Between them, sun and frost and mountain air have made the woods dry as a chip and crisp as a biscuit. The woodland solitudes are more noisy than Chinatown at New Year: the leaves rattle like dead men’s bones, and the twigs seem to explode like fire-crackers under your feet.
But it is September; the hunter’s moon has begun, and now and again, just about dawn or towards evening, there is a hollow whistle from the depths of the pine forests, followed by a succession of hoarse choking grunts. This is the love song of the great bull, and for the moment he is careless of rustling leaves and snapped twigs, and, being in love, is as great a fool as a biped under similar circumstances. Nor is love the bull elk’s only excuse for imprudence just now. In summer the great woods are still, but for the hum of insect life; in winter they are still as death; but now, in late autumn, they are full of sounds. Winter is coming, and everything that has breath is busy laying in stores for the approaching snow-time. All day long there is a rattle among the brush as creatures bustle through it; all day long the great fir-cones come thumping down from the pine-tops, while the squirrels who are gathering them chatter and swear at one another with the vigour and bitterness of rivals in business. Chipmunks, engaged in the same work of harvest, skip like long-legged streaks of light along the logs, and the short-tailed grey rats are as busy as either squirrels or chipmunks. As you cross the hillside, your foot sinks deep into the light soil, for the earth is full of little tunnels, and every tunnel is choked with garnered pine-cones; whilst in the high places amongst the rocks you come now and again upon a miniature haystack, neatly cut, and made of dried Alpine flowers and grasses, prepared for winter use by one of Nature’s invisible workers.
As you lie upon the hillside in the warm sun at noon, with the timber all below you and a good day’s work behind you, you will have time to note these things; but just now, though the stars are still visible, you should not be ‘foolin’ around camp’ any longer, if you want to get a shot at a bull before sundown.
It is no good pleading that you have toiled for a fortnight and seen nothing; that your limbs ache, your clothes are torn to rags, and your hands and feet wounded by the beastly dead timber. Such heads as bull elk wear in Colorado can only be earned nowadays by early rising, long patience, and honest hard work; so off with you, while the rime is on the sage brush, in spite of the temptation to stop until Sam has cooked just one rasher of sow-belly. The first crossing of the brook, before you are a hundred yards from camp, will effectually wake you up and make you step out, unless you want to ‘freeze solid,’ for the stepping-stones at this early hour are coated with ice, and neither courage nor caution, neither moccasins, nails, nor even sand, can save you from a cold plunge. Great Cæsar’s ghost! how cold it is; and how warm even the woodland bogs strike after that running water!
Here, within half a mile of your camp, is the first sign of elk; a great wallow made in the marsh late yesterday evening, and running from the wallow is a trail, well beaten, which leads, as you know, by a very circuitous route to that bare patch of red mud where the elk lick for alkali. But we have no time to follow the trail to-day, more especially as the elk seem to leave the lick before dawn. Our hunting-ground is in a belt of burnt timber very near the top of the divide, and to reach it in time we must climb straight up one ridge after another without staying to look for trails and easy places. From camp the belt of timber looks as if it lay upon a smooth, gently rising hillside. Once within it, you learn that the belt is composed of densely timbered ridges rising one behind another like waves in a choppy sea, and as you toil through and over these ridges, you wish, if you are an ordinary man, that you had never heard of elk.
Everywhere the trees crowd one another for light and breathing room, but so long as they are standing (unless they are young green pines) a man may walk at ease among them. It is when fire and wind have swept through them and left them in chaotic tangles upon the ground that the trouble begins. Then it is that the elk hunter has to rival the squirrel or Blondin, tacking from point to point along the pine logs, now straining every muscle to get a grip on the slippery trunk of a pine which offers a bridge uphill across the prone carcases of its fellows, now manfully suppressing an oath as his feet slip and he sits down inadvertently upon the ‘business end’ of a rampike.
For an hour, perhaps, or two, there is little or no change in your work. Your road may lie through dense green timber at one moment, through half-lit mossy glades at another, and the next through hollows full of burnt timber, amongst which the elk tracks are thick, and the pink fire-flower blooms; but it is always uphill work, and almost always in places where still hunting is impossible. Now and again there is something to cheer you up and encourage you to make fresh exertions. Now it is a great track like a deer’s, but larger and blunter; now it is the stem of a young quaking asp with its bark hanging in ribbons, which makes your heart beat quicker; or perhaps it is only the freshly nibbled buds of a young elder bush. There is no doubt that there are elk about, and a good many of them, and as you stretch in vain to reach the scars upon the quaking asp, you realise that there are big bulls among them; but what is the use of the biggest bull if you are never to see him within two hundred yards? Once to-day you heard a bough break several hundred yards below you, and a few minutes later you saw the warm lair from which an elk had stolen away; but you never saw him, never even heard him, until he was well out of range.
‘Hang the luck!’ you mutter; in another hour the wind that rises about noon will get up and then the odds will be doubled against you. Will the luck never change? Well, yes. Just as you are deciding for the twentieth time that you never will hunt elk again, there is a long hollow whistle among the pines below you. The whistle is faint and far off, and if you had not been sitting down and at rest you would never have heard it. You have, as a matter of fact, failed to hear two or three similar whistles during the morning—whistles which a better woodsman would have heard, and which even you would never have missed had you taken Sam’s advice and gone slow, ‘settin’ down once in a while to listen.’
You are not likely to see a motionless stag when you are scrambling through the brush, or to hear a bull’s stealthy tread upon the trail, or his distant call, whilst you are forcing your way through a barricade of burnt timber.
Well, luck, which after all counts for more in hunting than all the skill and experience of the best hunter—luck has favoured you at last, and there the whistle comes again, and directly after it another, followed this time by deep, hoarse grunts, so deep and hoarse and so close to you that, as Sam puts it, ‘your hair almost lifts your cap off your head.’ That last bull was within five hundred yards of you, and there can be no doubt about his size. Creeping forward, you look cautiously over the brow of a little ridge on to a flat, where amongst the black, burnt stems of the dead pines the tall jungle of fireweed is vivid with every shade from fresh green to royal purple, scarlet, and orange, and even as you look, without a sound, a great head is pushed out from a bunch of quaking asp. For what seems to you an age the cow stares straight at you, and then, when you are almost in despair, moves quietly into the open followed by her calf. In another moment the bull appears on the cow’s trail, without any display of that caution shown by her. There are others, you think, still in the timber, and a gleam of brown moving between the pine stems convinces you that you are right; but there is no doubt that this is the master bull of the herd, and you fairly catch your breath at the sight of his vast antlers.