Building Memories

by: Tom Sorenson

I wanted to share one other experience in the outdoors that I had the privilege to share with my wife. I’m not sure what her favorite memory is from her outdoor excursions with me, but I think this would be my favorite.

I found myself without a camera person, and I’d already hunted opening day without a camera and was a little nervous because I saw five bulls that day and was worried that if I shot one off camera, I would miss a great chance at getting some good footage on camera. Shanna, the trooper that she is, had been with me elk hunting before – and knew that I hike around a lot when I hunt elk. That’s just what you have to do to find elk, and she found that her short legs are not overly conducive to covering a lot of ground in the mountains very quickly. But, she was willing to go, again, as she seemed to enjoy herself each time despite getting pretty well worn out!

We bounced our way in to the mountains and hiked in about a mile from the road and put our sleeping bags on the ground and slept under the stars with no pads – my wife is tough! The sky is amazing out here, but when you are up in the mountains and the air is clearer and you feel closer to the stars, it really puts our own lives in perspective and makes a person feel pretty small and insignificant – and thankful to be gazing at such a wonderful landscape.

The next morning, we sat and waited where I’d seen three of the bulls on opening day, but we didn’t see them this morning. We had 5 bucks wander by us out of bow range and there is very little cover, so we had to settle for watching them. After hanging out next to a well traveled trail for a few hours, I got restless and decided we needed to start doing what I do – put the miles behind us. We spent the rest of the day seeing exactly the same amount of elk as we had when we sat, but now, Shanna and I were sore and tired. It was still evening when we rolled back into our camp to get something to eat as Shanna said she was starved! I started to get our food out of the packs when I thought I heard some rustling in the leaves behind camp. I thought maybe it was a deer or probably, more likely, a domestic cow. I walked out to where I could see through the trees a little bit and was shocked to see an elk staring at me! She turned and trotted off, but I was sure she had no idea what I was. I grabbed my bow and told Shanna to get the camera rolling again.

We stepped about fifteen yards from our sleeping bags and I started to cow call. Pretty soon it became obvious that the elk were coming closer again! The lead cow stopped at what I judged to be about 20 yards. I was kneeling behind some brush, so I drew and then slowly came to my feet. I put my pin on her, but I had a problem. While I’d been waiting, I’d rested the bow on the ground with my sights buried in the dirt. I was now looking at three pins – I had four, but one of them was covered by a pine cone that had neatly wedged itself in the sight! I guessed it was either my twenty yard pin or my fifty yard pin that was covered, and I guessed it was my twenty. I let the arrow fly and – oops, it was my fifty that had been covered. I thought I was using the thirty yard pin, so I help it was low on the cow – but it was very apparent by the fact that the arrow fell pathetically short for a twenty yard shot that the top visible pin was still my twenty yard pin. The cow also turned out to be twenty five yards accounting for the clean miss – it was just the second time I’d even had a chance at an elk, and I was shaking! But the coolest thing happened, then. The elk hadn’t gone very far, and we crawled into the canyon after them and called to them for an hour as the cows proceeded to bark and woof the entire time. They made sounds that I had never heard before, let alone my wife. I looked back at her as she was filming and she had the biggest smile on her face – she was loving it, and so was I! The sounds that elk make are just the most awesome sounds I’ve ever encountered in the wild, and to share it with my wife who had completely forgotten about her hunger because of this experience was something special. It was the first time I’d really noticed pure joy in her eyes while we were hunting.

I also wanted to mention that tomorrow we are starting a new feature that will run every Saturday, so if you find yourself near a computer tomorrow, come check it out!