Around the blue flames of a very hot juniper campfire, we discussed tomorrow’s plan. For Mark and me, we would be focusing on a Section of State Trust Lands while the other two in our group, Lin and Ken, would be heading in the opposite direction from us, in an adjacent Section but still on the Trust Lands. A barbed wire fence would divide our respective hunts and we would drive to that fence line together before heading our separate ways at first light.

After we were all talked out, I pulled my cot over to be nearer the fire while the others headed to their tents. Before long, the sounds of nocturnal bugling bulls mixed with the snores of my sleeping companions. I stayed awake to stare into the stars and listen to the distant hoots of a Great-horned Owl.

Earlier in the evening, Lin had pointed out the Andromeda Galaxy; a mere smudge of dim light not far from one of the points in the Constellation Cassiopeia. The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest neighboring galaxy but you wouldn’t know it from the faintness of its light. When we first looked at it, we used binoculars to better reveal its ancient light waves. Now though, from my cot, I gazed with my naked eyes and saw its light better when I slightly averted my eyes from looking dead-on at the pinky-nail sized galaxy.

Human retinas are comprised of rods and cones (photoreceptor cells) with the rods being responsible for black and white vision and the cones for color vision. The cones are situated in the center of the retina and the rods, along the perimeter. For this reason, if one looks just next to a faint star (or group of stars,) then you can see its light more clearly than if you stare directly at the star -- since the stars in the night sky are primarily a mosaic of black and white.

I guess I was more tired than I knew because, before I knew it, I had fallen into a deep sleep and when I awoke, it was only a couple of hours before our own star, the Sun, was scheduled to rise. I didn’t bother to put any wood on the smoldering embers -- there wouldn’t be time for that. Instead, I switched on my head lamp and walked to my truck so that I could fire up my stove and have a cup of coffee while I donned camouflage apparel and checked my pack for all the gear I might need on the morning hunt. 

Soon, we were all piling into the two trucks to make the short drive to where Mark and Ken would begin the morning’s hunt. It was still dark when we arrived at our destination and, while we unloaded our gear, we listened to two bulls -- each off in the same general westerly direction -- in what sounded like a call to battle. Because the bulls sounded like they were heading in our direction, we spread out along the north-south fence line in the hope that a few cows might come our way ahead of the enraged bulls.

The bugling had reached a fever pitch and the bulls were quite near when the earliest light revealed movement in the junipers about 50 yards southwest of where I stood at the fence. I waved for Mark to come toward me and, before he reached me, we caught a glimpse of a one of the big bulls, thrashing his antlers against one of the junipers. The junipers were thick so we could only see the bull’s head but we knew he was of good size, given the six points on each side of his broad rack.

As the dawn ever-so-slowly brightened, my attention was drawn from the bull to further down the southern fence line where a bit of peripheral motion had caught my eye. It was a cow and she was preparing to leave the cover of the junipers and make a dash to the east. First though, she would have to hop the fence and just as she made her move, Mark -- now standing quite nearby -- saw another cow that was already crossing the fence a bit further south.

Things had happened fast and Mark had not had time to draw a bead on either cow -- both of whom, having detected us, had quickly made their way over the barbed-wire and had slipped into the thick junipers on our side of the fence. We walked to where the first cow had crossed the fence and I pulled a tuft of tawny elk hair from one of the barbs. We shook our heads and returned our attention to the bull we had partially seen moments ago. He was still making a racket in the trees but was no longer visible to us. Meanwhile, the other bull, sometime during all the excitement, had also hopped the fence and was now bugling from behind us, off in the dense stand of junipers and presumably out ahead of the two cows who had made the crossing.

We waited for a while to see if any other elk were going to cross the fence but none did. As we walked back toward Ken and Lin to discuss plans prior to splitting up, we could hear that the one bull, the one that we had partially seen, was moving away from us, back to the west and in the direction Mark and I would be heading once we had touched-base with our friends.

After re-grouping and reiterating plans (Lin and Ken heading due east; Mark and I heading due west), we split up. Mark and I belly-crawled below the lowest wire of the fence --each, in turn, pulling the bottom wire up for the other to scoot beneath -- and picked our way through the dense junipers with the two bulls still trading calls: one fading off into the east; the other’s fading off to the west. It was the latter bull that we followed and soon, we would have the rising sun directly at our backs. At this point, the breeze was imperceptible and probably wouldn’t be a factor.

In addition to the bulls, we could also now hear a freight-train leaning on its horn as it rolled along the Gallup-Holbrook stretch of track. A pack of coyotes, seemingly inspired by the train’s horn, also commenced to howling. As there were a total of 75 tags sold for elk in this unit during this hunt, I suspected the coyotes also knew that the prospects for their dining on elk gut-piles left by human hunters was an increasingly likely proposition.

The train whistle and coyote howls continued, off and on, over the next few hours but the bulls stopped bugling about an hour after sunup. Mark and I followed what we figured were the big bull’s tracks but we never did see him again. Eventually, there were so many fresh tracks weaving through the junipers that we merely opted to keep the sun at our backs and hope to either sneak up on a cow or spook one up such that Mark had time to get off a shot. This would be tricky, given the high density of junipers.

About 10 a.m., we decided the time had come to head back in the direction of the trucks. We would take a different route back, hoping to cut fresh sign but our hopes were fading as the sun crept along its southerly trajectory. I think over the course of a human lifetime, most hunters have both experienced and heard accounts of innumerable successful elk hunts. Invariably, the vast majority of those experiences and accounts have documented that most kills occur within the first four hours, or the last two hours, of daylight.

That said, there are enough exceptions to this rule that most of the hunters I know never let their guards down and will walk as quietly and as attentively at high noon as they do at any other hour of the day. Such was the case for Mark, who led the way as we slowly picked our route back to the trucks. Perhaps, because we moved stealthily -- at one point -- not more than 50 yards ahead and to my left, a fully-grown bobcat was on the prowl and was moving in the same direction as Mark and I.

Because the bobcat was both upwind and slightly downhill, he wasn’t perceiving us with any of his keen senses. I also suspect that he was on the trail of potential prey and was totally absorbed in the process of catching a glimpse of whatever it was he was hunting out ahead of him. Mark sensed that I had stopped and turned around to check. I silently pointed in the direction of the bobcat and Mark instantly saw what it was that I was watching.

That old bobcat would have kept going forward out ahead of us if, after a minute or two, I hadn’t decided to make a kissing noise in an attempt to mimic the sound of a squeaking rodent. The “squeak” immediately caught his attention but he appeared confused as to where it was coming from and what was making the sound. The cat’s gaze searched in vain for the source of sporadic squeaking, which I judiciously kept to a minimum.

We were privileged to have a sweetly long look at the muscular cat -- his coat a mix of spots and stripes set on a background pelage that ranged from buff to brown and with a swath of rufous coloring on his flanks and sides. Eventually though, he figured out who and where the unnatural noise was coming from and suddenly, in his flash of awareness, dashed off into deeper cover and on out of sight. Still, it was a much, much better look than one usually gets of these phantom cats.

When we got back to the trucks, we radioed our friends to check their status and they informed us they would be back to the trucks within the half hour as they were currently heading our way and did not feel confident that they would spot an elk en route. We decided to wait for them and busied ourselves with re-organizing gear and eating snacks.

Lin and Ken returned tired but positive, just like Mark and me, and we traded details of our respective hunts. All agreed that this same area was the place in which to focus the afternoon’s effort although I reminded them that once we got back to camp that I would need to pack up and head for home.

Back at camp, we had lunch and said our good-byes. They were optimistic about their prospects and said they would text me once they filled the tags. Given what I had seen during my brief tenure as part of the team, I had no doubt that they stood a good chance of harvesting two cows.

I drove off down the 15 miles of dirt road that would take me back to the highway that eventually runs through St. Johns and onward back to Pinetop. Along the dirt road, I counted two Kestrels and one Red-tailed Hawk, all three perched on power lines and presumably looking for a careless critter that could become their lunch.

When I settled in back at home, it didn’t take long for things to get hectic. I didn’t forget about my friends’ hunts but I also didn’t get a chance to contact them for quite some time. When I did, I learned that both Ken and Mark had filled their tags. Apparently, when Lin had tried to text me photos from the hunt, they had not gone through, though Lin had not known that at the time. I had neglected to inform him that my ancient flip phone can’t receive text and photo files of any size but it was no matter. Once we learned where the lines got fouled, he simply sent the photos from the hunt to my email account. When I finally got around to seeing those pictures, it was an assemblage of images of beautiful country, filled with elusive elk; two of which were not elusive enough and, as a result, would be put to good use on a few tables in Yuma and Phoenix.