November 12, 2003, 8:24 a.m.
Of Man and Wapiti
An elk hunt turns spiritual.

In Mongolia, a giant elk comes every evening. He steals the sun in his antlers and runs off with it to the west, or so the legend goes. The sun only returns if great hunters chase the elk, wrest the sun from him, and put it in the eastern sky so the next day can begin.

The great hunters must have been successful last night. The awakened sun peered over the mountains to the east, its long fingers of light shooting into pockets of dark timber and scattered groves of aspens still clinging to their proud golden coats. This hunter and his companions sat on the crest of a rocky 1,000-foot hill, where each exhalation was a frosty cloud in the late October air. The sun emerged further, illuminating the opening day of elk season in central Colorado's White River National Forest.

For those who do not understand hunters, it might be hard to imagine how anyone could want to kill a majestic elk. But there is an earthy honesty to hunting: Only in the hunt do man and nature become one again. I wish I had said that first, but I did not. Erich Fromm did, in his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Fromm, William James, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Karl Menninger and many other eminent behavioral scientists agreed that hunting is not evil, but that the ethical hunter seeks renewal with his or her roots in the chase, as well as food for the belly.

That's why our goal that morning in Colorado was to take a life — that of a big, feisty 600-pound-plus bull elk with a proud head adorned by four sharp-tined antlers on each side.

Dressed like pumpkins (or road cones, depending on your build), the mission was to bag an elk in a legal and ethical manner, while avoiding the rising volley of shots booming across the vast valley below.

Like the eagle, who had just sailed by on the breath of the east wind that chilled our faces, we were using special magnifying devices to scan the valley. Ours were human creations, binoculars and scopes, which granted us the same abilities given to the eagle's steel-cold eyes by nature.

Here and there, a half-mile away or more, we could see small spots of bright orange weaving in and out of the aspens in pursuit of larger spots, light tan with white hindquarters and chocolate-brown capes. The elk, while two or three times larger than the inelegant men, moved like silent ghosts through the timber. Not with the high bounds of the whitetail deer, or the stiff-legged jumps of the mule deer, but with the easy gait of pacing horses devouring space with deceptive swiftness.

At times it did sound like a war zone. When you hear several blasts in rapid succession you know that someone has succumbed to the uncontrolled excitement of "buck fever." A hunter's rifle may fire four to five shots in quick succession, but the goal must always be to kill on that first shot. If you can't, don't shoot at all. That's one way we honor the elk: Make that shot a quick and clean kill, or miss completely. That's the hunter's prayer.

The sun climbed steadily higher as the great chase unfolded. Some elk died, many others disappeared unscathed. None had yet come close enough to us for a shot.

It seemed impossible that any elk could be left in that valley. Yet as the morning progressed and the landscape grew awash in daylight, on the crest of an open ridge about 600 yards away, a large chocolate cow suddenly burst into the open. Minutes before, four hunters in brilliant orange vests had been standing on that ridge, but now they were gone. The elk — judging from her size and coloration — was clearly the matriarch of that valley. She knew what the pumpkin people were up to — that's how she'd become the matriarch.

A string of nearly 30 elk followed her in an orderly procession. Near the back of the line was a bull, head held high, his white-tipped antlers gleaming in the sun. He had only one five-point antler left, and he suffered a limp. The missing antler and the limp could have been from errant shots; more likely they were scars from battles he'd fought that fall with other bulls to keep his harem. Elk kill each other in the name of love.

The elk paraded to the middle of a sage-covered hill, and then stopped. The Indians say that elk-people have the special power of enchantment, and the air carried that sense of the extraordinary.

The herd circled up, forming a tight group. In the middle stood the bull, his gasps of white breath puffing into the morning air. Standing by their man were the cows, all of which, incidentally, were legal game to hunters with special cow tags.

Before you pass judgment on shooting "mommy elk," consider population control. The ideal carrying capacity for the elk herd in the White River National Forest should be 26,000, but it has grown to at least 54,000. This is why elk bones litter the dense thickets of dark timber. There is not enough natural feed to support that many elk through a tough winter with waist-high snow. In deep snow years, they starve here in droves.

In 1999, when deep snow did blanket this area, my guide, Dan Harrison, manager of the Piney Valley Ranch, tells me that he put out 27 tons of hay for the elk one snowy January morning. In three days, it was gone.

The long, slow, painful death of an elk or deer by starvation in winter is not humane. In contrast, the hunter's quick, shocking bullet or the knife-like thrust of a broadhead arrow cannot be seen as anything but an act of mercy.

Our hearts came to our throats as that cluster of elk stood there in that tight circle. If the herd had been spotted by some excited neophyte who, even from 600 or 700 yards, charged with guns blazing, it is likely that animals would have been hit — but likely only wounded, and not killed.

The matriarch must have somehow known that the coast was clear.

Having drawn her flock together, the old cow now split from the herd and headed for the edge of the mesa. She trotted 100 yards over to the edge where she could look down the steep rocky slope into the valley below. She stopped there, testing the winds with her acute sense of smell. Elk have decent sight and hearing, but they are made extremely aware of what lies around them by the bouquet of odors that floats on the wind.

She paused, drinking in the morning air, all senses in high gear. Then she abruptly trotted back to the herd. Some elk was spoken, in audible tones we could not hear from our distance, but also in the silent mental communication that skeptics deny and all people who have spent time in nature know is how wild things speak to each other. As if on cue, the herd uncoiled into a line, fell in behind the matriarch, and followed her over the crest of the mesa and down the slope into the dense evergreen woods below.

Ten minutes later, two orange hunters appeared at the far end of the field where the elk had just been. The hunters may have seen the tracks, but all that remained was the fresh east wind, blowing through the sagebrush, and maybe even traces of the musky odor of elk lingering in the mountain air.

Some say hunters only pursue trophies to hang on walls or meat for the table. But on that morning, the wapiti, as the Shawnee call the elk, had shown us some of their secrets. They left behind vivid memories, far more valuable and powerful than any set of antlers.

Native people believe that when hunters are in touch with the greater web of life and spirit, hunter and hunted are brought together by forces beyond their control, if it is meant to be. Any modern hunter worth his salt knows this is true. On that frosty morning at the Piney Valley Ranch, the elk-people had decided not to sacrifice one of their own, but instead to teach us something precious by revealing a bit of their soul.

CLARIFICATION

In my October 17 article, "Time to Terminate Ecoterrorism," I suggested that the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance has been working directly with the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups to study ecoterrorism. I should have said that the USSA has been drawing from the notable research of other groups that are studying animal rights and ecoterrorism, such as SPLC, to assemble the case against ecoterrorism. My intent was to give credit to the brave and commendable work of other groups, not to imply there was a formal working relationship, which there is not.

— James Swan is a contributing editor of ESPNOutdoors.com. He also writes for the Outdoor Channel'sEngel's Outdoor Experience, which won a Golden Moose for the category "Best Waterfowl Shows 2002." If you'd like to see the scene Swan has just described, watch for it next summer on the Outdoor Life Network where it will be shown as part of a new series, The World of Beretta.