Bagging an elk is nice, but hunting is about so much more than harvesting game.

“This year, I’m holding out for a bull,” Ronald exclaimed as he and Jim assembled the wall tent.

“You say that every year,” Jim smirked.

It was second season and they both had burned a lot of preference points to draw these tags. The weather had been fair; a little too hot, to be honest. Both had made every preparation in advance for their three-day soirée and felt ready to go.

On opening morning Jim and Ron split up to cover more territory. They had either-sex elk tags, so any elk they found would be fair game.

When Ron made it back for lunch, there was no sign of Jim. He became especially concerned when he couldn’t raise his old friend on the radio. After wolfing down a sandwich, he tracked him southwest, deep into the steep, timbered country.

After two hours of searching, he was relieved to find his friend alive but with a twisted ankle. The batteries in Jimmy’s radio had gone dead. Upon fashioning a crutch, Ron and Jim slowly progressed back to camp. About a mile from camp it began to rain. Not a downpour, but the wind made it miserably cold.

At camp Ron made a fire and prepped a simple dinner as Jim rested and did what little he could to care for the ankle. While they were gone, some kind of rodent had made its way into their tent and had bitten holes in their air mattresses, deflating them. Ron’s .284 was soaked from the rain, but a little Hoppe’s No. 9 gun oil by the campfire light and it was in ship shape once again. After eating, they put out the Coleman lantern and hit the sack.

The next morning Jim decided to stay in camp and give his ankle a rest. Ron packed a sandwich and ventured out alone. He saw some huge mule deer bucks and a bighorn ram but no elk. A grouse flushing from its cover nearly gave him a heart attack. Back at camp that night he and Jim reminisced about the old days as they played cards and enjoyed some of Jim’s legendary dutch oven peach cobbler.

That night it rained and blew hard. Either the rainfly got loose or it developed a leak because both men awakened soaking wet, bobbing in their sleeping bags like soggy marshmallows in the bottom of their water-filled tent. Around 2 a.m. the storm quit and they spent nearly until daylight drying out their clothes, boots and sleeping bags by the campfire. It was a miserable night.

Jim still wasn’t feeling 100% but decided to hobble out of camp to make one last hunt as the trip drew to a close. As he neared the crest of the ridge the rising sun seemed to shine extra brightly off of a buckskin-colored rock lying just up the trail, maybe 50 or 60 yards ahead. A closer look at the rock through his Leupold scope revealed that it was no rock at all but a nice, fat cow elk bedded down, looking the opposite direction. Shouldering his rifle with a hasty sling around his left arm, he took careful aim and fired.

Ronny, still in his clammy bedroll trying to catch up on lost sleep from the night before, jerked awake at the report of Jim’s .30-06. An excited voice over the radio told him he needed to get his boots and packboard on. At the end of the day they had elk meat hanging in camp and dined on tenderloin and eggs.

Although they were sad that they had to go back to their regular lives in the morning, they had once again gotten to feel the fall air, smell the campfire smoke, and enjoy the company of a lifelong friendship. The experience, after all, is the whole reason they go hunting. The elk meat is just a bonus or, shall we say, the consolation prize for all the miles walked, ankles twisted and shivering cold and wet nights.

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