NMPaul
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I cant post the pics. I can email them. If someone could help me out I would appreciate it!
Sorry for the long story I got carried away!
This hunt started 2 years ago when my family and I moved to NM. Not having drawn for bull elk in the unit that we lived in, I was determined to find a way to hunt the unit. Therefore, I bought a Land owner tag that year to hunt Archery bull elk.
This unit has a 22 day season and luckily, I work out of my home and travel out of state every other week for work. With this schedule I was able to hunt early morning and evenings 19 days of that season 2 years ago. During this season, I came so close to success many times but could never closed the deal. I had held my standards to large bulls only and passed on several small ones. At the end of the season I had some wonderful experiences behind me, but, was also extremely frustrated. I told my wife that I was only going to hunt M/L or rifle and put archery down as 3rd choice going forward.
Here I am 2 years later and the property we own qualified for an either sex unit wide elk archery tag. I could sell it for really good money or I could hunt it myself. I waited for draw results to come in and again nobody in the family drew a bull tag. Decision time. All year round, I am hiking and scouting and seeing these magnificent bulls and I am not able to hunt them, though our friends have drawn bull and cow tags that I have enjoyed participating in their hunts.
I made the choice to forgo the money and hunt the tag. The 2007 Archery season started just like the 2005 season. In 2005 there were 3 different 350+ bulls that I hunted and never got a shot at. In 2007 I found 2 bulls of the same class. The main one I wanted was a 3x7 that a friend had missed during rifle season 2 years ago and was now older and actually shorter but very heavy and very unique. He is also the largest bodied elk I have ever seen. The other was a typical 7x7 long and heavy up to his top points.
Opening morning after a cautious stalk, I am within 30 yards of the 3x7 but, I am unable to take a shot thru the oaks. Over the course of the next 8 days I religiously got up at 4-5am and got to where I wanted to be before daylight. In the evenings I would wrap up business and then get out in the field the last couple of hours of daylight.
During this time I had 3 very close brushes with the 3x7 including one evening with my 9 year old son by my side we intercepted him and his cows as he was moving up into a feeding area before end of shooting light. We worked our way in on him and his cows until we were 40 yards away when this young calf moved right in front of the juniper we were behind and started staring right thru us. The bull was there but had brush in front of his vitals. We froze as the little calf chirped away knowing that something was wrong and we did not belong there.
The bull wandered away and eventually the calf did as well leaving us close but with no prize. I also came very close to getting within bow range of the 7x7 but each time a cow either smelled me or they wandered out of my range on their own leaving me with no good way to stalk them. There is a very good acorn crop this year and once I sat in the middle of a herd in a grove of oaks and could hear those crunching acorns they were so close, of course eventually the jig was up when a cow caught a whiff of my sweaty body.
Calling was not working this early in the season for herd bulls either, and my experience was that even later, it was hard to pull the big brutes from their herd of 10-15 cows on the off chance of getting a new cow or fighting a bull and even if they were of a mind to, curious cows also would do their best to keep it from happening.
This was how the first 8 days of the season went. On the evening of the 8th day (a Saturday) with my businesses closed I had a full afternoon to get after them. That evening I heard a total of 2 half hearted bugles in the distance and was at the low point of the season.
That evening I went to bed not knowing if I should hunt the same area I had seen the big bulls or go to plan B, C or D. Literally, I keep a ?hunting notes? list or Journal that lists my prioritized plan of attack. I had deviated from plan A only once the entire season but had kept going back to plan A because that area had it all in regards to feed, remote shelter, water and few hunters. The only deviation was that I was coming into that country from different directions. None of them were particularly good as all required a 1-2 mile hike to get into the country I wanted to hunt.
Zach (my 9 year old) and I had gotten permission from my wife for him to skip church the next morning and go with me (I was praying pretty heavily at this point so he was being exposed to a certain amount of religion). Even with the prior evening being such a disappointment I decided to go into the same general area, however, approaching it from the North where more of the thicker forest was hoping that the big bulls had moved into heavy cover and considering, the previous night I had seen a unescorted herd of cows feeding in the acorns. It was still early in the season and maybe the bulls pulled off to themselves. I was desperate and decided to throw away conventional wisdom.
We pulled in to our parking spot a half hour before daylight and started south thru the Juniper and pinion forest. Zach is not just baggage on an elk hunt. His young ears can hear bugles that mine cannot and can judge the direction better than mine. Often on the faintest bugles I look to him for his 9 year old expertise and he points to where the bugle came from. I know from experience to trust his ears over mine.
Within less than a quarter of a mile Zach stops me and indicates a faint bugle off to the East. Not the way we intended, but a hot lead was encouraging after the previous evening. We took off down the ridge that we were on and soon found ourselves in a dark forest of over grown Pinion, Juniper and Ponderosas. There were only a couple of bugles and eventually there was none. Now,back to the initial plan of attack. We started side hilling north and half way up to the ridge we came across a dead bull with an arrow sticking out of the back part of his haunch. He had been dead about a week and the aluminum arrow protruded out of his bird defiled body. Zach went over and gave it a tug, but, the corpse was not ready to give it up. I marked the spot on my GPS with the intention of notifying the warden and got back to the business at hand.
Leaving that spot, the bulls demise weighed heavily on our minds. The way he was hit it was likely he covered miles till he dropped. Somewhere there was maybe a disappointed hunter, but, worse than that hundreds of pounds of good eating had gone to waste. This is a hunter?s solemn fear that their shot does not make a clean kill. As we walked, I resolved to myself that I would make a good shot. In the 28 previous days of archery elk hunting I had yet to release an arrow and I did not want my first to result in a scene similar to what I had just left.
We had burned 45 minutes of hunting daylight, but, it was overcast and we had a wind from the East to North East that is unusual for our area. As we approached the mountains, again Zach stopped me telling me that there was a bugle off in the distance ahead. We were still heading due south and the unusual wind troubled me as I repeatedly checked it with the bottle of white powder. The bugles lead us to a trail that skirted the peak of the pine studded mountain and with the previous evenings rain I saw the fresh tracks of a bull, most likely the one that was occasionally bugling.
The bugles were the random sort and it was apparent the bull was on the move and that indicated to me that it was a lone bull. While the bull did not sound big, he did not sound like a spike headed squeaker either. I resolved that if the opportunity arose to shoot this bull, I would take it though I did not believe him to be one of the older bulls I had been pursuing.
As we skirted this mountain on the dim game trail I would stop occasionally to pick up a fossil, or comment on a fresh rub, or scowl at Zach for making to much noise when he walked. Actually, this season he had gotten much better, being careful where he placed his feet and how he rolled his foot on the ground. Forty minutes had passed since we first heard the bugle we followed and a couple of times we heard others, but, this one was closer and we felt that we were gaining on him. In my mind, I imagined one of the young 5x6 bulls that I had seen staying a safe distance from the herd bulls. We were now rounding the back side of the mountain and were starting to head South East which made the steady wind more to my liking. While previously I worried over the Easterly wind, I was thankful that it was consistent and not swirling and sporadic as it commonly is around these peaks and canyons.
As we rounded this mountain, it opened onto a saddle that was dotted with Oaks, Junipers and young Pinions and then started a new mountain. Now we slowed and off to the South we heard a deep Bugle and we were closing on the young bull in front of us. Thru the openings in the trees I desperately glassed to see bits and pieces of the openings on the southerly mountains. I then saw a string of cows and a herd bull side hilling the mountain almost across from us filtering towards the saddle between the 2 mountains. I made a quick decision to get into a position in the bottom of the saddle to where I may intercept the herd. The wind was perfect and it was now drizzling heavily on us and I looked up the saddle to the canyon East of it and saw a heavy fog rolling in which also was unusual for this part of the year in SE NM.
This was the part of a hunter?s decision making that conflicts caution with aggressiveness. The cautious approach was to get back to the NW of the saddle and not collide with the cows that lead the bull off the mountain. The aggressive approach was to get behind a clump of Juniper in the middle of the saddle and throw caution to the wind. Myself (after some internal struggle) decided compromise was the easiest way out. Keep in mind, failure in the recent days and the season 2 years ago weighed heavily on my decision.
I chose a spot between the 2 areas and used my range finder quickly on several potential routes; the best was at 55 yards a young vigorous Juniper that I hoped would direct them down off the mountain. Down they came trickling into the saddle, the bull now bellowing every 20 seconds at the young bull that we had pursued most of the morning who had continued past the saddle and now was continuing a path around the mountain we had been on. This also caused me to believe that the old bull would drop to the West of the saddle away from the annoying younger bull and hopefully in front of the bushy Juniper I had ranged. I could feel and hear the blood pulsing thru my eardrums. Down they came and the lead cow hesitated in front of my designated Juniper and then stepped to the right of it and leading the herd beyond my chosen spot for the kill. The mindless herd followed her taking the bull 10-15 yards beyond my bush and much further than my intended shot.
Decision time once again. They had not seen me. The bull was fully preoccupied with the other annoying young bull and they were half feeding into the canyon to the East and somewhat North around the mountain that we had been skirting. I looked at Zach and told him that I needed to hurry and I wanted him to stay put. He gave me a disappointed and worried look but nodded okay. I told him I would mark his spot on the GPS and not to move no matter what. Again he nodded.
I took off the most direct route to catch the herd and looked up 100 yards to a spike bull who had been trailing way behind the herd and we saw each other at the same time. Damn!!! He turned in his tracks and ran back the way he had come and so did I temporarily. I should have known better, often a small bull will follow quite some distance behind a herd and it was not the first time that I made that mistake.
He had been trailing far behind the others so I hoped that the others had not seen his panicked exit. I took off at full speed. Now keep in mind full speed for me is not much. But, I could go quiet in the damp earth of the saddle and utilized all the cover available. I could now hear the older herd bull damaging a tree with his rack and expected at any moment to round a tree and find myself staring at a cow as it has happened to me several time in the past in similar situations. I was gaining ground and then it happened. I rounded a bush and stared squarely at 3 cows that were staring at me 50 to 60 yards off thru the brush. This was it they were turning and getting ready to take off. They had me made as a threat. Immediately aggressiveness took over, there was no argument for patience at this point because we had been here before and patience had been made a fool of.
I stepped out even more in the open and saw the bull looking sheepishly up from the sapling he was abusing and saw the realization come across his face. He was quartering away, and was getting ready to run away. No time for a range finder. 50 yard pin screamed in my head. I drew back, picked my spot and the 50 yard pin and released the arrow thru the small lane of trees and bushes. The herd bolted. I normally try to watch my arrow, but, no matter how hard I questioned my memory I could not recall where my arrow went. I could now see the herd running thru the trees and the big bull right in step.
Suddenly, I saw him deviate from the flow of the herd. He now turned to the right in a loop. Then he stumbled and he wsa down. I stared at the strings and metal in my hand wondering how the hell it had caused all this to happen. He was down and I could see he was dead. I had seen enough animals die to know when they were wounded, hurt or dead. Still I approached cautiously. He was dead, and my arrow lay bloody next to him. Somehow it had completely come out of him and now lay before him. How could that little arrow have brought down such a large strong animal in less than 30 seconds? After all of the effort and days spent hunting I wanted to yell and scream, but, I had a stronger urge. That was to play a joke on Zach who I had left about 400 yards back about 5 minutes ago.
I marked the bull in the trees with my GPS, though I knew it was unnecessary. I hurried back to Zach who had climbed a tree to try to see me coming. I have him my best dejected face and told him that I had spooked the herd but we needed to keep going. I lead him back along the same route I had followed and said nothing as we approached the dead bull. Upon seeing the dead bull, Zach shouted ?hey someone shot a bull? then he recognized my arrow that was exactly where it had fallen out of the bull.
Now the celebrating began. We yelled, screamed and jumped up and down. That is a moment I will never forget. We then caped, gutted and quartered the bull making sure we got all the meat and kept it clean. By then it was raining and it was a triumphant hike back to the truck with the rack on my back. We got my horses and packed him back to the house later that afternoon. Over the next few days those 10 minutes from when we stepped into that saddle to when I fooled Zach have looped thru my mind hundreds of times. I cannot remember a more perfect hunt. I have not scored him yet, but, I will as many of my friends will be asking me what he scored. For me it matters just so I have an answer. The memories looking at him on the wall will be the real reward.
Sorry for the long story I got carried away!
This hunt started 2 years ago when my family and I moved to NM. Not having drawn for bull elk in the unit that we lived in, I was determined to find a way to hunt the unit. Therefore, I bought a Land owner tag that year to hunt Archery bull elk.
This unit has a 22 day season and luckily, I work out of my home and travel out of state every other week for work. With this schedule I was able to hunt early morning and evenings 19 days of that season 2 years ago. During this season, I came so close to success many times but could never closed the deal. I had held my standards to large bulls only and passed on several small ones. At the end of the season I had some wonderful experiences behind me, but, was also extremely frustrated. I told my wife that I was only going to hunt M/L or rifle and put archery down as 3rd choice going forward.
Here I am 2 years later and the property we own qualified for an either sex unit wide elk archery tag. I could sell it for really good money or I could hunt it myself. I waited for draw results to come in and again nobody in the family drew a bull tag. Decision time. All year round, I am hiking and scouting and seeing these magnificent bulls and I am not able to hunt them, though our friends have drawn bull and cow tags that I have enjoyed participating in their hunts.
I made the choice to forgo the money and hunt the tag. The 2007 Archery season started just like the 2005 season. In 2005 there were 3 different 350+ bulls that I hunted and never got a shot at. In 2007 I found 2 bulls of the same class. The main one I wanted was a 3x7 that a friend had missed during rifle season 2 years ago and was now older and actually shorter but very heavy and very unique. He is also the largest bodied elk I have ever seen. The other was a typical 7x7 long and heavy up to his top points.
Opening morning after a cautious stalk, I am within 30 yards of the 3x7 but, I am unable to take a shot thru the oaks. Over the course of the next 8 days I religiously got up at 4-5am and got to where I wanted to be before daylight. In the evenings I would wrap up business and then get out in the field the last couple of hours of daylight.
During this time I had 3 very close brushes with the 3x7 including one evening with my 9 year old son by my side we intercepted him and his cows as he was moving up into a feeding area before end of shooting light. We worked our way in on him and his cows until we were 40 yards away when this young calf moved right in front of the juniper we were behind and started staring right thru us. The bull was there but had brush in front of his vitals. We froze as the little calf chirped away knowing that something was wrong and we did not belong there.
The bull wandered away and eventually the calf did as well leaving us close but with no prize. I also came very close to getting within bow range of the 7x7 but each time a cow either smelled me or they wandered out of my range on their own leaving me with no good way to stalk them. There is a very good acorn crop this year and once I sat in the middle of a herd in a grove of oaks and could hear those crunching acorns they were so close, of course eventually the jig was up when a cow caught a whiff of my sweaty body.
Calling was not working this early in the season for herd bulls either, and my experience was that even later, it was hard to pull the big brutes from their herd of 10-15 cows on the off chance of getting a new cow or fighting a bull and even if they were of a mind to, curious cows also would do their best to keep it from happening.
This was how the first 8 days of the season went. On the evening of the 8th day (a Saturday) with my businesses closed I had a full afternoon to get after them. That evening I heard a total of 2 half hearted bugles in the distance and was at the low point of the season.
That evening I went to bed not knowing if I should hunt the same area I had seen the big bulls or go to plan B, C or D. Literally, I keep a ?hunting notes? list or Journal that lists my prioritized plan of attack. I had deviated from plan A only once the entire season but had kept going back to plan A because that area had it all in regards to feed, remote shelter, water and few hunters. The only deviation was that I was coming into that country from different directions. None of them were particularly good as all required a 1-2 mile hike to get into the country I wanted to hunt.
Zach (my 9 year old) and I had gotten permission from my wife for him to skip church the next morning and go with me (I was praying pretty heavily at this point so he was being exposed to a certain amount of religion). Even with the prior evening being such a disappointment I decided to go into the same general area, however, approaching it from the North where more of the thicker forest was hoping that the big bulls had moved into heavy cover and considering, the previous night I had seen a unescorted herd of cows feeding in the acorns. It was still early in the season and maybe the bulls pulled off to themselves. I was desperate and decided to throw away conventional wisdom.
We pulled in to our parking spot a half hour before daylight and started south thru the Juniper and pinion forest. Zach is not just baggage on an elk hunt. His young ears can hear bugles that mine cannot and can judge the direction better than mine. Often on the faintest bugles I look to him for his 9 year old expertise and he points to where the bugle came from. I know from experience to trust his ears over mine.
Within less than a quarter of a mile Zach stops me and indicates a faint bugle off to the East. Not the way we intended, but a hot lead was encouraging after the previous evening. We took off down the ridge that we were on and soon found ourselves in a dark forest of over grown Pinion, Juniper and Ponderosas. There were only a couple of bugles and eventually there was none. Now,back to the initial plan of attack. We started side hilling north and half way up to the ridge we came across a dead bull with an arrow sticking out of the back part of his haunch. He had been dead about a week and the aluminum arrow protruded out of his bird defiled body. Zach went over and gave it a tug, but, the corpse was not ready to give it up. I marked the spot on my GPS with the intention of notifying the warden and got back to the business at hand.
Leaving that spot, the bulls demise weighed heavily on our minds. The way he was hit it was likely he covered miles till he dropped. Somewhere there was maybe a disappointed hunter, but, worse than that hundreds of pounds of good eating had gone to waste. This is a hunter?s solemn fear that their shot does not make a clean kill. As we walked, I resolved to myself that I would make a good shot. In the 28 previous days of archery elk hunting I had yet to release an arrow and I did not want my first to result in a scene similar to what I had just left.
We had burned 45 minutes of hunting daylight, but, it was overcast and we had a wind from the East to North East that is unusual for our area. As we approached the mountains, again Zach stopped me telling me that there was a bugle off in the distance ahead. We were still heading due south and the unusual wind troubled me as I repeatedly checked it with the bottle of white powder. The bugles lead us to a trail that skirted the peak of the pine studded mountain and with the previous evenings rain I saw the fresh tracks of a bull, most likely the one that was occasionally bugling.
The bugles were the random sort and it was apparent the bull was on the move and that indicated to me that it was a lone bull. While the bull did not sound big, he did not sound like a spike headed squeaker either. I resolved that if the opportunity arose to shoot this bull, I would take it though I did not believe him to be one of the older bulls I had been pursuing.
As we skirted this mountain on the dim game trail I would stop occasionally to pick up a fossil, or comment on a fresh rub, or scowl at Zach for making to much noise when he walked. Actually, this season he had gotten much better, being careful where he placed his feet and how he rolled his foot on the ground. Forty minutes had passed since we first heard the bugle we followed and a couple of times we heard others, but, this one was closer and we felt that we were gaining on him. In my mind, I imagined one of the young 5x6 bulls that I had seen staying a safe distance from the herd bulls. We were now rounding the back side of the mountain and were starting to head South East which made the steady wind more to my liking. While previously I worried over the Easterly wind, I was thankful that it was consistent and not swirling and sporadic as it commonly is around these peaks and canyons.
As we rounded this mountain, it opened onto a saddle that was dotted with Oaks, Junipers and young Pinions and then started a new mountain. Now we slowed and off to the South we heard a deep Bugle and we were closing on the young bull in front of us. Thru the openings in the trees I desperately glassed to see bits and pieces of the openings on the southerly mountains. I then saw a string of cows and a herd bull side hilling the mountain almost across from us filtering towards the saddle between the 2 mountains. I made a quick decision to get into a position in the bottom of the saddle to where I may intercept the herd. The wind was perfect and it was now drizzling heavily on us and I looked up the saddle to the canyon East of it and saw a heavy fog rolling in which also was unusual for this part of the year in SE NM.
This was the part of a hunter?s decision making that conflicts caution with aggressiveness. The cautious approach was to get back to the NW of the saddle and not collide with the cows that lead the bull off the mountain. The aggressive approach was to get behind a clump of Juniper in the middle of the saddle and throw caution to the wind. Myself (after some internal struggle) decided compromise was the easiest way out. Keep in mind, failure in the recent days and the season 2 years ago weighed heavily on my decision.
I chose a spot between the 2 areas and used my range finder quickly on several potential routes; the best was at 55 yards a young vigorous Juniper that I hoped would direct them down off the mountain. Down they came trickling into the saddle, the bull now bellowing every 20 seconds at the young bull that we had pursued most of the morning who had continued past the saddle and now was continuing a path around the mountain we had been on. This also caused me to believe that the old bull would drop to the West of the saddle away from the annoying younger bull and hopefully in front of the bushy Juniper I had ranged. I could feel and hear the blood pulsing thru my eardrums. Down they came and the lead cow hesitated in front of my designated Juniper and then stepped to the right of it and leading the herd beyond my chosen spot for the kill. The mindless herd followed her taking the bull 10-15 yards beyond my bush and much further than my intended shot.
Decision time once again. They had not seen me. The bull was fully preoccupied with the other annoying young bull and they were half feeding into the canyon to the East and somewhat North around the mountain that we had been skirting. I looked at Zach and told him that I needed to hurry and I wanted him to stay put. He gave me a disappointed and worried look but nodded okay. I told him I would mark his spot on the GPS and not to move no matter what. Again he nodded.
I took off the most direct route to catch the herd and looked up 100 yards to a spike bull who had been trailing way behind the herd and we saw each other at the same time. Damn!!! He turned in his tracks and ran back the way he had come and so did I temporarily. I should have known better, often a small bull will follow quite some distance behind a herd and it was not the first time that I made that mistake.
He had been trailing far behind the others so I hoped that the others had not seen his panicked exit. I took off at full speed. Now keep in mind full speed for me is not much. But, I could go quiet in the damp earth of the saddle and utilized all the cover available. I could now hear the older herd bull damaging a tree with his rack and expected at any moment to round a tree and find myself staring at a cow as it has happened to me several time in the past in similar situations. I was gaining ground and then it happened. I rounded a bush and stared squarely at 3 cows that were staring at me 50 to 60 yards off thru the brush. This was it they were turning and getting ready to take off. They had me made as a threat. Immediately aggressiveness took over, there was no argument for patience at this point because we had been here before and patience had been made a fool of.
I stepped out even more in the open and saw the bull looking sheepishly up from the sapling he was abusing and saw the realization come across his face. He was quartering away, and was getting ready to run away. No time for a range finder. 50 yard pin screamed in my head. I drew back, picked my spot and the 50 yard pin and released the arrow thru the small lane of trees and bushes. The herd bolted. I normally try to watch my arrow, but, no matter how hard I questioned my memory I could not recall where my arrow went. I could now see the herd running thru the trees and the big bull right in step.
Suddenly, I saw him deviate from the flow of the herd. He now turned to the right in a loop. Then he stumbled and he wsa down. I stared at the strings and metal in my hand wondering how the hell it had caused all this to happen. He was down and I could see he was dead. I had seen enough animals die to know when they were wounded, hurt or dead. Still I approached cautiously. He was dead, and my arrow lay bloody next to him. Somehow it had completely come out of him and now lay before him. How could that little arrow have brought down such a large strong animal in less than 30 seconds? After all of the effort and days spent hunting I wanted to yell and scream, but, I had a stronger urge. That was to play a joke on Zach who I had left about 400 yards back about 5 minutes ago.
I marked the bull in the trees with my GPS, though I knew it was unnecessary. I hurried back to Zach who had climbed a tree to try to see me coming. I have him my best dejected face and told him that I had spooked the herd but we needed to keep going. I lead him back along the same route I had followed and said nothing as we approached the dead bull. Upon seeing the dead bull, Zach shouted ?hey someone shot a bull? then he recognized my arrow that was exactly where it had fallen out of the bull.
Now the celebrating began. We yelled, screamed and jumped up and down. That is a moment I will never forget. We then caped, gutted and quartered the bull making sure we got all the meat and kept it clean. By then it was raining and it was a triumphant hike back to the truck with the rack on my back. We got my horses and packed him back to the house later that afternoon. Over the next few days those 10 minutes from when we stepped into that saddle to when I fooled Zach have looped thru my mind hundreds of times. I cannot remember a more perfect hunt. I have not scored him yet, but, I will as many of my friends will be asking me what he scored. For me it matters just so I have an answer. The memories looking at him on the wall will be the real reward.
