Hunters bag rich memories

I‘m just back from elk camp and trying to salvage what’s left of the rest of my life.

My hunting partner, Dick Rivers, vowed to stay a few days longer in the jungle of northeastern Washington. There are roughly 650 skeletal muscles in the human body and he said two or three of them weren’t aching, yet. So he thought he’d keep tracking elk until he hurt all over.

As a masochist, he’s always been an overachiever.

In the best-case scenario, he bags an elk and gives me a call today and I go back to help him pack out 400 pounds of de-boned meat and then both of us ache thoroughly from head to toe – for weeks.

And, as any elk hunter knows, it would hurt good.

We’ve been trying our luck at the muzzleloader season, which theoretically coincides with the tail end of the rut. But if there’s a bull in Pend Oreille County with enough residual hormonal activity to trigger any desire in trotting over to find out who’s bugling, we didn’t find him.

“It would help if you weren’t putting the bugle into your mouth upside down,” Rivers pointed out. I’d made the somewhat creative call after we’d started in the dark Saturday and hiked more than an hour uphill to where we finally got into elk sign.

My hunting partner does not realize the handicap I must endure, living with a wife who insisted that elk bugling practice had to be postponed until our daughter had fully prepared for her upcoming violin audition.

“Bugling doesn’t go well with Mahler,” she said. “And wait a minute – did you use the hose from my new rug shampooer to make that stupid elk call?”

I’m not making this up.

But blowing that first call on the new bugle in a tone that is not found anywhere in the natural world was actually a good thing. We had climbed high into the crisp, clean air of the Colville National Forest, working up a good sweat stumbling over downfall and clawing through brush, and now we could relax. The pressure was off for the morning.

Knowing that any discriminating elk would be racing at full speed toward the Idaho border, we could sit on stumps and read our books without fear of being interrupted by something worth putting in the freezer.

Of course, we were distracted anyway. That’s one of the reasons we keep hunting. There’s never a dull moment.

First, much of the countryside is drop-dead gorgeous and at a high point in fall color even though the larch are still two weeks from their golden peak.

A three-toed woodpecker clamped onto a tree just 10 yards from my stand one morning and whacked at six square feet of bark for 10 solid minutes. I have a headache just thinking about it. A hairy woodpecker swooped in and scared it off, or the feeding frenzy might have gone on much longer.

Rivers whiled away the middle of the day on another ridge calling in a barred owl.

“If owls had antlers, we’d be packing out meat,” he said.

As we hiked into yet another hunting area, we froze upon seeing a pair of coyotes coming in our direction. They scurried about sniffing and hunting 40 yards in front of us before sensing trouble and vanishing.

Mushrooms were bursting from the forest floor, nourished by this week’s rainfall.

A chestnut-backed chickadee brushed my cheek with its wings.

Seeing a pair of bobcats was a first for both of us.

Three mule deer were standing by my pickup when we hiked out of the woods after a full day and God knows how many calories expended in the luckless pursuit of the elusive elk.

When I returned to the office, I found an e-mail from Bob Legasa, an Idaho bowhunter who had compiled images of his successful hunt in the Panhandle. I noticed several peculiar things:

•Legasa and his companions look happy. This is highly suspicious. I suggest their wives check their credit card statements to make sure there isn’t a bunch of charges made in Las Vegas. You can’t really look happy after bagging an elk unless you shoot it on a hillside and it rolls down into the back of your pickup.

•In the hero shot, Legasa is holding the antlers of his big bull in what appears to be a pasture. There’s grass but no brush. I never found a hint of elk sign this week until I bulldozed my way into 6-foot-high thickets false azalea and vine alders thick enough to hide a battleship.

Apparently the archers, who get the earliest season, kill all the dumb bulls before the lowly muzzleloaders get their chance in the field.

I’m just starting to add up the expenses for this year’s elk camp, a task that was startling even in the days when we drank cheap beer and gas was a measly $1.50 a gallon.

A week in Vegas might be cheaper, but certainly not something I’d look forward to doing every year.