My 1997 bowhunting season is one I will never forget, as it is the year that I killed my first elk. I have hunted elk and deer for many years but just five years ago decided to change from rifle hunting to bow hunting to add a little more challenge to my deer hunting. I was also eager to try my hand at hunting elk during the rut, as I thought it might give me the ability to be able to locate the elk more easily in our thick Oregon forests.
The last week of season is when my hunting partner Kyle McBride and I take off for our Eastern Oregon hunting trip. We have been hunting an area for a couple of years now that we kind of came across by chance when my old roommate, Shawn Huenergardt, suggested we try an area where he and his dad rifle hunted for elk. As luck would have it, there was a bad forest fire in that area a week or so earlier and access by hunters was still restricted. Not knowing much about the area, we just started looking close by for some good elk habitat but kept running into herds of cattle until we drove up the ridge a lot higher. Needless to say, when we got an answer to our bugles, we stayed there for the last two days of the 1996 season and my partner Kyle got two shots at bull elk. He even hit a huge branch bull in the shoulder at 20 yards, which barely penetrated an inch and a half. The bull ran off pissed as hell and bugled like crazy that night and next morning but never would come back in again. The last day of season I saw two smaller bulls but was unable to get a shot off. The whole drive home we were pumped to come back the next year to see if we could find that big bull again.
As hunting season approached, I was both excited and disappointed as I was unable to practice as much as I wanted because of a shoulder problem I was having. I was talking up our area so much that my neighbor Lindsay Wurn asked if he could come along with us, which Kyle and I agreed would be fine. Camper loaded, we headed out on our seven-hour drive from home, arriving at our hunting area in the early a.m. hours on the next day. Because of some road closures we could not drive right to our camp spot of the previous year, but decided from our maps that we could approach the drainage we wanted to hunt from the opposite side of the mountain almost easier anyway. After getting directions from a woodcutter in the area we found a great campsite with a view of several clearcuts and of one of our familiar landmarks from the year before. We had heard a couple of distant bugles that morning, nothing to get very excited about, but when we bugled from camp that night while eating dinner, we got an answer right down below us about 200 yards. We all were really pumped up. Minutes later the bull answered our bugle and it sounded as if he was under 100 yards away. What a great campsite spot we had picked out!
We didn't want to spook the elk so we immediately went to bed, although not right to sleep, and awoke the next morning to the bull immediately answering our bugles once again. We got set up, with Kyle staying above the elk, and Lindsay and I approaching from below up the creek. The sounds of elk were everywhere and I could hear a bull thrashing a tree but could not make out exactly where he was. All of a sudden, the sound of elk crashing through the forest told me that I was not going to get any closer to them anytime soon. I met up with Lindsay and he said he had seen a 3 by 3 bull that had almost trampled him.
The young bull had been spooked, as it turned out, by Kyle, and had stopped not 25 yards from Lindsay at the edge of a clear-cut. There were just a couple of branches in front of the bulls vitals and he just needed one more step forward for a shot as Lindsay was at full draw. Instead the bull bolted across the clearing, as it seems he just stopped there long enough to make sure the coast was clear. When we met up with Kyle, he told us he had shot at the bull but had shot over him due to the downhill nature of the shot. He had bugled the bull back in but the bull circled and winded him at the last minute. Even though we thought there was a bigger bull in the herd, we decided to give that area a rest for a day or two.