“Who killed the grouse?” someone yelled from the camp house kitchen as they popped open the fridge and collected the makings for dinner.

“Guilty,” I called from the boot room as I hung my recurve on a peg and pried off my boots.

Hours before as Chris and I hiked out to our evening ambushes for mulies, he stopped and hissed, “Grouse!” Mere yards away, the bird; tense and trusting its speckled camouflage hunkered in the game trail. Chris nocked a homemade blunt tipped arrow and missed a shot over the bird’s neck. 

“Your turn,” he said as I snapped a judo tipped arrow to my string and followed suit with a clean miss over its back. This was more nonsense than the grouse could tolerate. It exploded in a whir of feathers only to abruptly land on a nearby deadfall. 

With only one small game head apiece this became a broadhead game. Always the sporting gentleman, Chris opted for another neck shot and repeated the same near miss. I, being only a fair shot on a good day, took a body shot and tumbled the bird from its perch. 

The former grocery store butcher, Chris patiently played coach as my knife cleanly removed the thick breast meat which was later prepared with rice, broth and black pepper and made a fitting lunch on pack out day.

Chris has dreamed of chasing elk since he first tightened a bowstring. Elk, for me, are on the “to-do” list but with no particular time line, but who was I to spoil a good invite? Frank Waller, Gregg Dudley, Jeff Hester and Jason Cline also required little convincing to make the trip with us. 

I’ve been west before; on vacation, on business, so I was prepared for the vastness of the land but what I was unprepared for this time was the amount of game one can see from the road, from a motel window, even before stepping into the elk woods. I always wonder how many animals I missed in my travels before I started hunting. Now, I look for game constantly, knowing how to look and when to look. On the drive down from Denver to camp, we stopped to glass pronghorn and mule deer, excited as children with each new discovery. 

Elk camp sat at 9000 feet atop Fitzgerald Mesa. Staring up from Highway 50, I could only hope that a summer of stair climbing and push-ups would get me through the week. The snaky gravel road crunched under our tires as we gained altitude to the top. Going up we passed fellow TBOF member Joe Formella and his friends coming down. They had a good hunt with a good elk ready for the meat processor. Aside from the outhouse and outdoor shower, which was a small tented affair equipped with a pump sprayer, camp was comfortable and was actually ranch owner Mike’s home and we had the run of the house and his two thousand acres for the week. 

The hunt began with deceptively high hopes. Traveling in two trucks, Mike toured us around the property and when we stopped to glass a deep canyon we spotted a respectable bull elk half a mile away. Even closer, however, was the mew of a cow elk in the woods directly below us. Chris, Gregg and I scrambled to grab bows, tabs, face masks and slid downhill as Frank attempted to interest the elk with one of his calls. Twice more we heard them ahead of us until a fickle wind changed and our brief but exciting stalk was over.

Day one of the hunt would provide a much closer encounter for most of us. Chris and I played tag with a spike muley and five does with the deer winning the game. As we watched the deer clear a meadow back into an aspen grove, we planned our next move when a stick cracked behind us. We and a bull elk mutually surprised each other but at 50 yards, he was safely out of stickbow range. 

We could have been mildly disappointed at not getting a shot opportunity, but that would have done disservice to a morning that produced six mule deer and bull elk by nine o’clock. 

Contemplating our next move on the Colorado game board, we spotted Frank and Jason trudging up the same trail the elk did. Jason apparently shot and hit a bull just after sunup and the two had been tracking him since, eventually running out of sign. They believed the elk had been hit mid-body, left side. We briefly related our encounter, which revealed no blood on our elk as he turned showing us a spotless left side before trotting off into the woods. 

We agreed to an assist with the recovery and back trailed to re-work the trail. Chris and I found spotty sign and tag teamed the blood and tracks before reaching a puzzling impasse. The four of us were eventually, and bless cell phone service, joined by Gregg and Jeff. A twenty-minute search by all refused to give up the lost trail. Admittedly, I am not the woodsman that my companions are but I had two lucky breaks on the trail. On a whim, I made a hard ninety-degree turn and twenty yards later, found blood smeared across a fallen aspen. For several hundred more yards we each took turns finding sign until reaching another standstill.

Perplexed, I looked around and the area began to look very familiar. Through the trees, I saw the opening where Chris and I had stood when we saw our elk and I began to convince myself we had in fact seen their elk. The trail led this way. A gentlemanly debate ensued over this dilemma. They swore there was blood on their elk but we saw no blood on our elk. The argument was settled when I looked up and saw an aspen that formed a “v” about twenty feet from its base. I remember seeing the elk by the same tree earlier that morning. I walked over to the tree and found a small splash of blood. Mystery solved. Same bull. 

The morning crawled on to lunchtime and past. In total, we had now put twenty-four man-hours into recovering this bull. Our initial optimism was fading and the sign was getting increasingly scarce. A rainstorm finally brought our search to its frustrating conclusion.

With glaring obviousness, no one was more disappointed than Jason, who vowed to continue searching for the bull for the rest of the hunt. And he did just that. Five days later, Jason, along with Jeff and Frank located the dead bull in the same canyon where we attempted to work the elk herd days before. A bear found the bull first and the sign showed he was still in the area so the boys quickly examined the carcass, removed the rack and made a hasty retreat. It appeared that the elk somehow performed an odd quartering maneuver at the shot and instead of receiving an arrow through the ribs, he was the recipient of a “Texas heart shot” which was the reason Chris and I saw no blood on his side that day.

Plopped on a ridgeline the next afternoon, Chris and I, leaning against our packs, binoculars glued to our faces, studied the terrain below, hoping to spy a deer or elk sunning itself. A darting movement got my attention.

“Magpies,” I said as I watched the big black and white birds flutter atop the scrub oaks and then disappear once again out of sight, their long, flowing tails signaling a trail of their descent.

“What’s the attraction?” Chris asked me.

“Because there’s something dead in there, magpies are big time scavengers.”

“Let’s see what they’re on,” he said.

“Well, we wanted to scout that flat down by the highway anyway, where we saw those mulies yesterday.”

Chris anxiously eyed the drop. The hill was steep, the rocks loose. A misstep would bring a scratched custom bow at the least, a broken ankle at the worst. “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

We wound our way down through the broken terrain that alternated between grassy flats and the scrub oak thickets. Every few minutes we’d stop, keeping a bead on the magpies to keep our line. As we got closer we eventually lost track of the birds in the head high brush but our noses did the rest. The cow elk had been dead a few days, most of the muscle meat and organs had been consumed, stomach opened, its grassy contents spilled onto the dirt. But a key part of its anatomy was missing.

“Where’s the head?” I asked, puzzled.

Chris studied the elk a moment and announced, “It’s inside the neck.”

“Geez, you’re right.” The neck skin was inside out, glistening whitish pink in the afternoon sun. The elk’s head neatly tucked inside.

“How the devil did that happen?” Chris wondered aloud.

Eyes pouring over the mess like a crime scene detective I found our answer. “Bear,” I said, pointing to a pile of pretty recent scat. Resuming the investigation I said, “The bear could have killed the elk. It could have been lost to another hunter. It could have died on its own.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Chris said. “That scat isn’t from some cub, that’s a big bear and he might be sleeping off his meal a mile away or some place real close. I think we better leave.” 

I agreed with reluctance, wishing I had a bear tag. I’ve done the treestand, baited hunt; the bear graces my den, but now I want one, on the ground, without pretense. 

We wormed our way downhill, eyes watchful to the southwest. The sky had slowly been turning shades of charcoal and indigo and the lightning cracked white and horizontal across the far ridges. 

“This doesn’t look good, pal,” Chris said, his voice a tad nervous and rightly so. There is no good place to be in a lightning storm and this looked like a bad one. Retreating straight up was the most direct route to camp but that would land us directly on the ridge top. Heading to lower ground would put us too far from the cabin. Sidehilling to the main drive that snaked up to camp was the safest bet and I made double time, putting months of conditioning to the test. 

As we busted out onto the road I spooked a young buck that bounded off into the now sleeting rain. We trudged up the hill and surprised two ruffed grouse standing in the road. We missed, collected our arrows and were glad to finally reach the cabin, warm and inviting.

The week went by quickly, and other than snow, we experienced most of what fall in Colorado has to offer; heat, cold, wind, rain and lots of game. One of the reasons Chris makes such a fine hunting partner is that we recognize that it is part of the mutual fun to trade stalks and plan our next moves, but bowhunting, after all, is not a team sport and there is much to be said about the solitude that it brings. So there were hunts where we did our own thing as well.

Honestly, I haven’t done a large amount of deer hunting that doesn’t call for a treestand so this trip was an entry-level test of the ground game. And the deer, to their credit, were largely cooperative. The blame for empty coolers would fall to us. Granted, we only had buck tags, so being pinned down by several does for nearly an hour, at point blank range, served to be entertainment at best. And other close encounters with antlerless deer would continue throughout the hunt. However, the legal spike that walked by, in the open, at twelve yards, should have been in the freezer. The comic misunderstanding of Chris thinking I was going to shoot and me believing he was going to use the young buck as his western icebreaker spared the deer. By the time we figured out that I was the designated hitter, the deer realized these two crouched forms represented clear and present danger and bounded down the hill. 

When stand hunting, if armed with a paperback, I can sit for hours. Still-hunting, however, remains a challenge with curiosity seeming to get the best of me, always wondering what’s up ahead.  But I was quite pleased with myself on this hunt as I finally started to learn to slow down. One morning I spent the better part of an hour covering only two hundred yards. And I know some readers can cut that pace in two and I applaud them. I do know that on that morning if I had assumed my usual pace I would have never been within forty yards of a spectacular, giant mulie that would have made Boone and Crockett. His antlers were wide and massive and he had no idea I was there, motionless, watching him and his entourage of sentinel does and smaller bucks. There were just too many of them to cut the distance in half and remain undetected. No, I didn’t get the shot that modern archery tackle or a firearm would have offered, but the self-satisfaction of that close encounter speaks for itself. 

Many of my deer stalks were made in or around an “L” shaped clear cut, so for my last two days of hunting, I opted to hunt from a ground blind that I built beneath four spruce trees. The following morning as I confidently followed the beam of my headlamp down the hill to my blind, numerous pairs of eyes lit up the field. The deer were already there, feeding in the dark. Best laid plans of mice and men…..

Mentally masking my disappointment, I moved past the deer, most of which tore off into the night at my approach, and settled into my blind and waited out the remaining darkness. Shivering in the pre-dawn cold, I heard an ominous moaning in the woods behind me. Unsure of the originator of this unfamiliar sound, I went through a mental checklist of woodland creatures and their respective vocabularies. The only thing that made sense was bear. I have had bears stand up on my tree in Saskatchewan. I have had on the ground encounters with the untouchable, protected bears of south Florida. But I never felt so completely vulnerable and helpless as I did that morning, sitting on a Colorado hilltop, alone, in the dark with only a recurve bow in my hand and a Randall knife on my hip, knowing a bear was nearby, prowling the forest.

My suspicion was confirmed just after daylight. That sixth sense we all have and sadly don’t always make the best use of, whispered, “look left.” I did and there he was, his body a black tank pushing through the grass, head bigger than a five gallon bucket. He ambled out into the clear cut, stopped for a moment and then faded back into the woods. Knowing he was somewhere behind me, in the shadows, I slowly turned on my log seat, nervous eyes on the tree line. Minutes later, the big bear sky lined itself on the ridge top to my right before moving south, down the steep hill that led to the highway, and to the dead elk.

Later, that ground blind would produce several opportunities to arrow a mule deer. I collected nothing but memories and the deer would survive another of life’s lessons.

For the duration of the hunt, for Chris and I anyway, the elk were scarce, the mule deer plentiful. I counted seventeen to thirty five deer daily. Gregg covered plenty of territory solo and had similar mule deer adventures while the remainder of our group, with Frank’s expert calling, got into elk several times but with Jason having the only shot opportunity.

I suppose for a Total Recall of the hunt, one could say I botched two wonderful opportunities at deer and only connected on a bird, “The Three Thousand Dollar Grouse” so to speak as that was the overall cost of the trip, but our time in the mountains was so much more than that. The week was a lesson in Western Hunting 101 and I am certain we each will retain those lessons with a deep desire to return.

David Tetzlaff
david@napleszoo.com