“No, I said, just looking today.”

We drove around Little Mountain for about four and a half hours and saw plenty of antelope and deer, including a couple of nice muley bucks, but not a single elk. Not a single elk, that is, until we started heading home.

As we came around a curve in the dark, I thought, “Why is there a great big dead cedar in the middle of the road?” Then that great big dead cedar jumped and ran off the road to the right. He was massive. Long heavy beams and a big clubbed drop tine on his right side. I turned my headlights toward him and he stopped about ten yards off the road and struck the classic pose with his nose stuck up in the air. We tried to take a picture, but couldn’t get the camera to work in the dark. Arghhh.

Then, he turned around and walked across the road again right in front of us, ten or fifteen yards away in full view of the headlights. Six points on his left side, but way bigger than my bull from last year. Wow. He meandered across the road and jumped the fence on our left, almost getting his back feet tangled in the top wire, and joined a couple of cows just out of range of the headlights, but close enough for their eyes to shine blue in the darkness.

I know it was dark, and I know I was excited, but I’m pretty sure he was the biggest bull I’ve ever seen in the wild. (Yellowstone and feed lot bulls aside) Scott thinks he was probably a bull that a friend of his has been photographing for the last couple of years, and if he is the same one, estimates that he is about a 370 bull.

It was too dark to shoot him, even if I had brought a bow, but just seeing him was well worth it. Next time though, I bet I have a bow with me.

It was my first big game animal I have ever taken. I took him using Scott’s 30-378 rifle with one shot at 289 yards, slightly downhill, upstream from Dad’s property on Current Creek, above Jane’s Meadow. He was a six point bull. He wasn’t the biggest bull I saw during the season, but he was a nice one.

I have never been all that interested in big game hunting, but I enjoyed it immensely. I spent more time in November with my Dad and brothers than I have in the last 10 years and saw more country in Sweetwater County than I have in the last 36 years.