Hunting is a deeply personal endeavor, which I prefer to do alone. But my friend Bob is persistent, persuading me to take him along last fall to photograph a bowhunt in the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness of southwest Montana. The country is rugged and roadless, with very few trails. It’s a spectacularly wonderful, wild place—a land of high-mountain meadows, dense stands of Doug-fir and lodgepole, lush riparian bottoms with dark groves of large spruce, and craggy ridges graced with white-bark pine. By late September, golden larches and crimson ninebark rival the best of New England foliage. Elk find plenty of sedges and fescue to feed on in meadows from dusk to dawn, and dense, secure copses of alder to hide out in by day. The hills are brutally steep, the brush maddeningly thick, but people (particularly other hunters) are far and few between. Better yet, elk are plentiful, though tough to sneak in on.

A few days into our trip I was closing in on an elk, hoping to get a clear 10-15 yard broadside shot on a bull moving towards me through a dark stand of spruce. An hour or so earlier I had mimicked the elk’s bugle, and got him to respond. Camouflaged from head to toe, Bob and I quietly moved in closer and closer, staying downwind, while I occasionally exchanged squeals and grunts with the bull. Once we closed in to within 40 yards or so of the elk, he seemed curious enough, or perhaps annoyed enough, to close the distance and check out this fabricated bull seemingly invading his space. While Bob waited behind, I moved closer. And here he came, now silent, like a brown ghost in the timber, moving cautiously towards me, head turning back and forth, large dark eyes scanning the woods for another elk, long, branched antlers sweeping back and forth casting eerie shadows on the trees. He was about to step out from behind a large spruce, giving me the shot I awaited, when he suddenly jerked his head my way, eyes widened in fear. He whirled and crashed through the brush, away into the dark, gone. I didn’t move; the wind seemed right. What alarmed him? I turned to see Bob, camera in hand, mouth agape. “Did I spook him?” He had attempted to sneak in for a photograph, as he has done countless times before in places like Yellowstone National Park. “I was quiet, and didn’t move very quickly,” he said, a bit defensively. But here, where elk are hunted, it doesn’t take much. Though we saw and heard other elk during the next few days, it would be the only real chance we had at one during our short trip. Such is the nature of elk hunting.

There was a time when such an incident would have angered me. In large part, it’s why I hunt alone; chances improve without the noises, smells and distractions of another person. There are few things I savor more than fresh elk tenderloin; but the actual killing necessary for the meat weighs more heavily on my conscience nowadays. The thought of an empty freezer was tempered by seeing the elk run free. “Look at the bright side,” I told Bob. “We don’t have to pack him out of here.”

Indeed, we were at the bottom of a steep, rugged canyon, with lots of large blown-down trees and thick clumps of menziesia brush to climb up, over and through. The sun was rapidly disappearing behind the cliffs to our West. Boning out meat and packing heavy loads would have made for a long night and tough following day. Fortunately, we didn’t need to head back to camp; it was all on our backs—a practice I adapted nearly 20 years ago.

I was fresh out of the Marines and chasing elk far in the backcountry when a major drawback of a traditional elk camp first struck me. Bugling bulls had befuddled and enticed me from dawn to dark, leaving me 10 steep, rugged miles to stumble and blunder on a cold, half-snow, half-rain, moonless night, back to my little dome tend, stove and food. A Steller’s jay could have winged the trip in minutes. It took me five hours of slipping, falling and cursing. I went to sleep late and woke late, then trekked all the way back to where I’d come from the night before, where I knew elk might be—hours of time and energy I’d rather have spent hunting. So why not hunt, I thought, as if it were a reconnaissance patrol?

I’d served in a Force Recon unit, venturing on lengthy, four-man missions to gather information. “Travel Light, Freeze at Night,” was our unofficial motto. When snooping around in places you’re not welcome, you can’t risk detection. You don’t make noise, build fires or cook food. You carry as little as possible, move carefully and try to stay concealed. We would travel for days, even weeks, carrying only a rifle and a butt pack with ammo, canteens, and an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) or two. A poncho and a thin, nylon poncho liner served as bedding. When we rested, at least one person kept watch while the others huddled into a human ball covered with all four liners and ponchos.

Why not try this hunting? And so I set off one fine fall day with bow in hand, wearing only a fanny pack carrying poncho, liner and a few energy bars, determined to go where the elk took me and sleep where I was when it got dark. Dark came in a treeless, windy ridge with snow blowing in from the northwest. That night I learned a simple, harsh lesson: a solitary poncho and poncho liner is not as warm as four and does little good without other warm bodies producing heat. I spent hours stomping my feet, doing pushups and walking up and down hills to keep warm, while praying for the sun to rise. But I heard elk bugling, and I was into them by first light.

I liked the idea of carrying my camp on my back, having the freedom to go where the elk took me and sleep wherever I ended up. It was the “freeze at night” part that proved troublesome. Thus began an ongoing, near obsessive quest for the Spartan, mobile elk camp. I bought a narrow fleece pack with a Kevlar frame and a down sleeping bag, good to 30 below, with a Gore-Tex shell, which stuffs the size of a football and weighs just 3 pounds. I still pack the poncho for shelter, if needed, and to keep meat out of the dirt when I’m fortunate enough to be boning out an elk. Add a hunting knife, map and compass, a half-dozen energy bars, some jerky, a survival kit and a fleece jacket, and I’ve kept the pack under 10 pounds, which I can comfortably wear while drawing and shooting a bow. I’m often hungry and sometimes lonely (there’s lots to be said for warm conversations and the camaraderie of an evening spent with other hunters in a wood-heated wall tent), but I can travel for a week with freedom to haphazardly roam at will.

This approach has resulted in multiple, unforgettable experiences. I have awakened to what sounded like a packstring of horses clambering up a rocky trail and watched in the dark as a herd of elk passed a few yards from me, oblivious to my presence. I have slept in a grassy avalanche chute, stirring often to the symphony of bulls and seeing their dark silhouettes under the full moon. I’ve slept in elk beds and near elk wallows, and near the carcasses of elk I’ve killed after working late into the evening cutting meat, preparing to take my first load out in the morning (and then beg my wife and friends to return with me for successive loads.) Sometimes, I wake to nearby bugles and hurriedly pack my bag and resume my hunt. Other times, the silence makes me long for company, and the weather makes me wish for more gear.

A friend calls it “extreme” elk hunting, a tiresome cliché applied nowadays to seemingly all human endeavors. (Will it be long before extreme chess and shuffleboard makes their debuts on FOX TV?). But it is extreme, I suppose, in comparison to those who shoot elk from the back of All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), or pay to kill domesticated elk on private, fenced game farms (a practice recently made illegal in Montana, thanks to a citizen’s initiative). The notion that hunting hard has become the exception, rather than the norm, is distressing. There is an ongoing quest to make hunting easier, quicker, with more sure-fire results, changing the fundamental relationship between predator and prey.

A look through most any hunting equipment catalog shows a plethora of technology available to the modern hunter, including trail-monitoring devices to photograph, record, and store animal movements, game scanners, hearing enhancers, night-vision goggles, range finders, animal scents, ATVs with gun mounts, and thousands of other gadgets designed to increase our chances of finding and killing wildlife. Technology has saturated the world of hunting—come opening day, D-day, the assault begins.

I once spent fourteen numbing days on a mountain in northern Norway, wearing Gore-Tex over wool to fend off the wind and sixty-below cold, covered by white camouflage to hide from British troops below—the “enemy” in a giant NATO war game intended to warn Russia there’d be hell to pay if it dared cross the nearby border in an attempt to gain control of the North Sea. The cold war at its coldest. I was a Marine in a Force Recon unit, traveling to every clime and place to detect and report enemy movements and activities. We had state-of-the-art technology to help us get the job done: PVS5 night-vision goggles, satellite communications gear, remote sensors to detect movement around our perimeter, global positioning systems to determine precise locations, high-powered variable scopes on our M40 7.62mm sniper rifles. Swift, silent and deadly. We used our skills and technology against the Gadhafis of the world . . . and in Norway I joked with my buddy from Mississippi, “What if we could use this stuff hunting?”

I was kidding. Yet today you can find this stuff in outdoor catalogs. “Let cold war technology help you find and kill game.” Several years ago, hunters in northern Idaho were shooting elk from a half mile away using .50-caliber rifles mounted on off road vehicles. A game warden from Wyoming tells me that every year, more and more hunters are using airplanes to locate elk, radioing their sightings to friends on the ground.

When hunters seek easier ways, focusing only on results and skipping the process, they fail to gain the intimacy, knowledge, appreciation and respect for the prey, for the country, and for other wildlife gained through arduous pursuit. I suspect this growing disconnect is, in large part, why so many hunters hate wolves and grizzlies, would just assume see our last remaining roadless lands penetrated with roads, and think nothing of building homes in the midst of elk habitat.

To be sure, hunting elk is not the most proficient means of procuring food. Only about 15 percent of all Montana elk hunters put meat in the freezer. Hunting is supposed to be tough, the meat earned. Hunting is stalking, tracking, and penetrating an animal’s natural defenses. It’s the very inefficiency of elk hunting—countless hours in the woods—that creates and strengthens the bonds between the hunter and the wild. It’s why I prefer to sleep on a mattress of soft, pungent needles under a fat spruce, and listen to the late-night chortles of rutting bull elk, than anywhere else in the world; and why I do all I can to ensure that what little remains of crucial elk calving grounds, migratory corridors and winter range remain free of the trophy homes and subdivisions that are so prolifically invading and threatening elk country.

For me there is a strange, somewhat tortuous dichotomy to elk hunting; I struggle to kill what I love. I imagine even ancient hunters felt remorse, reflected in ceremonious rituals to honor their prey. It’s an odd, primordial bond, to be sure; a relationship derived from intimacy gained through countless hours of difficult pursuit during which you come to admire, respect and cherish the prey. Edward Abbey, himself a hunter, put it this way: “Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about. Such a storm of conflicting emotion!”

But in a world where people purchase sanitized packages of butchered beef with no clue of its origins; where people with best intentions buy soy products from farmers who displace wildlife habitat and kill deer to reduce crop depredation, it makes sense to eat wild meat derived from native grasses and forbs in wild mountains close to home. We all kill to eat; so why not elk? It’s organic, low in fat, and monies spent on licenses and equipment tax helps protect and enhance the wild places that elk, wolves, grizzlies and other critters so desperately need. Perfect, if not for the remorse that follows. So why do it at all? Colorado naturalist and writer David Petersen said it best:
"Why do I hunt? It's a lot to think about, and I think about it a lot. I hunt to acknowledge my evolutionary roots, millennia deep, as a predatory omnivore. To participate actively in the bedrock workings of nature. For the atavistic challenge of doing it well with an absolute minimum of technological assistance. To learn the lessons, about nature and myself, that only hunting can teach. To accept personal responsibilities for at least some of the deaths that nourish my life. For the glimpse it offers into a wildness we can hardly imagine. Because it provides the closet thing I've known to a spiritual experience. I hunt because it enriches my life and because I can't help myself . . . because I was born with a hunter's heart."

My hunter’s heart has swelled large through experience. I remember once awakening at night to see a black bear staring at me under a full moon as I lay in my sleeping bag several yards away. I once spent an hour watching a wolverine waddle along a ridge. I’ve spooked and treed bears, listened to wolves and coyotes, been humbled by lions and grizzlies, played peek-a-boo with a pine marten, and more, so much more, while chasing elk. Elk have furnished me immeasurable adventure, joy, and nourishment. And so I do what I can to aid efforts that sustain the wildness on which they, and I, depend. When I am old, I hope to look with content, not sorrow, at mountains still clean and wild—a world where elk still captivate and inspire their pursuers.

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