The first shot boomed just as I was leaving my camper on opening day of elk season. I looked at my watch: Shooting wouldn’t be legal for another 15 minutes. 
  As I walked through the dark woods toward the spot I’d picked to watch for elk, a spot very close to where the first shot had sounded, I wondered how the idiot who’d fired it could see what he was shooting at. It turned out he couldn’t. 
  The Colockum elk area between Ellensburg and Wenatchee is more like a turkey shoot than hunting. The herd lives in the Stan Coffin preserve but comes out at night and, when shooting starts, returns to the preserve along fairly predictable routes. 
  General hunting is restricted to spike bulls, young males with simple, unbranched antlers. It is difficult to tell the difference between a legal spike elk with branches, if any and if more than one, under one inch long and an elk with more than one branch more than one inch long. In pre-legal light, even with binoculars or a rifle scope, it’s almost impossible. 
  There are a few “hunters” (it debases the honorable term to refer to these people by it) who shoot anything that looks about right, and if it is not a legal animal, they simply walk away and try again. Most often it is a careless mistake rather than reckless intent, but that is no excuse. 
  That first shot on opening day, the one I heard 15 minutes before legal light, killed an illegal elk. 
  I happened upon the scene an hour or so later when I saw two game wardens and a hunter in a pickup truck slowly making its way past me along a remnant of road. When it stopped not far from me, I walked over to see what was up. 
  The hunter with the wardens told the story again for my benefit as we all lifted the carcass of the 2-by-2 bull into the truck. 
  He’d been in the edge of the trees beside a large meadow with several other hunters who knew elk were likely to be passing through on their way back to the reserve. 
  As the hunting hour approached and the cloudy sky began to lighten, a small herd in the meadow became visible. 
  The shooter couldn’t wait. In the dim light, he killed an elk that would have been illegal regardless of the clock. There were two legal bulls in the herd he couldn’t identify in the darkness. 
  The shooter and the hunter who reported him walked over to the dead elk with a few other hunters. The shooter tried unsuccessfully to cut off the offending extra antler point with his knife.  
  The other hunter told the shooter to do what he wanted, but that he was going to report the incident to the game department. 
  The shooter said he’d just gut the animal and leave it. He did, so at least the meat did not have to be wasted. 
  The man who reported the incident gave the wardens the best description of the shooter he could, given the dim light at the time. The shooter had mentioned he is from Moses Lake. 
  While we loaded the carcass into the wardens’ truck, I said it’s too bad the Wildlife department doesn’t have an auxiliary program like a sheriff or police auxiliary, hunters willing to take some training and spend some time helping the understaffed wardens keep an eye on things. 
  Maybe sloppy hunters would stick closer to the law if they knew that the guy behind the next tree might have some official standing. 
  One of the wardens said they couldn’t do that. Liability problems. 
  I said something laced with profanity about insurance companies and our legal system ruining the country. 
  And I thought of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg referring to this government of, by, and for the people. He said people. He didn’t say anything about insurance and liability.