by Bill Heavey
Again, my efforts to raise a second strike failed. Taimen were aggressive but wary. Parkinson was as disappointed as I was, the sign of a good guide. “My aim is to show every angler a meter-long fish,” he said. “Usually, I can. We may have to resort to extreme measures.” He gave me a version of his mouse lure, which, when wet, weighed several ounces. I actually threw it over the river and landed it on the glacier, from which I teased it into the water. Still no luck.
At lunch we found out that Greg had hit the jackpot, landing a taimen measuring just over 40 inches and so broad across the back that he couldn’t grab it. “I’ve never seen a freshwater fish like it,” he said. While trying to free his lure, he had reached into the fish’s mouth with the protective glove. “It nearly crushed me hand,” he said, “and bit through the bloody glove like it was paper. Lucky I only got this.” He showed a small puncture wound on his finger. I wanted a wound like that, too.
Luck with Lenok
At lunch that day as we sat by the river eating sandwiches, Nyamaa urged me to have a beer. “It will make fish come. I am sure of it.” I had the beer. When I woke up, I was lying in the grass and everybody had headed off fishing. Nyamaa was watching me. “You were really asleep. We tried shaking you but you would not awaken. So we take your picture. Did you dream of a fish?” I couldn’t remember. She still had that unnerving smile. I got my rod and started casting.
In my obsessive hunt for taimen, I’d been passing up all sorts of other opportunities, from fishing for lenok and grayling to visiting a local village and the gers of nearby nomads. One afternoon, we went way upriver and crossed in a spot so deep that the water came up over the floorboards in the back of the truck and it appeared that we might be stationing a casting platform there permanently. As I walked back to the rendezvous point, I discovered Bruce casting in a pool with a little 5-weight. He offered to let me have a try, and within 15 minutes I’d landed two lenok and two grayling, good additions to the night’s dinner. It was also the first tug on my line I’d felt since leaving home. I liked it. Lenok are quite good sport on a light rod, but I was a prisoner to my taimen-mania.
Parkinson, sensing my fixation and my despair, cut the smaller lenok in half and rigged the tail end on his spinning rod with a treble hook. I’d slipped from fly-fishing to spinning with lures to heaving a bloody hunk of fish across the river. It wasn’t the first time I’d thrown my dignity out of the boat to lighten the load, and it wouldn’t be the last.
You Shoulda Been Here Next Week
On the evening before my last day of fishing, I saw two of the camp boys on horseback trotting swiftly back to camp carrying something hanging from a string. As they got closer, I saw that it was a freshly snared prairie dog. My heart soared. I was so happy I nearly dropped my beer. Prairie dogs are cute little things, and were it not for the fact that they are known to carry bubonic plague and dig horse-crippling holes in the ground, I might have regretted this one’s demise.
Parkinson and the boys spent about an hour working on the dog, fortifying its spine and rigging the treble hook until the lure swam with a lifelike motion. They put a good dollop of Gink on the tail to make it float realistically. This, I was sure, was going to be one of those trips that is saved at the last minute with the catching of a tremendous fish. Mine would be a tale told around the campfire for years to come.
Only it didn’t turn out that way. I cast that damn prairie dog until we both looked about equally beat up. I never got a bite. As the evening grew gray and the wind came up, Parkinson came and put a hand on my shoulder. “We know there are fish here. And you fished harder than just about anybody I’ve ever had on a trip.” I turned and tried to smile.
The next day, we loaded up and left. The last image I saw of camp was Nyamaa and her benign, knowing smile. We said good-bye at the Moron airport as another group of anglers got off the plane we were about to board.
I got an e-mail from Parkinson the next week. Fishing had turned fantastic right after we left. His four clients landed 18 taimen in five days. Each had one that measured at least a meter. I’m trying to be philosophical about it. I find beer helps.
The Toughest Son of a Gun in the Elk Woods
When I first meet Orvall “Junior” Bedell at the tiny airport in Hayden, Colorado, I’m thinking there’s been some terrible mix-up. An eastern whitetail hunter, I’ve just plunked down the money saved by staying out of taverns for 18 months straight to pursue my dream of bagging a bull elk with a bow. And now I’m shaking the square, calloused hand of an old cowboy straight out of Central Casting: spurs, black hat, and a silver belt buckle the size of a cheeseburger that reads, DINOSAUR ROUNDUP RODEO—TEAM PENNING CHAMPION 1994. I don’t know what I was expecting. I only know that this is not it. “Look,” I want to tell him. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I like Yosemite Sam as much as the next guy. But what I was really after is a damn elk guide.” But I don’t because (1) my curiosity is already getting the better of me and (2) the money’s gone anyway.
The guy is 60 if he’s a day, with a tan that stops where the permanent shade of his hat begins, three toothpicks in the hatband where most guys stick a feather, and mud spatters on his shirt. Plus he’s smiling too much. This is not good. Where I come from, smiley people are generally on medication. Stumped for something to say as I stumble toward his truck under the weight of every piece of gear I own, I ask if he still rodeos. “Yep,” he answers. “Won a little over seven grand last year.” In fact, he’s in the middle of a little team cattle penning right now—and he’s taking me there.
Junior, a.k.a. the Dinosaur
As soon as we get to the local ring, I can’t help noticing that everybody here defers to the dinosaur. A pretty woman atop an expensive-looking piece of horseflesh bats her eyes at him and asks if he can come shoe the beast sometime later in the week. One of the judges takes Junior’s arm to speak about something he doesn’t want overheard. Even the guy turning the mud to dry before the event swings the tractor by to ask if Junior thinks the harrow is set too deep. I take a seat by the judge he was talking to and mention that Junior seems to be quite the man. “Oh, they don’t make ’em like Junior no more,” he says. “You just watch.”
He explains that in team penning, groups of three riders race the clock to cut three specific head of cattle out of a herd of 30, then drive them into a small enclosure at the opposite end of the ring. The team members at this club event are chosen at random from a hat. A pattern quickly emerges: The teams that Junior is on tend to win; the teams he is not on don’t.
Velcroed to the saddle, he rides at a gallop into the herd and scatters cattle like billiard balls. Then the three he wants trot out obediently and head for the enclosure as if that’s where they wanted to be in the first place. His two teammates make a lot of noise and flap their hats at the animals, but it’s clear who’s getting the job done. At the barbecue afterward, Junior picks up four checks totaling $310 and two belt buckles. It’s the last rodeo of the season and everyone teases him about beating up on them all summer. Junior just smiles.
Trophy Haven
“You’ll sleep at my place,” he tells me back in the truck. Steamboat Lake Outfitters, of which Junior is a partner, has 14,000 acres leased around Routt County, and apparently there’s no need to pack into the backcountry. “No sense huntin’ where they ain’t. Elk’ve mostly moved down out of the national forest. Too much pressure.” Junior’s house is not really a house. It’s a combination antler-storage and used-outdoor-gear facility, with countless rodeo ribbons, three calendars, and a mountain lion skin decorating the walls. His bow is there, an old PSE Polaris Express with round wheels. (“Hell,” he says. “Thing’s practically new. I don’t think I’ve had it 10 years.”)
He shoots fingers without sights. His anchor point is just below his right eye. “I like to look down the shaft to see where it’s going.” On the wall are Pope and Young certificates for two whitetails and a Rocky Mountain goat. He has too many elk antlers to keep them in the
house. When the truck lights raked his garage on the way in I saw heaps of them in the corners and crawl space. He got his guide’s license in 1958, when I was 3. I’m beginning to think I’ve fallen into the right hands after all. “Wake you at 5,” Junior says.
At 6 the next morning we are glassing a herd of 160 elk along a riverbottom, already threading their way up through the steep draws on the far side to bed in the hills for the day. Though they’re nearly a mile off, their calls and whistles carry clearly. We count only five bulls in the herd. None appear to be monsters, but even through the spotting scope on the truck window it’s hard to tell for sure at this distance. “We’ll have to hustle to get in front of ’em,” Junior says. “Let’s go.”
I’ve come to Colorado in the best shape of my adult life, thanks to killer gym workouts and avoiding everything I enjoy. Junior, naturally, smokes two packs a day, drinks his first beer before lunch, and fries his elk and mule deer steaks in butter. But I’ll give him this: He waits for me to catch up on hills. At least, most of the time he does.
Back at the Ranch
An hour later, crouched down behind some sagebrush, we’re watching cow elk and their calves streaming uphill past us not 25 yards away. Even the calves are the size of shooter whitetail bucks. Junior blows on a tiny cow call held together with rubber bands to calm the elk. They aren’t alarmed, but neither are they slowing down. We try four different spots and see elk at two of them, but no bulls. At noon, we hang it up and hike back down.
At a fence crossing, Junior says, “Local feller I was guidin’ had a 25-yard shot at a monster 6-point right here last year. It’s the only fence for miles, and he hit the top strand of wire.” He smiles at the memory, pulls on a cigarette. “That guy’s face was long as a well rope all season.”
Junior’s not being colorful for my benefit. This is how you talk when you were raised on a ranch and had neither plumbing nor electricity until you were 6. “Heck,” he tells me. “I never got to town but twice a year till I was in high school. Somebody’d look at you funny, you’d go hide behind your momma’s skirts.”
In the afternoon, we drive up through quaking aspens, alders, and ferns to a high plateau to still-hunt the woods. Along the way, Junior points to a single stake at the edge of a green field. “We had a house right there. My parents got married in September, and I was born in December. Raised five boys on deer meat and taters. Rode my horse to school every day.”
I want him to keep talking. I ask how he learned to shoe horses. He says a neighbor taught him on Junior’s own horse, given to the boy for helping a farmer hay all summer. “He did the first foot—made me help him with the second. He and I did the third together, and he made me do the last by myself. I wudn’t but 9. Didn’t have any money, but I did have sense enough to ask what I owed him. He said, ‘Nothin’, but don’t ask me to shoe your horse again. Now you know how.’ Been doing it ever since.” He lights another cigarette. “You wanna hear me flap my gums or you wanna hunt an elk?” he asks. Both, actually.
Breaking the Rules
We park in a meadow at about 10,000 feet and slip into the woods. Junior smells of sweat and cigarettes, and wears the same woodland camo day after day. He learned to hunt in the old days, before the scent and camo industries got hold of the sport. “Heck, if the wind’s right, the game won’t smell you no matter what,” he tells me. “If the wind’s wrong, they’re gonna scent you no matter how much soap and stink you use.” I’m thinking how he breaks all the how-to rules I’ve memorized as though they were carved in stone. And how that garage full of antlers is all the rebuttal he needs.
We move into the woods, sun at our backs, wind in our faces. He points silently to droppings and the big prints in the soft ground. They’re only hours old. Junior doesn’t move the way I do, all sneaky and tense. He moves casually, as if he’s just another animal filtering through the trees. Several times we see cows and spikes up ahead. He blows softly on his cow call, and the elk relax and move on. “Lotta guys would come in here and bugle ’cause that’s what they been told to do,” he whispers. “Problem is they blow everything out of the woods. You wanna be giving back the same calls you hear.” We press on, the woods getting thicker.
Suddenly, Junior sinks to one knee and motions with the hand behind his back for me to come up. Forty yards ahead, two bull elk are raking alder bushes in earnest. One is hidden by the swaying bushes. The other, a 5-point, three times the size of the biggest quadruped I’ve ever put a pin on, is visible but screened by the alders, except for a foot-wide window at his left shoulder.
“Forty yards,” is all Junior says.
I can shoot 40 yards. I’ve been doing it all summer. But the elk is moving back and forth in the window. From the Cat Quiver on my back, I nock an arrow with a 100-grain Spitfire mechanical on my Mathews MQ1 and stalk forward and right 10 steps. It’s as if I’m in a trance. I draw, let out half my breath, settle the 30-yard pin on his shoulder, and release. The arrow is right on the money. He wheels and crashes off. The other bull retreats 20 yards to even thicker stuff, snorts and bellows at us, then leaves. We never do see that one.
Junior claps me on the shoulder and says, “Now we wait 15 minutes.” After 3 minutes, he says, “Time’s up.”
The blood trail is faint but steady. We find the elk piled up 150 yards away. The rack is a smallish 5x5. Junior guesses him to be 550 pounds, a 2-year-old. Pope and Young may not beat down my door, but I’ve got myself an elk. It’s all happened too quickly, too easily. My picture was that you’re supposed to have 9 or 10 near-successes before you get your elk, and here I’ve bagged one my first day. “You think we should have waited for a bigger one?” I ask.
“Nope. Something like that happens maybe one in 20 hunts,” Junior says. “You get a shot like that, you take it.”
We gut him, and Junior washes blood over the exposed meat. “Usually I carry pepper in my fanny pack to keep the flies off, but that blood’ll harden and protect the meat,” he says. “I think our scent will keep anything but a bear from eating on him until we can get up here tomorrow.” He cuts off a hunk of tenderloin and puts it in a Ziploc. On the way out, we come across a place where the ground has erupted in yellow chanterelles. Junior fills another bag. That night we celebrate with a little Jack Daniel’s and water, fried tenderloin with garlic, sautéed mushrooms with garlic, and garlic bread. “You get enough garlic in you, the mosquitoes’ll leave you alone,” he jokes. The food is wonderful. You can cut the meat with your fork.
Family Portraits
After dinner, he shows me an old photo of his father with 10 prime beaver pelts drying on round stretchers and one of his grandfather accompanying a young boy biting his lip self-consciously as he leads an old mare, in his hatband a poppy that the war veterans gave out at the Fourth of July parade in Steamboat in those days. He pulls out an arrowhead his father found in the dry mud on the garden plow one time. It’s a bird point, the size of a dime. There are about 70 facets on each side, and the thing nearly sparkles in the low light. He tells me about the new people moving in, the fellow who paid $10.5 million for an 800-acre spread that sold for $2 an acre back in the Depression, and about the neighbors up the road who invited him to a picnic and bonfire in which they were burning down the old wreck of a house out back.
“I told them, hell no, I wouldn’t come,” he says. “That house was hand-hewn, built with broadaxes. I knew Pat McGill, the old Irishman who lived there. He was one of those old-timers I call draft horse-bred. Guys who were out of bed by sunup and worked till dusk every day of their lives. Old Pat had a horse named Charlie. And even when he was 92 years old, he’d go out with that horse and work in the yard. It’d take him all day to dig four postholes. But he was out there. They don’t make guys like that anymore.”
Junior pulls himself up short, says we’d better get on to bed if we’re going to pack that elk out before noon. He’s got a place he wants to take me for mule deer tomorrow around sundown.
We bid each other go
od night. Lying in my sleeping bag in the dark, I’m thinking how lucky I am to be here, how fast the world is changing, how a hunt with an old dinosaur named Junior is something you can’t put a price tag on.
The Promised Land
The masthead of Field & Stream magazine is loaded with the names of guys who can make a fire by rubbing two icicles together, catch a tarpon on a safety pin and some pocket lint, or track a squirrel over a rockslide. When the editors want an alternative perspective, they call me.
“Heavey,” one purred into the phone not long ago, “we were wondering where an Eastern hardwoods hunter—let’s say a guy with more passion than skill—would go to bowhunt the buck of a lifetime.” Easy, I said. He’d head for the Promised Land: Buffalo County, Wisconsin. In the last decade this hunk of deer heaven led the nation with 309 record-book deer, almost twice as many as its nearest competitor. “From the numbers it looks like most any bozo would have pretty good odds at a wall hanger out there.” I regretted these words even as they left my mouth.
“Good. Then that’s where we’re sending you.” I could hear a group howl of mirth on the other end. Fine. All my life, I’ve wanted a shot at a big buck. Now I was going to get it. There was, of course, no guarantee. Just because you make the pilgrimage doesn’t mean you’ll come home a prophet. But I vowed to hunt as hard as possible. If I failed, I meant to go down swinging.
