Away From the Things of Man

Hunting a new area can be trying. By the time you find what you’re looking for, the hunt is nearing its end. It takes days and miles to scout the land, find the game, determine habits for that particular time frame. There are tools, Google Earth for one, that make this task less daunting. Hunting services like GoHunt, Huntin Fool, and Eastman’s provide insider tips and breakdowns relative to season, weapon, and trophy potential. Although I’ve had varied luck with these, the best hunts are the ones I’ve scouted on my own, determining for myself what suits my hunting needs and desires. There seems to be no substitute for boots on the ground. No expectation but imagination.

Increasingly, my shining priority is seclusion. In the old Tom Hanks movie, Joe Versus the Volcano, Meg Ryan asks Tom where they are going as they face the wide-open ocean in front of them.

“I wonder where we’ll end up,” she says.

“Away from the things of man, my love. Away from the things of man,” Tom responds.

That’s what I’m looking for. A world where the things of man have not yet permeated themselves onto the things of mother nature. This is why hunters don’t want to see other hunters when they’re hunting. It’s like seeing an ex-girlfriend when you’re on a blind date, the former reminding you of reality and therefore ruining your delusions of a perfect and unfettered future with the latter. There are no perfect hunts. Only perfect memories. If the hunt ends in success, we paint over the imperfections with an overall satisfactory grade. If the opposite is true, we gloss over the small moments of bliss that are surely there - something as simple as a hot coffee on a cold morning. More and more my reflective scorecard seems to rise and fall with sightings of the human race rather than sightings of game animals. This is not to say that I wish to hunt alone always or that I dislike other hunters. But the company needs to remain light. Something between 1 and 5 if I had to put a number to it. Any more and the hunt creeps towards something resembling warfare - hordes of orange vests sweeping a field from one end to the other like a rabbit round up or rattlesnake drive, the sole purpose extermination instead of selective harvest. In these scenarios, some of the men or women are people I’ve never even heard of, much less seen before. I distance myself from these hunts. I do not wish to initiate a friendship with a stranger holding a shotgun. I’d rather get to know them a little better before we walked rough country with loaded weapons, although it should be stated that you can learn almost everything you need to know about a person by the way he or she carries a 12-gauge and the direction they point the muzzle. But no, I’d rather know intimately the people I share the field with.

“A man doesn’t own a farm, the farm owns him.”

This feeling rises with my wish for isolation. Time is limited. Why would I spend that precious commodity with someone casual? Isn’t the company as important as the season? Isn’t the friend as valuable as the tag? Hunting buddies are like good bird dogs. They’re damn hard to come by, you only get a few per lifetime, and when they’re gone you drink good whiskey to their memories. And if you don’t have a good friend to go hunting with, going alone is the next best thing. Meaningful is the word I’m chasing when I go hunting. Everyone gets to choose their own formula for this. I strive to be away from the things of man and bring a good friend along if possible to enhance the taste.

           I tried to work out the equation when I moved to Idaho from New Mexico. Before I knew it, half of September had been spent loading moving trucks and signing real estate contracts. In The English Major by Jim Harrison, the main character Cliff references Thoreau’s sentiment of “a man doesn’t own the farm, the farm owns him.” I have appreciated this notion since my youth on a tractor in western Oklahoma and I would extend it into real estate. At one point I was under contract for three houses. It felt like three straight jackets. You gotta live somewhere, but part of my nomadic spirit wants to find a cabin like Thoreau or perhaps go fatally Into the Wild like Christopher McCandless. My dutiful side looks at my three daughters, decides they need a roof over their heads. And so it is and so we are blessed and so I yearn to be away from it all if only for a little while.

  I researched over-the-counter units for the last 3 days of archery elk season and bought a tag at the regional office of Idaho Fish and Game. I questioned whether or not it was even worth going for such a short time frame but that is the rationale of a civilized mind. The true hunter, the ancestral hunter, goes whenever he can and in complete disregard of duration. He goes when the opportunity presents itself. It doesn’t take a day to pull the trigger. The good news was that since I hadn’t claimed residency in another state in the year and a half I’d been away, I still qualified as a resident, and therefore resident license costs. This made me much happier than the check I received for the selling of my family cabin - the simple victories more understandable to me than the larger ones. I was melancholy to say goodbye to something owned by my father and grandparents, all of whom were now gone. Death, like houses, is another necessity I’ve grown to loathe.

I made stops at Cabelas and the grocery store and then drove north towards Salmon. It didn’t take long for me to find mountains and hunters. I drove all day, the two-track gravel bouncing me into a trance of mild rage. I got high-centered in a narrow canyon, had to reverse along a cliff on a one-way road, other hunters on their way out, their placid mugs facing mine across windshields filled with game regulations, gloves, and other detritus of the hunt. I could not get away from other humanoids. Every turnoff held a 1987 Winnebago camper, every trail a 4-wheeler or Polaris Razr, the latter seemingly granted to every Idahoan male upon completion of their state driver’s license test. I grew discouraged. I wanted to go home. Instead, like a stubborn mule, I kept treading along.

Finally, I found a place to all myself. I pulled into antelope country right at dark with mountains looming in the background. I was half asleep, in need of a cold beer. Suddenly, like an alien encounter, a bull elk ran in front of me and I had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting him. I was rocked out of an unconscious, radio-induced, road coma. He was a good bull, and I immediately parked and set up camp. By camp, I mean that I opened the back of my truck topper, boiled a Mountain House bag of chicken gumbo, and went to sleep. The aluminum frame was surprisingly comfortable compared to the mattress I’d just hauled across 4 states, although I had to turn diagonal to fit my 6’2 frame inside the bed to close the tailgate and window.

The next morning, I got up early, boiled coffee, and tried to find the bull. I spotted him within the first ten minutes. He was a tall dark object surrounded by a sagebrush prairie. I went slow and crawled to a slight ditch, then followed him for a few hundred yards. At first, he was trailing three antelope doe through the valley, an act I witnessed the previous morning. Both species are infused with the rut at this time, and I wonder if there is some lustful confusion. Eventually, he distanced himself from the antelope and for a moment it looked like he was coming my way. Then he turned and walked slowly and steadily across an entire valley, up and into the timber on an east-facing slope.

I had seen four-wheeler lights the night before coming out of the high country but for the next three days, I had the entire range to myself. I marked the point where the bull entered the trees and that evening I put myself in position for an ambush. As I crept uphill I heard sudden hoof thumps against the dirt and I looked to see a solid 7x5 chasing two spike bulls around two cows. They stepped out of the tree line at 70 yards, and I drew in anticipation, but they stayed hidden behind scattered pines and fed away from me. I let down my draw and waited. Soon the herd bull appeared with more cows and again they stayed just out of range. He was a massive mature bull. His points were short but his main beams were long and his rack stood tall against the sloping horizon of the grassy hillsides. I made a desperate move before they fed out of sight, but a cow smelled me and barked and the 7x5 threw his head back and ran into the timber. The herd bull kept his eyes only on the cows as he corralled them downhill at a steady pace. I was able to follow without spooking them. All living things converged toward the bottom of the wide-open canyon. I heard another bugle and looked to my left to see a six-point standing alone on the ridge to the north. The herd bull with cows bugled a deep and raspy echo in the still September air. The new bull, which turned out to be the bull I almost hit with my pickup, bugled back angrily – a clear challenge. When he dropped into a swale, I sprinted to put myself in position between the two. But I stopped too short and the wind was dead wrong. At 80 yards the light-colored 6x6 winded me and trotted back to the ridge he came from before disappearing off the other side. The herd bull took his cows in the opposite direction and I was alone with the night as it covered us all.

“We are in fact seeking the ultimate truth - that something has to die for us to live. ”

Later, I lay in my pickup bed alone and snug, the stars littered like acne on the face of the universe. With the topper windows opened, I listened to bugles all night as I drifted in and out of reality. One to my left and one to my right in wonderful report. It was the two bulls I had just ruined my chance on. They never seemed to meet each other. They just called and called like two lovers across a river too deep to cross.

There is something soulfully soothing about listening to elk bugle in your sleep. At the cabin in New Mexico, we heard it nightly all month long. I’m sure my father and grandparents heard it too. In that way, they had followed me to Idaho, deeds, mortality, and property lines be damned.

            The next morning, I hiked several miles but could not find any elk. They had gone to bed early and high before the sun. I heard a few bugles deep in the trees that evening but again I could not get eyes on them. On the third and final day, I hunted a different drainage and found a deep-throated bull on a north-facing slope covered in spruce and pines. I waited until I was sure he was bedded for the day before going back to camp for lunch. I returned in the afternoon. Just before leaving the truck, I heard him bugle along with another, lighter-pitched bull on the opposite slope to the west. I skirted the edge of the wind and hiked to the bottom of the canyon, 100 yards below the last place I heard the call. The sun was high, prime shooting time hours away. I passed the time by catching flies with my hands. 11 in total. It was an odd and primal game. There is an undeniable aspect of meditation when the hunt is in its essence. There is complete focus and singular vision and nothing in the world is in your head other than the hunt in front of you. Even in times of wait, there is only the singing of the wind and the chiming of the trees and if you close your eyes you can get to the same place Buddhists go; find the same peace preached by doctors and therapists. Hunters are not so different than these truth seekers. We are in fact seeking the ultimate truth - that something has to die for us to live.

The bulls bugled in their beds most of the late afternoon. Silence prevailed for over an hour, and I assumed the bulls had caught my wind and lingered off. Then the sound of antlers smashing sounded off up the canyon, a collision of bone that rattled through the pines and echoed down the drainage toward the sage flats. The two bulls had been trading insults all day and now they backed it up with a fight. I should have gone immediately toward them, but cover was tight, and where I stood there were two open shooting lanes – a known advantage I was uneasy to give up. I thought they would come downhill, just as all the elk I had seen the last two days had done. But all the elk I had seen the last two days were not all the elk on the mountain. Other elk certainly went uphill. I didn’t consider this blaring truth when I waited on the two bulls fighting. I assumed I was smarter than them because I know how to balance a checkbook. But animals know how to balance their own existence. In that way, they are smarter than I’ll ever be.

The next time I heard them they were another 100 yards up the draw. They were traveling up with the wind in their face. I tried to catch them but couldn’t keep up. I called to them and they answered but did not turn around. I raked branches on trees and cut my fingers on the breaking wood and the growling bull turned his head and called to me, but he didn’t turn his legs. He walked up the mountain until the light was gone and the hunt was over. I walked back down the drainage toward my pickup. It was only a few miles away, but I made myself walk slowly. I was happy. I never laid eyes on the elk, but I was in their world for half a day. I was a part of their lives. They didn’t let me see them, but they let me hear them; let me feel their presence. That’s what they gave me. Also, an antler. On my way out I almost stepped on the right side of a six-point shed. The mountains had given me views I had never seen before, the incline had given me exercise and the thin air had given my lungs good use. The only thing I didn’t have was meat and the shot of the bow and the trailing of blood and the insatiable joy of shining a light across freshly died cape.

            In the end, I found what I was looking for; what I needed most. I had gone away from the things of man and lived among the things of elk. After days of walking alone in silence, I hit the highway and sped to the limit of 75. I found it impossible to drive that fast and stay straight. I had to slow down. I tried to listen to the radio but found the music too loud and turned it off. I had fast food when I got into town but found the taste unnatural and unsettling. I found my daughters and friends and I tried to express the hunt to them and what it meant to me, but I couldn’t find the words. I still can’t. Maybe they’re out there still, lingering between the hoof prints of old bulls. Maybe I’ll find them on my next hunt. Wherever that is. I only need a little while. Because it doesn’t matter how long I go outside. It only matters that I go.