out, and yet with a little planning and good luck you can find, kill, and haul out a mulie buck in a half-day's hunt. Sometimes.

This past weekend, I was blessed with two mule deer hunting partners: our "little brother" AJ and my old friend Don Kieffer. The latter made a long-overdue visit from upstate New York, where he is blessed with fine white-tailed deer and turkey hunting. Here's Don, hiking across some typical sage brush and mountain mahogany habitat on the slopes of our ridge, where we expect to see both white-tailed and mule deer:

Oftentimes, especially during the rut and with heavy hunting pressure, a mule deer buck and "his" does head for the highest, most rugged country they can find. And so this is where we spent our time, clambering along the top, staying off the ridge line, glassing carefully for bedded deer, and stalking every group we could find. I'm fussy about mule deer hunting, and generally avoid shooting the big bucks or any buck with a lot of does. Dominant bucks are stinky, and I'm talking gag-a-maggot stinky here. Usually, the stink seems to stay on the hide, but occasionally it permeates the meat no matter how carefully you field dress, skin, and butcher the critter. Ask Brent Patch, who once killed a stinky big buck whose strong-flavored wild flesh refused to be tamed by the strongest and hottest of spices!

Three humans moving through mulie habitat is a bit much. Mule deer have sharp vision and acute hearing, and still-hunting is difficult at best. After a brief conference, AJ hunted one way along the ridge while Don & I went the other. AJ was barely out of sight when we heard my little 25 Roberts crack once and then -- a minute later -- once again (I gave him three cartridges this year). Sure enough, AJ killed his buck:

And what an unusual rack: a 6 X 6 with triple brow tines on once side, double brow tines on the other, and one set of double points:

Maybe it was a mulie-whitetail hybrid, or maybe just a case of too much testerone. He was a stinky one, and ruled over about twenty does. Almost before Don & I could figure out what was going on (we're a little slow on the uptake, sometimes), we saw AJ a mile below us washing his hands in the river, his buck safely stashed along the railroad tracks. Like last year, we found a mountain bike handy for the two-mile trek along the railway grade. Tough going, but it beat dragging all the hair off on the rough ballast between the ties:

Don & I have 50-some year old knees, and by the time we got AJ & his buck back to the truck, we were tuckered out and it was dark. Did I say that you could hunt this ridge in a half-day? Well, there was a qualifier about "good planning and a little luck" with that claim. And not being 15-years old--an age when no task seems too daunting if you want to do it.

After letting the ridge quiet down for a day or so, Don & I went back and sure enough found the perfect mule deer buck: a fat forkhorn. Not too rutty. Young & tender. And in an appropriately rugged spot near the top of this outcrop:

Just before we saw the buck silhouetted on the ridge, we watched a 3/4 curl bighorn ram strut out of the sagebrush ahead of us, and a yearling moose ford the river far below us. Don's 7 X 57 is a great deer rifle, and he was generous in letting me shoot it. The rifle dropped this little buck in its tracks. It took longer to move it the first two hundred yards out of the rocks than it did to drag it the next mile to the truck:

With the two of us ferrying packs and rifle and taking turns on drag duty, we were home well before noon. A sandwhich and quick cup of coffee, and us old guys were starting to feel young again. We had time to drive back over to the lower Big Hole for a quick afternoon antelope hunt.

It took awhile to locate them in the basin where I usually hunt. We drove by three or four mulie bucks that would have been a Butte road hunter's dream. Turns out, all the antelope bucks and does were together in a herd of fifty or more critters. By the time we spotted them and stalked within almost-shooting distance, the sun was well behind the western ridge. Though I was sorely tempted, Don wisely suggested we save this one for another day. As Chad Krause pointed when I told him this, "A lot can go wrong real quick. Especially when it's getting dark." Good advice, Chad. Good judgment, Don.

The "25 Roberts" rifle (aka .257 Remington Roberts)

Lying awake and trying to find my way into sleep one night during this past hunting season, like pearls on a string I began sliding along the memories of deer killed by my 25 Roberts. I lost count and fell into sleep somewhere past sixty. More important to me were the seven individuals whom I could recall having used the rifle. Though it is a mere material fetish, it gives me great pleasure to connect the lives of these friends and family members through an elegant piece of wood and steel.

When I was a kid, I read an essay by Jack O'Connor about the 257 Roberts--probably on the pages of Outdoor Life magazine. A few oldtimer friends of my grandfather hunted with the 250-3000 Savage M99 lever action, and that cartridge carried quite a mystique. When O'Connor declared the 25 Roberts to be far superior to the 250-3000, I knew I had to have one.

It took awhile. After dozens of deer shot with everything including a 222 Remington, 20 ga shotgun slugs, and a 308 Winchester, I was working at an oil refinery in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and had a little folding money to spare. It was the late 1970s, and Winchester had reintroduced its M70 Featherweight. A local gunshop ordered me one in 25 Roberts.

It proved to shoot accurately with 50 grains of IMR 4350 pushing 100 grain Hornaday softpoints. I've since reduced that load to 48 gr, since occasionally with warm weather the load has proved a little too hot--leading to cratered primers and sticky ejection. For bullets, I've switched to 100-gr Nosler "blue tip" boattail softpoints, a super accurate bullet suggested by my friend Don Kieffer (from whom I recently re-acquired a 25-06 Browning, after having traded him the rifle some years prior to that). I also like the 100-gr Barnes all copper bullet--it is accurate, holds together on elk, and has not caused the copper fouling problems reported by some.

The 25 Roberts is a low recoil round that kills deer and antelope very well. I do not like shooting big magnum rifles and the flinching (bad shooting) habits they induce in most users. The 25 Roberts is also light to carry, something I appreciate when stalking mule deer up and down the rugged canyons of the lower Big Hole River valley. While the 25 Roberts is not the best choice for an elk rifle, it did kill a nice bull elk (1 shot) last year that happened to be feeding with a bunch of mule deer. Also, my hunting apprentice AJ used the little rifle to kill his elk cow this year. The first shot was at rather long range (well over 200 yards), and the second shot (delivered after the cow made it to the bottom of a steep walled valley and lay down, where AJ caught up with it) was probably superfluous.

On many deer hunts over the years, hunting partners have used my 25 Roberts to kill their deer. Sometimes, this has been after they missed a deer with their own rifle. I think some people are just careless about working up a good load in their own rifle and shooting it enough to have confidence in it (and to KNOW it’s sighted in!) but this has lent my rifle an almost magical reputation.