Unicorn Hunt

I went to bed with a solid plan for the morning. It all began to unravel the very moment I hit my alarm.

I’d been after elk for the first couple weeks of the season and had no luck. I needed to make a change. It was the middle of the rut, the time when bull elk are fighting with each other for mating rights. Their battle cry is a 3-5 second long, high-pitched scream that is so primal and terrifying it has to be experienced to be believed. If you google up “bull elk bugle,” you’ll think the video is AI generated because you’ll see a massive and intimidating beast let out an incongruously high-pitched wail. It’s like hearing a dairy cow cut loose with a shriek like the Ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings.

But these ludicrous and eerie wails are serious business. Bull elk sport some of the most impressive sets of headgear in the animal kingdom. Each antler is a four-foot long beam with six or seven daggers sprouting out of it, and they’ve got one on each of their head. When two 800-pound animals start slashing those deadly implements together, it’s a sight to behold.

They only do it for a couple weeks in September, and the blood-curdling bugles are how the males tell each other they are going to mate with some females, and they’ll fight anybody who says otherwise.

They’re like cocky young men at the bar on a Saturday night. They’re all hopped up on pheromones, and they can’t endure a challenge to their manhood.

Challenger: Woot, woot! Nice night, eh!? Who feels like gettin’ a little crazy!?

Boss Bull: Just havin’ a quiet night here, pal. Keep movin’.

Challenger: Oh, hey, Pissant. Didn’t see you over there.

Boss Bull: Cuz we didn’t invite you. So get lost.

Challenger: We? Who’s we? Got some ladies up in here?

Boss Bull: You come find out, and you’re gonna get 10 inches of antler straight up your keester.

Challenger: Oh, yeah? So your boyfriend’s got 10 inches, now does he?

Innocent Bystander: And that’s when the fight started, officer.

A bow hunter wants to use his elk calls to be the Challenger in that conversation and make a Boss Bull elk angry enough to come charging in and get an arrow for his troubles. But it’s harder than it sounds.

I can walk into a bar on any given night and get into a brawl using a variation of the script above, but only because I’m a native English speaker. This is a highly nuanced verbal escalation to incite violence:

1.      Hearty but aggressive greeting.

2.      Firm rebuke.

3.      Playful but diminutive insult.

4.      Rejection and banishment.

5.      Implied threat to take something by force.

6.      Promise of violence if provoked again.

7.      Clear provocation and insult to masculinity.

It takes years of listening to elk bugles—and hours of practice at mimicking these bugles—to steadily ratchet up the intensity and draw a champion bull into a brawl.

I’m still a rookie at making bulls mad. I don’t know how to get the insults and challenges just right. When I try to insult bulls, I’m like this friend of mine from high school name Byron. He was this really easy-going, amiable guy who used little to no profanity. But every now and then, we’d manage to needle him into a towering wrath, and he didn’t have the ability to express it. He didn’t lose his cool very often, so he had no skill at stringing together a coherent insult. His angry challenges were mystifying and disjointed because he was so unused to naked aggression.

When I’m out there in the woods trying to challenge bulls, I’m sure I sound like Byron in one of his unintelligible tirades.

Adam: Hey, boob-nuts!! You want a piece of my action!? I’ll tear you a new scrotum, and kick your nipple whiskers right into next Tuesday. Yeah, you heard me!

Two bulls within earshot:

Elk #1: What’s his damage?

Elk #2: Dude, if you figure it out, let me know. He’s out there screamin’ like that every couple days.

Elk #1: Should we kick his ass?

Elk #2: Nah, he wonders around for a couple hours, tuckers himself out, and that’s it. I’m just gonna breed these cows instead.

Elk #1: Uh… not quite yet. One of us is going to breed these cows.

Elk #2: Right, sorry. We still doin’ this thing?

Elk #1: Damn skippy.

Elk #2: (puts in mouthguard) Bring it, bitch.

They touch gloves and go to war. Meanwhile, I’m still picking a fight with no one at all: “Come on, ass-brains! I’ll make you sorry you ever pissed!”

But you only get better at it with practice and persistence, so I always go out there with my bugle and give it a shot. I’ve managed to call in the odd small bull, and I’m not fussy about who I arrow. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d heard bulls bugling to the northeast of my position quite consistently, and I’d decided I’d try to loop around them to make an approach.

See, even though bugling is important, wind direction trumps everything in bow hunting. As we all know from driving past stockyards or landfills, wind carries smell along with it, and these animals that I hunt all have scent receptors that boggle the mind. They are superior to a bloodhound, able to pick up the faintest odor, and pinpoint the direction it’s coming from.

They trust their sense of smell the way we rely on our eyes. If you see a grizzly bear charging at you, gaping maw, bared teeth, you don’t typically think, “Hmmm, I should probably wait until I smell him to be sure that’s really a grizzly bear.” The visual is enough to get you motivated.

It’s hard to get your mind around it, but it’s the opposite with elk. If they smell human scent, they don’t need visual confirmation. That scent means death, and they bolt just as swiftly and surely as if they saw you running toward them waving your hands in the air.

Rifle hunters can afford to be a bit lazy about scent. When the animal smells you 200 yards away, they will be on high alert, but they may stand around pondering which way to run long enough for you to take a shot. But when they scent you at the 20-40 yard range required for ethical bow shots, they turn and sprint in the opposite direction instantly.

The wind in the hunting grounds I was working that morning blow from west to east nearly every day of the year. It’s just east of the Rockies, and the prevailing westerlies… well, they prevail. I still check a weather app in the day or two leading up to a hunt, but the forecast is quite predictable, and I made what I thought was an excellent plan to approach the elk that morning. But I almost didn’t even leave the house.

I woke up to my alarm going off at 3:30 a.m. The sun comes up quite early, and I need an hour drive time and 30 minutes to change into hunting gear before I’m ready. I had a message waiting for me on the phone, a text from my buddy Graham that just said, “Can you call me.”

I started fretting. Graham has sent me a text like that because he wants some help polishing up his resume or to get some advice on how to deal with an annoying coworker or boss. But… he’s also showed up on my porch with a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the night when his dad died. There’s no question that you drop everything for that kind of friend when you need to, but what kind of text did I just get? The resume fix or the dead father? No way to know.

The text came in at 11:14 p.m., and it was the day before a statutory holiday, so we’re not talking about a really late text here. If it came at 1:30 a.m., I probably would have hopped into my pants, my truck, and then driven straight over.

When all else fails, full transparency is best. I sent him a text letting him know I was heading out hunting, but that I could easily turn around and come right back if he needed anything. I let him know I’d be in cell range all day. I’d be on silent mode, but I’d check frequently.

I felt pretty guilty the whole drive out because I love to mentally torture myself at the least provocation. Sixty minutes of pointless bickering between the voices in my head:

What if one of the kids is hurt?

Well, what if they are? We gonna go lay hands on them and make it all better?

No, but you could be there at the hospital, couldn’t you? Instead of hunting?

Dude, he could be asking if we still have his copy of The Wrath of Khan? You want to skip the elk rut for that?

I’m just sayin’… if this is something big, this is a real bad look for you, Schnell.

Look, it’s not like we left on a five-day trip. If he texts back, and it’s big, we’re standing there with him in one-hour! What is your damn problem?!

It never ends. I eventually turned on my Metallica hunting mix and sang the words just to mute the conversation. But this was not the only quandary I found myself in that morning.

The wind was blowing east. I felt it on my face as soon as I got out of my truck, and I actively ignored it as I put on my gear. The wind will swirl and gust, so you can convince yourself you’re not feeling what you’re feeling if you try hard enough. Since this was going to ruin my entire approach for the day, I was very committed to the denial.

Nevertheless, all geared up, I walked into a small clearing where a wind reading would not be altered by trees or other obstacles. I held out my compass and squeezed a small device called a “windicator” that sends a tiny puff of talcum into the air, and I watched the powder float steadily from east to west: the wrong way.

I could hear the elk bugling right where they were supposed to be, but my planned approach would be useless. They would—quite literally—smell me a mile away. Why didn’t I just alter my plan and stalk them from the opposite direction? I would have done that, but this spot is on the border with several different properties. I have permission to hunt on some but not all. The approach that I would need to take was on forbidden land.

It can be very difficult to extricate yourself from the inertia of a plan, especially when you feel like you’re owed something. I’d checked the forecast the previous night: west wind. The forecast at the very moment I tested the wind said the same thing: west wind. But in the real world, the wind was stubbornly east.

I stood there listening to the elk for a while, before I decided to just wipe the slate clean and ask myself what I could do with an east wind and the properties I have access to. There’s a spot where three properties meet, far to the west of where I’d intended to go. But if I took a long detour over to that spot, I could walk along a ridge into the wind so that any elk in front of me wouldn’t smell me coming. I could hear that there were no elk bugling over on that ridge, so it wasn’t a high percentage gambit, but one never knows what can happen.

My route took me into a dead zone for cell service for about an hour as the sun began to rise, and the elk all stopped bugling. Somehow, the elk have pieced it together that answering bugles and charging into a fight can get you killed by a hunter. Furthermore, they’ve figured out that this will only happen in daylight. So they bugle and scream all night long, but they clam up as soon as the lights come on. Cagey buggers.

The new spot where I planned to begin my stalk on elk that were not there, took me to the base of a steep hill, and I stripped down to a light shirt before beginning to climb.

While I lashed my heavy coat to my pack, I heard a lone bugle. It was ahead of me, upwind so that I’d have the advantage on the approach. I was so surprised that it took me a minute to react. I bugled back, but either because they’d all calmed down or because I suck, I got no reply. But I did have a location. Time for yet another plan.

I had something in my bag of tricks that’s called an Ultimate Predator. It’s a two-dimensional decoy that looks exactly like a cow elk. It’s only about three feet tall, but it mounts to the front of my bow. When I aim at a bull elk, he sees a cow elk looking back. The ruse doesn’t last long. Bulls expect cows to do elk things like flick their ears, nibble the grass, and above all, exude the smell of a cow elk. But the decoy can give me an extra second to aim and fire.

I decided I would tell a story, a story about a cow elk who’d wandered off in the nightly hullabaloo of the rut, and now that it was time to bed down in the shade through the heat of the day, she wanted to link back up with the herd. I mean, I’m no cow elk, but it seemed plausible to me.

So I was going to walk towards that bull, grazing as I went. I’d go just 75-100 yards very slowly, then sit down on a log and give out a cow mew or two to let him know I was enroute. Rinse and repeat. I consulted myself, it seemed like a good plan, and I set off.

Then I felt my phone vibrate in the staccato of several messages landing at once. This hillside is right on the border of cell coverage. The border moves due to influences beyond my ken, but as soon as you get one last step of elevation somewhere on that hill, wham, you got all the bars.

I stopped again and looked at my messages. The first one wasn’t from Graham, but it was from a mutual friend urgently requesting Graham’s wife’s phone number. Clearly, that original text was not about Star Trek movies or resume edits. I shared Nikki’s contact info and opened the next message. Nikki’s dad had died in a freak diving accident in Mexico.

I called Graham right away and had a whispered conversation. I offered to come right back to town, but he assured me this wasn’t an all-hands-on-deck kind of a call. He was just letting everyone know about it. I said to let me know if there’s anything he needed, and we signed off.

I never met Nikki’s dad, but it was startling, nonetheless. He was not much older than me, only a decade or so. Which… when you’re my age, doesn’t seem like much. I shook my head and tried to get myself back into hunting mode.

Remember the story. Commit to the story: You're a cow elk, coming home from a night on the town. Anybody out there?

I got my elk diaphragm seated on my palate. This is a piece of plastic and latex the size of a silver dollar that allows you to produce a mew, the high-pitched, nasal bleat female elk use to locate each other and their calves. An elongated mew indicates they're ready to breed. I climbed about 75 yards and stopped. I let out a few mews to begin my narrative. It takes patience and restraint to commit to a story like this. My natural inclination is to get into a working rhythm, pacing steadily up the hill, pushing through fatigue and exertion to get the job done. I have to continually tell myself: Schnell, that’s not the job. The job is to keep a cool head, move quietly, keep that decoy facing up and forward, rest every 100 paces or so, and let out an enticing mew.

At the second rest stage, after I called, I decided to try to refine my tone. I opened up my phone after scanning ahead for game, and I searched up “elk mews.” I found a really helpful video of an AI generated bull elk lecturing all his mates.

“Listen up, boys. It’s hunting season, and you’re going to hear a lot of calls out there. Remember, this here is what a cow elk sounds like (elk mew). But this here is a hunter (elk mew). Get those two mixed up and you’re going to wind up on some good ol’ boys’ wall.”

I listened to the mews again, and I realized I sounded more like the hunter. I experimented a couple times with my elk diaphragm to get the sound more authentic, discovering that a counterintuitive rounding of the lips while blowing through the diaphragm creates a much different and more organic sound.

I applied this technique as I made all my subsequent stops, which, when I tally it up, could only have been about 8-10 more short rests. I only had about a kilometer to work with between where I started and where I intended to admit my hunt was over.

As I neared the top of the hill where I began to stalk parallel to the height of the ridge, the country opened up slightly. Here I could see nearly 100 yards through the trees. Still no sign or sound of the bull I believed to have bugled from up there.

I sat down on a log to call again, and I thought I ought to text Nikki. I’d only known her a few years, but she’s certainly closer than merely “my friend’s wife,” and it was getting late enough in the morning that it wasn’t intrusive to send a text.

I was puzzling over what to send when my eye caught movement 80 yards downhill. I froze and zeroed in. It was just an owl. But it was a massive owl. Perched 10 feet up an aspen, it looked like it had to be around two feet tall.

I’ve mentioned before that I am not a birder, but a hunter does bump into some fascinating birds, so I’ve downloaded a birding app out of a sense of social responsibility. The birding community likes to know when interesting fellows are spotted in the woods, so why not use my extensive time in nature to contribute. Right?

I opened the app and searched for a match. This was a Great Gray Owl, not seen particularly often in these parts. So he was worth noting. I guessed low on the size. They average 2-3 feet tall, and they can live 20 years. Jeepers!

I marked the time and sighting in the app so that all the people who actually are birders would know about it, and I went back to my text.

I started and stopped writing it way too many times. When someone has suffered such a significant and sudden loss, I have trouble avoiding being trite or cliché. I almost abandoned it altogether. I stopped and practiced a few more genuine elk mews. Then went back to the text, scolding myself.

Dude, when all else fails, just be authentic. You just heard the news. You’re really sorry to hear about it, and you’re around if they need anything, right? Right.

I typed out something to that effect, and I was reviewing it before hitting send when a bull elk came crashing through the bush.

I heard the snap of a large branch and a heavy tread approaching. I set down my phone, picked up my bow, and faced it toward the oncoming racket.

I saw the first movement at about 80 yards away. At 60, I could see it was an elk. At 50 I could see it was a legal bull, and he was coming in fast.

He spotted my decoy right away, and he didn’t break stride. He held his head high, swiveling as he came, looking for a scent. He was making straight for me, but at 40 yards away, he made a slight turn down hill, making his final approach towards me an arc.

This was no accident. The wind was light, but it was blowing down hill. He was making a small loop at the end of his approach to make sure he not only saw but smelled a cow elk. Deer, elk, and moose all do this as naturally as you or I would step to the side to see around an obstacle and confirm something visually.

I’ve seen this technique enough to expect it, but it still causes panic. I knew I would have very little time to make the shot. Once he was directly downwind of me, I’d have perhaps one second to shoot.

When he got to within 30 yards, some undergrowth blocked my direct line of sight, and I drew my bow, obscuring that motion from his view. He was now within range, and I was holding aim on his vitals as he approached. They usually pause for a second to suss out the situation, and that’s when I’d fire.

But he didn’t stop. He kept walking towards my downhill side, and that was going to end this hunt in a hurry. It was invisible to me, but there was a blazing trail of my scent running down the hill like a swift stream, and once he reached its bank, he would bolt.

At 25 yards away, his path took him behind a stand of trees that blocked any shot. When he stepped clear of that, I knew I’d need to stop him and shoot. He was already in a spot where he might smell me.

When he emerged from behind the trees, and I had a clear shot, I let out the worst cow elk mews you can imagine. I was nervous, and my practiced call sounded more like a dying rabbit. But it was enough to make him stop, look up, and lock eyes with the image of the cow elk I held before him.

I had to make a split-second decision as he came to a stop. He was in an orientation that we hunters call quartering-toward. This is bad for archers. An elk’s front leg and shoulder blade are like plate armor protecting its vitals.

A broadside shot is what we’re looking for. The target’s as big as a basketball, and we practice that shot day in day out, usually waiting for the animal to turn that way before firing. Straight on is a smaller target. You need to squeeze that arrow between the shoulders to hit the vitals in between, but it’s an intuitive shot; you aim right down the middle.

Quartering-toward is the worst. You still have a shot, but it’s a small area, and it’s easy to misjudge where to aim. It’s very tempting to aim as if you had a true broadside shot, but you’ll hit those big bones. You can get away with that with a big rifle, but arrows will be deflected.

Picture Note: A bit crude because I’m using PowerPoint shapes to represent the bones and vitals, but this pic gives you the general idea. You need to hit the red to kill the elk fast. In the one on the left, I drew in bones to illustrate what makes this a tough shot. But in the wild, none of those shapes are there. In that quartering-toward image, you need to be able to envision that small red area on a live animal. Hit anything else, and you’ve wounded an animal. You’ll never track him down, and he’ll suffer a painful, lonely death.

When he stopped and looked at me in that position, I wanted to wait and see if he’d turn for a better angle, but I could feel the breeze on the back of my neck, and I knew he’d be gone in a second.

Of course, all of this thinking is nearly instantaneous in real time. I mewed, he stopped, and I saw I could thread the arrow past the shoulder bone. I had some primal thought like Yup or Go, and I shot.

There was a quiet thum as I released the arrow. He flinched like he’d been stung by a bee and turned and trotted back the way he’d come for a few steps, covering about 10 yards. He seemed confused, looking back at me, seeing the cow elk still gazing at him, wondering how she made such an odd noise.

I was pulling another arrow free of my quiver behind the decoy. It is very rare to get a second shot in archery, but you take it when it’s offered. As I nocked the arrow, I saw his forelegs quiver. He took one running step, but dropped to the ground, kicked his legs several times, and went still. He was done five seconds after the arrow hit him.

I was still sitting on the log, and I couldn’t see him where he dropped into the tall grass and undergrowth. The forest was quiet again, and there was nothing to indicate anything had happened. I picked up my phone, had one last look at the text, added a comma I missed, and hit send.

I looked back at the spot he’d been when I fired. It was right in line with where the owl had been, but Mr. Gray had quit the scene.

I stood and threaded my way through downed trees and stumps to where he’d fallen. I probably stood there staring at him for five minutes. When you’re a bow hunter, this is the moment you work for, and you don’t get many of them. Every scouting trip, every moment reviewing footage from game cameras, every arrow shot at a target, and the many, many hunts where you don’t even see your quarry, they all contribute to this one moment. The time it all came together.

It’s not just a moment of reflection either; it’s a time to switch gears. There is so much that needs to happen. I had a 700-pound animal lying on the ground on a mild, late summer morning, and the temperature was rising. To ensure none of the meat would spoil, I needed to get him field-dressed, quartered, loaded in my truck, and hung up in dad’s garage. I had a series of texts to send: one to my buddy Heath, who misses nearly every hunt, but never misses a drag out and butchering session; one to my dad to prep the garage and round up a few guys to divide the meat; and one more on this unique occasion.

I fired off all my texts and decided I should try to take a selfie or two with the dearly departed, and I discovered something interesting. The bull had one antler growing nearly out of the center of his head. It could be an old injury or a genetic abnormality, but I’d never seen anything like it on an elk before. I have a habit of coining and clinging to nicknames, and this one was clear and obvious.

Here are a couple pics of the Unicorn Bull.

That thing hanging out of my mouth like a dart is the diaphragm I've mentioned. It lets you make a cow mew, and it's handsfree. I have it in my mouth or clasped like this for immediate use while stalking elk.