I’ve been a whitetail hunter my entire life. I was exposed to it since I was old enough to remember, and shot my first buck with my bow when I was 12 years old. Over the last 5 years I have dabbled a little bit with mule deer hunting in North Dakota. Although I haven’t been successful, I’ve learned a ton about spot and stock hunting, and just western hunting in general. One morning I found myself in the middle of 25 head of elk, and I was buying preference points ever since!
Fast forward to this year, Myself, and three high school friends drew big game combo tags for the Missouri River Breaks in eastern Montana. We went on one scouting mission in May, and headed back out for opening weekend for a quick trip just to try and learn as much as possible about the areas we had picked out. The early trip was productive since we had never hunted there before, it was nice to refresh our memories on getting around, most convenient places to camp, where the most hunting pressure was etc. We also were able to locate a few herds of elk in areas we were somewhat familiar with. The elk were not bugling yet.
We went back out September 16th. The elk were bugling every morning and evening for an hour or two. After 3 days of playing cat and mouse with them I ran into a MT resident who was watching the same herd of elk as me one evening. We hit it off and he shared a lot of general info about the area and elk movements. The next morning we ran into each other in the dark again trying to make a move on a bunch of bugles off in the distance. We decided to team up and hunt together vs step on each-others toes. He obviously knew what he was doing and I was happy to learn! (he showed me a bunch of past archery kills on his phone the day before).
Within the first 20 minutes of shooting light he called in a awesome 6 point bull to 62 yards where he froze up and knew something wasn’t right! Travis was kicking himself for not setting up differently, but we quickly snuck over the next hill where we had heard other bugles. There were a handful of mature bulls heading up the far hill onto private land, but 2 smaller bulls were definitely close enough to coax over. We got setup and Travis made a few cow calls. 15 minutes later they had worked their way up to us looking for the cow. I was able to put a double lung shot on him at 46 yards and he tipped over within 80 yards!
I think it was the coolest hunt i’ve ever been on to date and was happy to meet a new friend. Also big thanks to my friends Nick, Matt, and Billy for helping me along the way and packing him out!
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