Into The Wild

Hunting in the wilderness is of all pastimes the most attractive, and it's doubly so when not carried on as merely a pastime. Shooting over a private game preserve is, of course, not to be compared to it. The wilderness hunter must not only show skill in the use of the rifle and address in finding and approaching game, but he must also show the qualities of hardihood, self-reliance, and resolution needed for effectively grappling with his wild surroundings.

Although Theodore Roosevelt inked those words in 1893, they perfectly capture the sentiments of modern hunters captivated by the unique appeal of matching wits with game in areas untrammeled by human development. Sitting with the backside of my wool pants frozen to a handy rock in Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness a few seasons back, a friend and I were experiencing the same emotions that pulsed in the heart of America's twenty-sixth president.

Though the thermometer read but five degrees on the blinking sign at a lone bank in a tiny hamlet enroute to the trailhead, a snapping fire of dead branches plucked from a fir tree warmed our hands and sent tendrils of mist steaming from my boots and the hem of my britches. Ostensibly hunting a deer for Jeff, at the moment we were simply resting, enthralled with the stunning character of our surroundings. A postcard-perfect coating of snow flocked countless evergreens on the riverbottom, from towering Englemann spruce to perky Douglas firs no taller than the length of the Marlin lever-action that shared my rest on the boulder. Among the evergreens rose shimmering stands of aspens, pale trunks dappled with dark spots, as beautiful in their coating of winter frost as in the fiery, golden leaves of autumn.

Wilderness Misconceptions

Mention the word "wilderness" in a mixed company of hunters and you'll likely provoke a range of reactions. Though the Wilderness Act that preserves federal lands as wilderness with a capital "W" was passed over four decades ago in 1964, many myths and misconceptions persist regarding wilderness areas. Just last season, at my family's elk camp in the Snowcrest Mountains of Montana, a second-cousin worriedly told me that a proposal was afoot to designate most of the area we hunt as wilderness. "They're going to lock it up," he insisted, having bought the rhetoric pandered by folks who think motorized vehicles ought to run roughshod over all federal lands.

In fact, wilderness areas don't lock up anything. They simply restrict travel to non-motorized and non-wheeled methods with the exception of wheelchairs. Hunters are as welcome as folks who fish, hike, cross-country ski and the like. After listening to my cousin blow his steam, I informed him that a "wilderness" designation wouldn't affect our type of hunting (hiking and horseback) in the least.

Actually, if statistics from other areas hold true, the hunting would only improve--at least from the standpoint of those who wish to match wits with a bull elk whose age matches the number of tines on his antlers or a mule deer buck that's tracked the mountains long enough to acquire nearly twice the body mass of the does he's courting in November.