Jack O’Connor Shoots Record-Book Elk

O’Connor and his bull elk, spotted in a sky-high basin. “At 12,000 feet,” wrote O’Connor, “bulls still come big where Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody hunted 50 years ago.” Outdoor Life

DURING THE MIDDLE of the night something awakened me, and for a moment I thought I was back in Tanganyika listening to the dawn roaring of lions. But in seconds my consciousness spun me back.

The interlaced branches above were not thorn or fever trees of Africa, but American fir and spruce. The chattering brook and clean, resinous scent of frosty mountain air told me I was in Wyoming. The noise was only the snoring of my amigo Fred Huntington, whose thunderous slumbering earlier had driven me to seek sleep under the early-October brilliance of mountain stars.

Fred, who owns a gun and die shop in Oroville, Calif., weighs 265 pounds and is a prodigious eater. He’s also a gun nut and a nice guy.

Now that his snores were softened, I could hear the wilderness around me. The brook talked to itself gently as it danced over its bed of stones and the softest of breezes sighed through the fir and spruce. Downstream a lone coyote burst into a sudden ecstasy of yips and barks, and on the other side of camp a hobbled horse groaned wearily between mouthfuls of grass.

Then the elk opened up. First a little bull gave a thin whistle that might have been made by a bird. Then an old-timer hoarse with years bugled like a braying donkey. For a few minutes bulls were bugling all through the pine-clad canyon. Quickly I learned to distinguish the bugles of individual bulls. One of them, a fellow not more than 300 yards up the side of the canyon, made a noise like a burlesque comedian jabbed with a pin—ueooow. I could almost imagine him grabbing his pants and leaping into the air while the audience roared with laughter. I’ve heard elk bugle in many areas—on Arizona’s Mogollon Plateau, in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole, in Idaho’s Selway and Salmon River countries—but never had I heard anything like the wilderness symphony in the Wyoming Rockies outside of Cody.

The elk were still bugling when I dropped off to sleep again. When I awakened, the camp was gray with dawn and Les Bowman, our outfitter, was building a fire in the tent where Fred still slept.

After a late start the day before, Les, Fred, and I had ridden into this camp at Cut Coulee from Les’s ranch down on the South Fork of the Shoshone, arriving in time to cook a hasty meal before we piled into bed.

“There’s a spot I want you to see,” Les had told me—“a series of basins above timberline, about 12,000 feet. It’s been warm and the elk have been hanging out in the timber, but now that it’s turned cool they may have gone up on the ridges again. If they have, we’ll really see some elk; if not, we’ll have wasted a few days. It’s worth a gamble.”

The area off the South Fork has always been great elk country—and good bear, sheep, and grizzly country too. Half a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt hunted there with Buffalo Bill Cody, for whom Cody, Wyo., was named. The site of their base camp lay about two miles from where we spent the night.

Next morning we climbed to those basins. They were about 3,500 feet above us over a rough and almost vertical trail. As our horses labored up, the air grew thinner and cooler and the trees more stunted. Finally our little cavalcade crawled over the last rockslide, then scrambled up a narrow trail by a big bluff. We were right at timberline now at an elevation where the whitebark pine grows in open groves that look like gnarled and neglected orchards.

In the Wyoming Rockies timberline is about 11,000 feet above sea level and the ridge to which we struggled was a bit above that. We dropped down to a dark draw, then on and up to a grassy ridge. Before us lay an enormous canyon with darkly timbered draws and long ridges golden brown with frost-cured grass. Around lay more bare ridges and beyond them jagged snow-capped peaks.

As we glassed the country, we heard the thin, piping whistle of a young bull elk below us, and we saw a cow walk slowly across the open grass from one little tongue of purple timber to the next.

The north wind was clean and cold and frosty, driving the cold right through my jacket, shirt, and long underwear. It made my ears sting and my eyes water.

“You stay up here on the ridge and watch,” Les told Fred. “It’s time for the elk to start coming out of the timber to graze. You may see a nice one. Jack and I will look into some of the high basins farther on.”

We left Fred on the ridge. Not far away we saw four elk on a grassy hillside. One was a spike bull. To their left was a jagged, rocky outcrop. We decided to climb it and look them over in case there was a good bull we hadn’t seen. But there wasn’t, so we left them untroubled.

Beyond us was a peak rising from another ridge. Right then we must have been at least 12,000 feet above sea level and in a patch of the arctic in Wyoming—snow and rockslides and dead grass and lichens. Except that the country was dryer, even dusty in some spots, it looked much like the big basins in northern British Columbia where I had hunted the great mountain caribou.

My sins and years weighed heavily upon me as I labored in the thin air up this rocky ridge to look into the basin beyond, but when we got there the sight was worth our labors. In this basin above timberline were about 50 elk—cows, calves, young bulls, great patriarchs with six-point antlers tipped with ivory. Each bull had his own harem. Apparently the question of which cow belonged to whom had been settled during the battles of September, for now they mingled peacefully. Some of the big bulls were lying down. Others were grazing. Even the younger bulls that had not collected cows seemed content simply to rest or eat.

Hungrily I watched the big herd bulls as I lay there on my belly in the shale and slide rock. I could see four six-pointers in the basin. Any would make a fine trophy, but two of the heads were more massive, had longer points.

Les punched me as I was looking them over.

“Let’s go around this point and come out on the ridge over there. We’ll still be a long way from the best bulls, but we’ll be a couple of hundred yards closer.”

We edged down the slide and got aboard our weary horses, rode around the peak, and tied them to stones below the point we planned to climb. Then we ran into more elk. We’d just left the horses when we saw a cow in a basin to our right. Cautiously we crawled around the hillside until we could look right into the basin. There we saw at least 15 other elk, among them a big six-pointer.

We glassed him for a moment, then Les turned to me. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I’d like to get a closer look.”

“All right, get as close as you want and glass him good. You probably know as much about elk heads as I do. I might want to get one of the big fellows in the first basin for myself, so I’ll wait up top until I hear you shoot. Then I’ll open up.”

There was no cover, so I left my camera and binocular case on the grass. Then I strapped my rifle over my back, took my binoculars in hand, and crawled toward the little herd. Every time an elk looked my way I froze; when they all had their heads down I inched forward. Now and then I glassed the bull again.

When I got within 300 yards of him, I began to have my doubts about shooting him. His antlers had fine length, but the points were short and the head as a whole was light. Then, as if to help me get another look, he trotted 100 yards or so toward me, then stopped by a patch of the low evergreen shrubs. There he turned broadside and began to graze. I could tell then that I didn’t want him. So I snaked my way back for several hundred yards until I could get out of sight behind the ridge. As I started to climb up to meet Les, I saw him coming down.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Afraid that bull will eat you if you shoot at him?”

“More I saw of his head, the less I liked it,” I told him. “Antlers too thin.”

When we got on top I found that the first elk we had seen were still undisturbed. I walked over to where I could look back at the basin I had just left. The thin-antlered bull was still grazing by the patch of shrubs. The wind continued bitter and chill. Above us a great eagle flapped his wings ponderously in the polished blue sky, labored hard, got nowhere.

Keeping concealed behind the rocks, I dropped around to the left to find out if there were any elk I hadn’t seen from below. There were behind a point that had hidden them from me when I was making the stalk. Half a dozen or so were cows, but with them was the finest bull I ever laid eyes on. I put the glass on him, and the more I looked the nicer he seemed. His massive six-point antlers were deep brown, tipped with ivory, wide of spread, and many-pointed.

“See that guy below?” I said to Les. “I take!”

The great bull was about 300 yards away and below me, quartering slightly away. Since the elk were not alarmed and I had lots of time, I sat down, got into a perfectly easy and comfortable sitting position, and took aim. The bullet drove down through the lungs and broke the far shoulder.

Then the little .270 went off. The bullet, pushed out at around 3,000 feet per second, plunked into the elk, knocking off hair right where the crosshairs had rested. The bull staggered, and as I worked the bolt to get off another shot Les yelled, “He’s going down.”

Slowly the bull slumped to his knees. Then his great antlered head dropped to the ground, and he rolled over.

He was a grand elk, with a head well up in the record class. As Les and I dressed him out, the sun was plunging rapidly. Its slanting rays still fell on our peak, but below us we could see the shadows creeping up out of the canyons, spreading up the mountainsides. Remembering the trail we’d come up, I was anxious to get started down. We almost ran to the spot where we had left our horses, and we trotted them over to where Fred waited.

The trip we three made down that trail is something I’ll not soon forget. By the time we dropped off the ridge it was dark, and when we hit the timber it was so black that most of the time I couldn’t see Fred’s light-gray horse a few feet in front of me. For a while I tried to walk and lead my horse. I stumbled over boulders, got off the trail, fell on my face, and once strayed within inches of a precipice with a creek directly below me. I decided then to get back on my horse and trust his cat’s eyes and stout legs to get me to camp. Many times I got whacked by limbs, and a sharp twig cut my nose. Part of the time Les used a flashlight with expiring batteries, and once it showed that we were off the trail and trying to scramble down a cliff a couple of hundred feet high.

Finally, though, we hit a familiar grassy flat, then the trail, and we were crossing the Cut Coulee bridge and could see the palely luminescent tents of our camp.

Since we’d found the basins full of elk, Les and I felt bad about leaving Fred up on the saddle. He’d seen a good many elk while he waited, he told us, and a couple of very respectable bulls he could have shot. However, they were far below in the timber and killing any of them would have made us too late in getting off the mountain.

We worried a little about Fred as we started up to skin and quarter my bull and to bring out the meat. We hoped Fred could get one.

We were winding through the timber not over a mile from camp when a mule-deer buck popped up on a knoll. Fred got off his horse, took his .35 Magnum out of the scabbard, and shot the buck. It ran 50 or 60 yards and piled up.

We took the insides out of this buck and laid the carcass across a log. We’d pick him up on the way back. But before we had ridden a quarter of a mile, Les and I, who were in the lead, saw a big bull elk. With his antlers laid along his back, he came trotting out of trees to our right. He didn’t seem frightened, only a bit annoyed and curious.

I turned toward Fred, who was riding behind me. “Elk!” I whispered hoarsely. “Big bull.”

Fred grabbed his .35 Magnum, charged up to the firing line, and shot that accommodating old bull right through the neck. That was that—a buck deer and a bull elk in two shots within 400 yards of each other.

When at last we got up in those great empty basins more than two miles above the sea, we must have seen 30 or 40 more elk, some of them big bulls like those we’d shot. When they were hunting that country 50 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill knew what they were doing.

This story, “Top Shelf Elk,” originally ran in the February 1955 issue. Read more OL+ stories.

This story, “Top Shelf Elk,” originally ran in the February 1955 issue. Read more OL+ stories.