I seldom visit MM, with the exception of the photo section, which I view quite often, but since it was raining today and I wanted to do some outside work, I decided to past a few minutes on the computer.
I was surprised to see the word "Hucking", thus I clicked this thread to see what people were talking about.
I don't know if I'm the one who coined this word or not, but I discoverd this method, which I started calling hucking, because that is exactly what I was doing, when I found out how well it worked.
Without going into great detail, about my first episodes and explaining how it came about, I will say that hucking can be used very successfully at times, with elk who are call shy or quite. I learned the method not by raking trees, which I had done for years, and which I refer to as raking. It really has nothing to do with raking, but can be used in combination with that process. I came upon hucking, quite by accident. I was following a herd of elk with a bull that was bugling non stop. I had not yet seen the herd, but I was closing the distance as they were heading to their feeding area, when I came upon a spike feeding about 30 yards in front me. I didn't want to spook the spike, which I thought might scare the other elk, so I held up and waited. As I waited the bugling bull kept putting more distance between us and I knew would loose the herd if I continued to wait much longer. By this time the spike had fed off to my side and I felt that I could scare him by throwing something out in front of him and make him run in the opposite direction of the herd I was after.
I picked up a stick, about a long and round as my forearm and threw it between him and the vanishing elk herd. It was loud, but he only raised his head and looked and went right back to feeding. I picked up another stick and did the same thing. Again he looked up, but this time he started walking towards me. So I then started picking up what was left around me and started throwing them out in front of him, but he continued to come at me, rather than run away. Soon I was lifting and throwing old dead fall quakies that we 15 or so feet long, all the while moving. I started pulling grass and weeds and threw them up into the air, and yet he came closer and closer.
Long story short, he walked right up to me, even as I made all that movement and noise and stayed there long enough the elk herd I wanted vanished into the distance.
That incident got me to thinking about why that elk behaved the way it did. It just so happened that evening when I was heading towards a distant bugling bull I came upon several cows who were feeding in the same open hillside I needed to cross to cut off the bull. It was getting late, and I knew I didn't have much shooting light left, so I didn't have time to wait out the cows. So again I stared hucking stuff into the air and low and behold those cows heading towards me and walked right up to me as I threw all kinds of stuff into the air. They never spooked until the walked around me and got my wind. After watching those two incidents that day, I knew I was onto something, and have used it successfully ever since. I just call it hucking, as that is exactly what I do. I just huck stuff, like rocks, sticks, deadfall, grass, weeds, and dirt into the air. Many times the elk that you can't call in with a call, will close the distance to excellent bow range. Not all elk will come to every call, nor will all elk come in while you huck, but a good percentage will, so I use it often when I'm on the ground bowhunting elk.
Anyway that's how I stared hucking and why I called it that. That's not to say, someone else called it that, or something else long before I discovered it. I've just called it hucking ever since I discovered it many years ago.
Have a good one. BB
