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Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
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The sky is not yet light. The still air is drenched in dew and clumps of cloud hide most of the waning stars. I’d hoped for a storm or some other sharp change in the air. Weather has been mild and uneventful. Elk have not been moving. Partners and I hunted in Colorado three weeks ago. Bland weather there allowed elk to lie low on private land we couldn’t hunt, and we’d seen not one elk in an area overrun with too many. Now I’m hunting alone. This is the first time I’ve been in this area southwest of Ellensburg. It is not as crowded as Colockum Pass, a few miles north of here. I don’t care for the crowds in the Colockum woods, hunters strung like orange beads around meadows, waiting for a herd to run a gantlet of gunfire. On the first day this year, a small bunch of elk moved through trees only yards from me. They were cows, the ones whose heads I clearly saw, but just a glimpse of antler would not be enough to warrant shooting. The general season is for spike-antlered bulls only, so a clear view of antlers is necessary. I am tempted to hunt a different area each day, to cover as much ground as possible in the short time I have. I’m a neophyte at elk hunting, though, so I listen to more experienced hunters. The most consistent advice I’ve heard is, I should pick an area where tracks and sign show elk pass through often and hunt that area every day until elk cross my path. It’s a good plan when animals are moving, but it took a couple of days to realize the elk, wherever they were, were not moving. I hunted the same square-mile area each of the first three days. I covered the woods and meadows, the ridges and gullies. The accumulated track on my GPS screen looked like tangled yarn. In all those hours and miles, I saw no track or sign I could be certain was made later than the first day. On the third day, I took a different road to my hunting area and passed near a deep, steep canyon with patches of dense timber on the slopes and patches of grass and water amid the brush and trees in the bottoms. Elk could hide there for days without having to move. After hunting my usual area in the morning, I moved to the top of the canyon and hunted both the shady and the sunny slopes. Elk tracks crossed in both directions and many tracks were only a day or two old. I pushed slowly through dense fir hardly taller than I am and found elk beds and recent sign. That was where I would hunt on my last day. As usual, I don’t bother with breakfast. I boil water for a carafe of coffee as I find my last pairs of clean socks and dress for the day. I park my truck, finish my coffee, and begin walking slowly and softly through the woods toward my canyon as the undersides of scattered clouds turn magenta and pink in the east. I carry only my license, tag, rifle, and a knife, in addition to compass, water, binoculars, and GPS. I’ll go back to the truck for meat bags, saws, hoist, and pack frame. If I need to. There are no fresh tracks. Even the newest have frost in them. The sun pours into the canyon at last and I have to take off a shirt. I encounter another hunter on a slope above me. She has a cow tag, in case she doesn’t find a spike bull, but it won’t be valid until tomorrow. She hasn’t seen any cows anyway. “We need a change in the weather to get them moving,” she says. It is 10:00 a.m. I’ve hunted the ground I intended to cover. I drive to the area I hunted the first three days to check the ground for new tracks. There are none. I drive back to the camper and fry breakfast. There is enough water in the tank for one last shower. I load the truck and break camp. As I drive out of the woods, a rising wind swirls in the tops of trees and ragged clouds race in from the west. |