I was talking with #3 son last night about our weekend, and he reminded me of an incident the morning before I heard the elk in the night. It got me to thinking. I’ve posted this on a couple of forums, and folks tell me this probably was a herd of elk.

Saturday morning (the morning before “Stuff of Dreams”) we were hunting squirrel at the back of the property. We have a campsite in the midst of a large grove of old oaks, and #3 son and I were just sitting atop the picnic table waiting for a bushtail to come out onto one of the limbs. The campground is astride a saddle. Deer bed frequently on one side of the saddle and move throughout the day across the top of the saddle to feed.

All of a sudden, I heard a weird noise coming from the cedars about 100 yards away and crosswind. It was most like a deer snort, but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was higher and whinier and had much less of a breathy quality to it. There were also a lot more calls than with a whitetail– maybe 10 or so over a short period of time. Figuring it for just a weird-sounding deer, I responded with a run of deer contact bleats. I called over about a 2 minute period. Nothing happened, so we went back to concentrating on squirrel.

About 5 minutes later. There was a huge (I mean HUGE) ruckous on our downwind. Branches flew every which way, saplings bent. Leaves were coming off trees, and there was a brief thundering of hooves downhill and away from us.

The pattern matched exactly what happens when a whitetail comes out of its bed on the East side of the saddle, encounters a swirl of human scent coming from our campground and then does an end-around towards the downwind side to get a better grasp of the situation. However, the size of the disturbance left our mouths hanging open. A bulldozer could have made less noise.

If you regularly have contact with elk and have hunted them this whole thing must have sounded pretty mundane. You have to understand, for a guy who was born and raised in the Ohio Valley, a free ranging elk in the backyard is as exotic as an elephant. This is on a farm only 63 miles from Cincinnati.

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