Like many readers of this magazine, I had read stories that ignited my imagination. After I read of successful elk hunts in Pennsylvania, I called Huntin’ Fool to learn more about them. When I learned that the hunts did not require preference points to be given a chance to win, I had them put me in for an elk hunt for the upcoming season. In early summer, on a Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were finishing errands when a call showed up on my vehicle’s monitor – “PA Game and Fish.” The game warden confirmed who I was and then proceeded to congratulate me for drawing one of the few bull elk tags in Pennsylvania’s hunt zone 13, specifically the late season rifle (December 31-January 7), and that I would receive the necessary paperwork in a few weeks.
My wife looked at me incredulously and said, “Is this a scam?”
“No,” I said. “I do remember applying a few months ago, but I just forgot about it!”
The scramble began with calling several hunting friends who could not believe my good fortune. Since I had no idea about where hunt zone 13 was or the topography of the land, I called one of my more experienced hunting friends and asked him if he knew how I should go about getting a guide. When I told him the general area, he said he had contacts in that part of Pennsylvania and would make some calls. Within an hour, he called me back and said that his contacts told him to call Bryan Hale of Elk County Outfitters. I did so, and Bryan and I almost immediately connected over the phone. After numerous conversations with him about many aspects of this hunt, I decided to go with him.
I asked a few friends if any could come along, but because of previous commitments and various life situations, none of them could. I then asked my youngest daughter, Shelby, who is a professional photographer, to see what her interest might be in coming along to document the hunt through the eyes of her creative lens of photography, and she said, “I would love to!” I had no way of knowing it at the time, but her perspectives, comedic relief, creative eye, and continual support and encouragement would help make this trip memorable in many ways.
The evening before the hunt, Bryan received a call from a farmer telling him there was a monster bull in one of his fields and we were welcome to come and see him. We arrived as quickly as we could, and the bull was indeed monstrous. Bryan guessed him to be right at 400" with the type of rack that presented additional points with every head turn. We decided we would be back at first light.
We arrived at first light, and he was still in the field! Would this happen this fast with a bull of this size? We had decided to approach the field from an angle that ended up with us not having an ethical shot, and by the time we circled back around, he had wandered into an area we did not have permission to hunt. As we struggled to find where he may have gone, Bryan turned to me and said, “And they say hunting elk in Pennsylvania is easy!” After hours of following tracks in the crusted snow and trying to play catchup to the bull before he entered private land, we called it a day. No, this was not going to be easy!
We had permission from another farmer to hunt in an “elk stand” that overlooked an alfalfa field. A nice bull had been seen there over the previous few days. We decided to enter the field from the bottom, walking in the pre-dawn darkness, shrouded in the ever-present fog. After settling quietly into the stand, the fog slowly began to seep away along the end of the field about 200 yards away, exposing more of the dense woods that were everywhere on this hunt.
As the fog moved out, it revealed a bull that had been in the thick underbrush right outside the edge of the field. Since there were no other elk to be seen, we focused all our attention on him, trying to determine if he was a bull worthy of such a tag. He stayed bedded, only occasionally moving his head. For nearly 90 minutes, we studied him, discussing what each of us could see from the angle we had. Eventually, he stood up, but it was only for a moment. When he bedded back down, he did so a few yards further into the underbrush, making a clean shot even more difficult. Even with these tauntingly brief glimpses of his size and headgear, we all agreed that if he came out into the field, he may be worthy of my tag. Something he heard or saw bothered him and he stood up, going straight back up the hill and out of sight, never presenting a shot. No, this was not going to be easy!
As the hunt began to wind down, the pressure was beginning to ramp up on the possibility of not filling this tag. I forced it out of my mind. Bryan’s wife and son had been scouting some of the few public areas that bulls had been sighted in, and we developed a plan for us to arrive early at a specific public field and be ready at first light in case the bulls decided to revisit this area. The concept of legal shooting light became a relative term as the overcast skies, misting rain, and persistent fog caused “legal hunting light” to become later in the morning than the Pennsylvania hunting charts said we could begin to hunt.
As we silently pulled into the side area off a main road, Bryan walked out ahead of me. As we approached, shots rang out and we instinctively ducked, Bryan pushing me back just as he saw a great bull fall. He knew who it was who had fired the shot – the only other hunter who had a late season rifle tag for this hunting zone. Bryan called the other hunter on his cell to tell him to stay in place as we were at the other end of the field, wanting to see if any other bulls were still around. We saw another bull milling about, not sure what to make of the sound that had caused his companion to drop in his tracks. However, he was out of range and moving toward private land that we did not have permission to hunt on or to recover a wounded elk on.
The dinner the night before the last day of this hunt did not taste so good as anxiety and pressure churned my stomach late into the night. The friendly banter that was around the evening meal that night did little to assuage my doubts that had begun to take up permanent residence inside of me. I was pretty sure I was not the only one feeling the pressure as all of my outfitter’s clients who had a bull tag had tagged out except me.
Shortly into dinner, Bryan got a call. When he finished, he simply said, “Game on!”
The farmer who had called us before the hunt had called and told Bryan that his cousin had been seeing a bull on his property and that if we wanted to, we could come over in the morning and see if we could find him. Our plan this last day of the hunt was to hike in the dark about a mile and a half and enter from the woods onto the public land where we had been the morning before, where the other hunter had harvested his bull, thinking that perhaps the bulls would return. We did, but nothing. The feelings of disappointment were palpable.
We wasted no time and made our way over to the rancher’s home. He greeted us warmly, telling us what he could of where the bull had been and giving us general directions. We had not traveled far when Bryan shouted, “I see dark legs making their way through the pines!” I did not see anything, but I dutifully followed him. In what seemed like a few moments, the bull stepped out into the clearing, presenting a clean broadside shot. Bryan called out a distance of 129 yards. I clicked off the safety, placed the crosshairs behind the bull’s shoulder, and at the shot, he dropped in his tracks. “Did that just happen?” I asked in disbelief.
The hard work of pre-scouting by Bryan and his Elk County Outfitters crew, the persistent work of eight days of hiking, not giving up, checking and rechecking areas where elk had been sighted, and the continuous encouragement from Bryan’s crew and my family and friends back home made this hunt worthy of the special tag that I received. No, it was not easy, but then, most good hunts rarely are.
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