Going to the Bugle

October 2011

Mark Klimek of North Carolina took this dandy bull on the second day of our first Wilderness Rifle elk hunt.

We were riding through a large piney park when we noticed several cow elk bedded to our right. They were close, so I motioned for Mark to get off his horse and I kept on going.  The elk stood up and their attention was on me and the horses slowly going through the Ponderosa Pines.  There was a bull on the far side of the cows and the group started moving away.  After I had ridden a couple hundred yards, I stopped and tied up the horses.

I’d seen Mark following the group of elk so I waited.  Half an hour had passed and Mark hadn’t come back and I’d heard no shots fired.   I got worried that Mark wouldn’t find his way back to where I was, so I started riding in the direciton that he and the elk had gone.  I was following the elk tracks into a small canyon when I heard him shoot on the next ridge.  I caught up with him and as we gutted his bull another bull was bugling his head off not over 200 yeards away!  Mark told me he’d lost which way the elk had gone in the canyon and had started back when he heard a bugle and thought I was calling him to my location.  He said he whistled back and shouted that he was coming.  He hiked up the ridge to the bugling and was surprised to see this beautiful bull and not me.

Good job Mark!!

Elk Hunting, Wilderness Rifle Elk