Even in Montana, where hunting is woven into the culture alongside Charlie Russell oils and Resistol hats, it seems to me elk hunters are, well... different.  A couple arrows shy of a full quiver.  They just don’t think the  same as most folks.

Consider Brian, Mark and I, driving up a dusty Forest Service road in the Big Belts, windows open and wearing T-shirts. We were off to hunt September elk with archery gear.  It was one of those Indian summer afternoons that seem to be evidence for global warning.  It was as if August had worn out its welcome and couldn’t take the hint to move on. 

We were not optimistic.  Elk hunting is not about hot weather.  No doubt our elk hunt would turn into a four-day camping trip.  We had a cooler of beer.  We had fly rods.  We would survive the week sitting in the shade, trying to stay cool.  Just like the elk.

To add insult to injury, the ”oldies“ station was playing the Eagles. 
Then the disc jockey broke in, the sound of heartbreak in his voice.  Weather report. 

”Bad news,“ he said. ”Summer’s over.  A cold front coming in. Expect lows in the 30s and... get this... snow in the mountains.“
We whooped. A happy band of misfits, the hunt was back on.

An elk is born with a barometer in his belly.  We found our prey on the move, feeding even before the first mare’s tail clouds hinted at changing weather.

I spent the next evening on a Douglas fir ridge, a herd of elk all around me. I glimpsed bits and pieces of elk visible in the timber.  I readied an arrow and the broadhead gleamed.

With a rifle, my hunt would have ended right there.  With a bow, it had just started.  I was pinned down, hunched and helpless, in a knobby cluster of deadfall.  I had crept this close in stocking feet (stalking feet), but ran out of cover 50 yards from a bedded cow.

Now, I kept my excitement caged in my chest, and kept flat on the ground. 
Peering over the grass, I heard the soft mews of elk talk, heard their molars grind the browse and watched the random twitches of their hides.  But I had no shot.  I wanted to do it right or not at all.  Fifty yards is twice the range of my skill.  I waited for dusk, found my boots and slipped away in the darkness, every sense sharp and feeling high from the entire episode.
Walking back to camp in the dark it occurred to me.  The purpose of the modern hunt is no longer to reduce an animal to a human’s possession. Rather, the purpose is to raise a human’s alertness to the level of a predator’s.

The snow came overnight.  I awoke to find the rainfly on my dome tent glazed with ice, frozen like a shell.  My boots were white, stiff blocks.  Mark loaned me his spare pair.  Today, Mark and I would hunt together.
When it comes to hunting bugling elk, I have  the distinct handicap of being deaf in my right ear.  I can hear bulls bugle OK, but damn if I can tell where the sound is COMING from.  The normal process is called stereolocation, and is the reason most animals are born with two ears in the first place.  Without help, I have a one-in-four chance of stalking in the right direction.  Bowhunting is tough enough.

So Mark and I greeted dawn at the same ridge I had retreated from the night before.  It was only 12 hours later, but the ridge was almost unrecognizable.  Our green, still world was now a swirl of white.  We dug caps and gloves from our packs as the snow squall turned into a mountain blizzard.

In the timber below us, two bulls were bugling, back and forth, just furious with each other.  The harder it snowed, the more they would rail at each other.  The woods just shook with the ruckus.  It was a wonder the snow could cling to the trees.

We spent most of the morning edging toward the sound.  Snow stung my face.  There was no sound but the hidden elk, raging in the trees.  I told myself to move like an elk:  Step deliberately.  Keep your head up and your wits about you.

We closed in, one step at a time.  Any. Moment. Now...

I thought to myself:  If this is not my favorite thing, it is very, very close. 
Many people (most of them, these days)  cannot understand this passion.  They never felt this ancient urge and are unsettled by the fact of predation—human or otherwise.

One March, I was cross-country skiing with a small group, up in Glacier National Park.  We almost stumbled across a fresh cougar kill, a whitetail doe, dropped smack in the center of the trail.  The cat had bitten off a shoulder and disappeared, but hadn’t taken time to even hastily cache the kill.

I backtracked the scene in the snow, finding where the lion had hidden a kitten, where she had stalked alone, pounced and dropped the deer before it had completed two leaps.

I examined the wounds where she had bitten the throat.  I explored where the cat had sheered off the scapula, turning her face sideways to sever the shoulder joint with her jagged molars.  I probed a finger between two ribs.  The doe’s lungs were still hot.  That fresh.

There were three skiers there: a hunter, a vegetarian and a meat-counter carnivore. The vegetarian, who is a sculptor, studied the form of the deer, lying there, three-legged and still.  We talked about the stories of tracks and about how rare a find this was.  He said it was, as far as he knew, the nearest he had ever been to a cougar. 

Our companion just looked sadly down at the carcass.  ”Poor thing,“ she said.  ”How awful.“

This reaction should not have surprised me.  Most people seem to see the constant give-and-take of predator and prey as some vast, cosmic tragedy.  Our emotions are scrambled when it comes to the hunt and to death. It is kind of a cultural schizophrenia. 

Consider the English language:  When a psychopath becomes obsessed with a woman, we say he is ”stalking“ her.  When he does this violently and repeatedly, he is branded a ”sexual predator.“  These are visceral metaphors, to be sure.  But that mother mountain lion, her kitten’s belly full of venison, knows nothing of the perversions of our species. Yet we burden her with them, through our words and our prejudices.

Because I am a hunter, I believe I see the world with profoundly different eyes than my dismayed skiing companion.

As I write this, Oregon juncos scatter sunflower seeds from the feeder outside my window.  Yesterday, a tiny package of fierceness, a northern pygmy owl, waited in the neighbor’s fir to kill one of them.  To me, the owl and the junco are equal. Equally beautiful, one for being the hunter and the other for being the hunted.  I have no desire to see the lion lay down with the lamb.  I am too mesmerized by the yin and yang of predator and prey.
But, like I said, elk hunters don’t think the same as most folks.

I have never stalked so deliberately, with such confidence.  I looked at my quiver, visualizing which arrow  I would draw when the time came.  I looked at my bowstring, pleased that it was well-waxed, so it would not become soaked in the snow and ruin my aim.  The woods seemed filled with elk.  My nostrils searched for that familiar whiff of elk musk. They were that close.
But then, suddenly, the woods went silent.

Mark raised his eyebrows.  I shrugged.  It was as if someone had pulled the plug.

There was no clatter of elk hooves, no timber-crash of herd panic.  But there was no bugling either.  The elk were gone.  Something had spooked them.
We found elk tracks.  The herd departed, yes, but did not run.  Puzzled, we scanned the woods. I felt Marks hand on my shoulder.  He pulled me close and whispered in my ear and pointing.  I follow his finger to a tangle of deadfall, just to our right.  I put my binoculars to it.  Staring squarely back at me the handsome, unmistakable face of a mountain lion.  An elk hunting lion.  Lion and humans, hunting the same mountain, stalking the same herd.  I put the binoculars down and see the blacktipped whip of a tail.  I raise the glasses again and look into those yellow predator’s eyes. 

Knowing eyes.