I moved to Montana to hunt elk in wild country, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to most unless you consider the true prize, a year-round supply of ancient, perfected protein to fuel the body and mind. Naturally, I soon met others with the same intentions, and one of the first was Adam. Unlike me, Adam didn’t care much for hunting deer, antelope, or upland birds. In the fall, he was devoted to the single purpose of hunting elk, and the tougher the country, the better. That’s how we ended up in the same elk camps together and I quickly realized that I had met my match. Adam was gung-ho incarnate. I trained all year for elk season; stupid stuff like marathons, half-marathons, and lunges. He worked hard and played hard, turning abandoned wood into masterpiece homes, running wild rivers and racing dirt bikes and snowmobiles through the mountains. No matter how hard I prepared I could never keep pace with him in the steep timber and eventually gave up trying. I judged my own conditioning on just being able to keep him in view.
We lost Adam in the spring of 2016, and the following elk season, I had every intention of spending it alone, paying respect to his spirit by hunting half as hard as he did. I returned to the last place that we had bowhunted together, where I had the initial sense that, at 40 years old, still tough as cow bone but clearly in physical pain, my friend was heading down a mysterious path. His ghost was with me every step and I realized that spending this joyous season choking back tears of reflection and regret was not what he would have wanted, so I pulled myself together for rifle season, reached out to an old friend of mine, and accepted a generous offer to join his camp.
During the last week of the season, on a beautiful late fall day, with the Madisons aglow, we maneuvered 4-wheelers down a churned-up two track. Despite the fact that the ATVs replaced pickups as the vehicle to get us into camp, where we would hunt on foot right outside the canvas door, I chuckled as I imagined Adam’s infectious cackle resonating from the dark timber. The two of us would poke fun at any outfit on the highway with an ATV in tow, and noted how “butt bumpers” and elk antlers never seemed to ride in the same rig together. As soon as he left me unsupervised, my first act was to jump on a wheeler and ride into elk country.
We put meat in the freezer on that hunt and I had found a new fire to stoke during rifle season, but the following year, our daughter arrived and an extended hunt wasn’t an option for me. Fortunately, I drew a local cow tag and a friend of mine, who knew the unit well, took me on an afternoon hunt that turned out to be all the time that I would need to invest. Based on his additional intel, and the keen eyes and situational awareness of another friend of mine, I filled my bull tag the following Saturday and was home that evening. Elk had never come so easily and I rode this tailwind, which I sensed had to be generated by my late friend’s spirit, back to the deep timber camp.
Last year, I followed fresh elk tracks over manageable deadfall (“low hurdles” in a patch of “North Idaho Timber” in the parlance of elk camp). I don’t know why I stopped in my tracks at that moment. I’d been thinking of how Adam and I would have approached this hunt. He would’ve split left or right and tracked one of the bulls, likely to the elk’s doom, and I would’ve taken the other. We would now be in this together, a manageable task for two long-legged goons immersed in deadfall. But as the tines manifested just 20 or so yards to my left, the bull must’ve realized, too late, when my footfalls subsided, that I was not his traveling companion. When the shooting stopped, he stood there a moment and took one final look at his home, before toppling over in a mass of downed trees.
Years ago, Adam and I were high up on a ridgeline during an inclement bow hunt. We gazed down into an abyss of burned timber, listening to the pines sigh in a gale, when he uttered words that I will never forget “this place is like the darkness in the back of our minds”. He smiled at me and laughed, and I knew what he meant. Perhaps, in the end, had he spent more time in these woods smiling at the darkness, he’d still be with us, but maybe, like the great bull on the ground searching for his wayward companion, circumstances had left him alone and in the wrong place at the wrong time. I prefer to think that it was just his time to go, and he was sending me a gift from the other side. “Stop, Brother, look around.”
The elk may be glad that Adam is gone, but I am still here and intend to pass on everything gained from our friendship to my children. In our little circle, Adam’s spirit lives on, and we will carry it with us on the autumn wind, when it’s time to lace em’ up and put boots to fine, rugged country.
