Call Of The Wild

It should have gone to the other fellow. He was older, gray around ears that stuck out red in the cold under a thick orange hat. I memorized those ears, watching them from behind as he swayed and lurched in the saddle, hour after hour.

That would be my only entertainment for days while exploring Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness. Marshall, its namesake, was a forester so taken with wild places that he is said to have hiked thirty miles a day to immerse himself in them. Though he died young, he saw more of these mountains than have most of the multitudes who now live on their hem.

Only a quest for a bull elk would show you as much of the Bob.

"There! Shoot him!" The wiry young man in the surplus pea jacket sprang off his bay and dashed back to the old man's sway-backed sorrel. He yanked the rifle from its scabbard as the client struggled to swing free of the cantle. I'd hit the ground quickly and flung the reins around a lodgepole. As hunter and guide scrambled to a stump, I saw the bull. He was standing, stone-still, on a slide between thick stringers of lodgepole. A deep cleft in the mountain separated us, but the range was only about 150 yards. He'd been watching our horses.

The man with the red ears had his rifle hard against the stump now. Hunched behind it, he took a long time firing. The elk showed no sign of a hit, but the blast alarmed him. He moved quickly through the jackstraw boles in the slide, angling uphill on a trail that spun from dark timber to the north.

I can't remember threading the sling and dropping prone, but I do recall yanking the trigger. If the safety hadn't been on, I'd have missed as badly as the old man, now bolting another round into his 700.

He wasn't very fast; the elk would beat him. Thumbing the safety, I nudged the crosswire to the shoulder's leading edge and fired as the bull vanished in the 'poles. He didn't even stumble. But the roar of the .338 had the flat finish that engenders hope.

We packed the elk out the next day, in a cold rain that fell like bullets. With no way to get mules across the canyon, we humped quarters into its tangled gut and strained mightily back up, clawing mud the consistency of axle grease. Unrelenting, the deluge pelted the mules as we loaded meat. A jenny fidgeted, slipped. A rope caught under a tail. Suddenly, canvas and mule hooves filled the air. Packs burst open in the river that had replaced our trail. Quarters skidded down the slope into the canyon's muddy black maw.

Such was my introduction to the Bob.

More than a decade has passed, but I recall that trip as our pack-train snakes along trails cutting through mustard aspens. This route, in the cradle of the Blackfoot, will take us fourteen miles past road's end to a canvas camp in the shadow of the Continental Divide. Maybe I'll see more than one elk.