A long time ago, deep, deep into the mountains of Northern Utah. My brother and I had an

old camp. Now we were still pretty young as far as all hunters go and neither of us had

ever shot an honest to goodness big bull elk.

We'd gone in with a couple friends and opening day I'd shot a three by four bull

no one that we needed meat I had determined I was going to shoot the first elk I found.

And I managed to call him off a hill. He was alone in early October in some pretty thick pine timber. And I staged up underneath the little bluff he was probably

betted on. This was mid-morning and called him off, hit him at about 170 yards with my

pre-64 model 70 Winchester chambered in 270 with a

150-grain nozzler partition. He kind of hunched like a bull will when he's hit

hard and started to turn sideways and turn around to go back up that hill and I hit him again through both ribs and he came rolling down the mountainside.

We packed him down to camp and hunted a couple more days hard and then our friends had to leave.

My brother was determined to get a bowl. We had a couple good horses with us and so we decided to stay and hunt until he got a bull or the season ended.

About five or six days later it snowed about six inches and he spent most of the day

track in a bull until he went clear down out of that high country.

He was migrating, right, getting pushed by the snow and his tracks turned from, well, fresh bull tracks in the snow to smears in the mud and then

to nothing at all.

And so the next day my brother went back up north of camp and hunted in the evening, hunted a meadow that generally produces if you sit on it long enough. This was kind of a pinch point in a great big

canyon system with a couple little meadows and big bulls sometimes coming out of that high country

late would stage up there for a night and

fill their bellies on that metalgrass before continuing down.

Well going into that metal he caved through some ice and went nearly knee deep in water, right?

And it was pretty cold up there at that point. His boots filled up. He went and he sat on his little spot

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