Took my buddy to Colorado for his first elk hunt, second big game hunt ever. On the trip from CA to Colorado a cold sets in on him and by Utah he’s sick as a dog. We stop and go to Walmart for meds and a library to print off Mapquest directions to hospitals along our route. He carved out a little coffin in the back of my 89 bronco and went to sleep.
Get to CO and set up camp, I’m legitimately worried and want to take him back to town to at the very least get a hotel but more likely be near medical assistance. He flatly refuses and we make dinner and watch a storm roll in. It was 70 and sunny while we made camp, that night it rained then snowed about 6” on top. Everything froze solid, get up on the opener and drive to our hunting spot. He decides, probably smartly, to stay in my bronco and “glass” I take off for my glassing spot and get settled in. Shooting starts popping off and a small herd runs into the bowl I’m watching, they take the draw leading up to me and I kill a nice bull. It’s only about 400 yards from the truck, tag and gut the bull and walk back to the truck. Tell him I have a bull down and he immediately lights up, he basically ran back to the bull and took his time just being in awe of how big a bull elk is. We snap some film photos and record on his vhs camcorder some scenes of the processing. It takes a bunch of trips getting the meat out on a Milsurp pack and a pack frame he borrowed. It was the longest 400 yards ever, the snow was over the top of frozen rain so there was a layer of ice under the snow. We must have fallen 20 times. He never wavered or let on how bad he was hurting. It was around 2 when we made our last trip and we were sitting on my tailgate game planning how to fill his cow tag when we heard some shooting on the private property below us.
I see 12-15 elk running this canyon and I have a fair idea where they’re heading. We haul azz up this road and I pull off the road and we jog about 15 yards to overlook this draw I think they’ll use and sure enough they are jamming right up this draw. They start filtering through a stand of quakies and a spike pops out and pauses, a small cow runs right into him and pushes him up, earlier I hadn’t seen any bulls so I say if the next one’s a cow and she stops in that clearing take her. A huge cow, still the largest life ever seen, runs the clearing and he smacks her on the run about 175 yards. She runs about 70 yards and dies in the middle of the 2 track road. We drove right to her and processed her right from the ground to the back of my bronco. Smiles for miles, despite the pneumonia he ended up coming down with. I lost those photos and video about 20 years ago and lost him a few years ago to a drunk driver.
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