October 2011
This shot is taken in front of the Ted Turner Ranch. Those are his buffalo and I wasn't about to robin-hood one of them.
We shot no elk. We did see elk cows. My friend Henry Lievens attempted a very long shot, actually four shots, at a monster bull elk more than 400 yards distant, with his .338. He came close--rocks fragmented above and below where the elk was crossing the mountain side. It reminded me of the joke about the three statisticians who went elk hunting: the first saw a distant elk, leveled his rifle and fired; the shot struck three feet low; the second in turn fired his rifle, and it hit three feet high on the rocky slope; said the third, "We got him." They were, of course, social statisticians, working for the Obama administration.
We didn't get him. No meat for us, although we share a better sense of reality testing than the social statisticians and those whom they inform. We did see four moose, a few hundred antelope. a few hundred mule deer, two astonishing foxes that behaved as if they had never seem humans before and a shrew-like creature that lived at about 9,000 feet.
It was a great hunt.
