I kept in touch with Paul and Barby and, after talking for several years about going hunting with Paul, at the start of 2018 I did the one thing that meant I was going. I bought a return ticket to Missoula, Montana. I was "goin' a huntin'". I'd never hunted before and wasn't expecting Paul to throw a rifle over my shoulder and tell me to 'go for it'. I was going purely for the experience of the hunt. I didn't quite know what to expect, other than I knew it was going to be like nothing I'd ever experienced.
When Paul knew I was coming, he decided to go for a 'big kahuna' and get an elk bull tag (he also had a deer buck tag to fill). Elk are elk but the deer tag could be either a whitetail or a mule (muley) deer buck. Elk are notoriously elusive, so an elk bull was was going to be a prize if we got one.
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Above photo: Paul makes his way along the whitetail trail early one morning.
**After being made redundant in 2016, my passion for photography had dwindled to next to nothing, to the point where I debated whether to even take a camera with me to Montana. However, I decided to on the off-chance I'd regret not having one. I would have my iPhone SE if need be but packed my trusty (if little used) DSLR on the off-chance. As it turned out, the iPhone fitted nicely into my pocket. The temperatures were below freezing, so the iPhone was kept warm - unfrozen - by my body heat, whereas my DSLR would have undoubtedly frozen. All photos were taken with my iPhone.
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'Casa Paul & Barby'. I thought it was going to be more 'shack' than 'palatial' and was expecting to sleep on a pullout lounge in the living room. But no! It was spacious and extremely cosy. (Paul and Barby built this house themselves during the mid-1990s)
Awww - whitetail deer fawns gather in the yard outside the kitchen window (the house is on five acres around 40km - 25 miles - out of town and very much in the wilderness).
One of Paul's brothers, Scott, joined us several times. Here, he leads the way through the 'undergrowth' on a hunt. Despite have a supposed dodgy (hurt) foot, he set a cracking pace. (Hunters, by law, have to wear orange vests/jackets to make them stand out to other hunters. Deer and elk are colour blind to it).
Paul (seated) and Scott chew the fat on the first night out, when we also discovered the heating in the campervan was busted. We spent the night in around -8C to -10C (15F-10F) temperatures and at one point I might have wondered, "What the f*** am I doing here?"
To make matters worse, I should have spent 30 seconds seeing how my sleeping bag worked before getting into it. But I didn't. Paul also suggested I use on the top (double) bed and sleep under the covers with my sleeping bag opened out on top like a bedspread. But I didn't (I thought Paul or Scott was going to sleep on the top bed with me). Instead, I clambered into the sleeping bag and zipped it up as best I could. This, it turned out, wasn't all that good and I had a (freezing!) cold patch on my neck all night. I barely slept a wink.
We planned on rising at 4.45am, so we could be at the hunting ground by sun up at around 7am. Paul and Scott forgot this plan and sat around the campfire solving the problems of the world via the aid of cheap beer and even cheaper brandy. At around 2:30am, with world problems taken care of, they crawled into the van. Scott slept on the table-that-turns-into-a-bed, while Paul used a thin piece of foam as a mattress and slept on the freezing floor (thank goodness for cheap beer and even cheaper brandy!). We arose at 5:30am.
The view from one of the hunting grounds. I thought I was going to die that day, or at least need to be airlifted out by a medical team (did my travel insurance cover this?). Paul said that the days would get progressively harder during that first week. "She'll be right", I said to myself. Bullshit!
It had been a steady 5+ hour climb - much of it through snow (think 'climbing a sand dune') - to this place, a snow-free patch of grass under a tree. The last 20 metres or so up to the tree were among the most arduous I'd ever undertaken. I was utterly spent and didn't think there was any way possible I was going to make my way back down.
I later found out Paul was just as exhausted. An indication of this was the fact we spent nearly two hours recovering under the tree. The sun was out and we basked in its warmth (four layers were still needed), dozing and resting. I told myself I'd remember this view when I was back in Brisbane, loading cans of baked beans onto the shelf at Coles.
Paul lies in the grass and uses the scope of his gun to view some whitetail deer. Elk hunting involves a lot of walking, often to higher ground. Deer hunting is more along the lines I'd imagined - seeing, stalking, shooting. We did quite a lot of this when we were deer hunting. Whitetail are extremely skittish, while muleys are (far) less so ...
On one occasion Scott and I were walking down a snow-covered track when I saw something move around 50-60 metres directly ahead. I patted Scott on the shoulder and whispered what I'd seen. He peered through his binoculars and handed them back to me. I looked but couldn't see anything. Then I saw 'it' move again. It was the head and neck of what I thought was a young elk bull.
We kept walking and more and more of the animal began to appear. I couldn't understand why Scott wasn't stopping and taking a shot, as we now had a clear view of the animal's torso. I joked to myself that perhaps Scott was going to show off for me and strangle the thing to death with his bare hands. We got closer and closer, finally as close as around five metres. The animal kept watching us and, as we drew level with it, we looked away, so as to avoid eye contact, which would have made it bolt. Perhaps Scott is going to make a shot from the other side, I thought. When this didn't look likely, I tapped him on the shoulder and quietly asked if he was going to shoot it. "I've already filled my deer tag," he said. "It's a muley."
Not a bad view. Paul savours the moment as we descend from a hunting ground late one afternoon.
After hunting from Mon - Fri (without a kill), we headed back 'home' for something possibly more important than hunting ... the (118th) Brawl of the Wild!
I'd been watching American football the better part of four decades but had never been to a game as a spectator, so I was delighted to find out I would be in town for the 'brawl' between traditional Montana rivals, the University of Montana Grizzlies and the Montana State Bobcats. While no one does pomp and pageantry like the Poms, NO ONE puts on a show like the Yanks, and the four or so hours we were at the ground were among the most entertaining I've spent anywhere.
Stoppages are a part of the game, but there was always something happening on and off the field during these breaks in play. Your eyes were constantly being directed here, there and everywhere! It was loud, it was proud, it was larger than life. Americans are boisterous at the best of times and there were people yahoo-ing and high-fiving each other all over the place. I don't know if they knew each other and I often didn't know why they were high-fiving each other. It didn't matter and no one cared. We - they - were all in this together. God Bless America!
(For those interested, the Grizzlies shot out to a 22-0 lead but lost a thriller 29-25, with seconds to go. As for the photo: The Grizzlies enter the stadium through (what was) a large, inflatable gridiron helmet.)
Paul and I headed back to the hunting grounds the Monday after the Grizzlies game and, after we'd done a morning hunt on the Monday, Scott arrived with a deer carcass in the back of his ute (pickup). Our afternoon hunt was cancelled in order to celebrate Scott's kill.
With campfire ablaze, we pulled up a chair ... he'd been out along the whitetail trail, when he saw two young bucks. They started moving towards the safety of a ridge line, so he dropped to his knee, took aim and hit one of them on the run from around 250-300 metres. At such a distance, the bullet would have dropped several inches, so his years of experience paid off.
Scott pulled the deer from the back of his pickup and lay it on the ground beside a boulder next to the campervan. We were at around 1,700m (5,000ft) altitude, so the temperature continually hovered around freezing - perfect for meat storage.
A deer/elk needs to be gutted ASAP, so its warm innards don't spoil the meat. Scott had done this but had not removed the windpipe (also a source of heat) and did so as the carcass lay next to the boulder.
Scott saved the heart with the intention of cooking it over the open fire. I indulged in a portion of it - the freshest meat I'd ever eaten.
The freezing temperatures meant the beer often needed defrosting.
The nice thing about the constant near-freezing temperatures was that the condiments could stay out as long as we wanted (Scott puts a chainsaw to good use and turns some fallen trees into more manageable firewood).
After Scott finished with the chainsaw, I noticed the sawdust on his boots and my hunter (photographer) instincts took over.
Paul had seen some elk tracks near our campsite and told Scott about them while we were celebrating Scott's kill. He wandered off to view them in the remaining daylight and had only gone a short way when he spotted a young muley buck a few hundred metres away. He ran back and told us, so Paul grabbed his rifle and the two of them headed off (three people sneaking up on a deer might be one too many, so I stayed where I was).
A short time later I heard the crack of Paul's rifle. I looked up and saw the deer jump awkwardly. I knew it had been hit and ran to join Paul and Scott with the now dead deer.
No sooner had I arrived, then Paul and Scott then went into auto-pilot, starting the process of gutting the deer. This is a bloody affair, but Paul went about his work without blinking an eye (he'd done it enough times). Even I winced when I his arms disappeared into the body cavity, so he could grab all the innards and drag them out. In fact, he reached in so far that Scott, who was removing the windpipe, cut one of Paul's fingers (he lived).
In a matter of minutes the job was done. Scott retrieved the heart and we could clearly see that one of Paul's shots had torn through the top of it. The animal would have been dead in seconds.
After gutting the deer, Paul washes his blood-covered arms in the snow.
Paul drags the carcass back to the campsite, where he deposited it next to Scott's deer.
Up until now I'd heard stories about retrieving a deer/elk 'several miles in'. Stories that involved cutting the carcass into quarters and lugging it out in one or more trips, or sledding the entire carcass out. This kill, a couple of hundred yards from the campsite, was a rarity. Except for the previous year, that is ...
Paul had been camped in exactly the same spot and Scott was once again visiting. It was late afternoon and they'd been sitting around the campfire when a young muley buck walked past the campsite - literally. Paul and Scott could have almost reached out and patted the thing. Scott got up and retrieved Paul's rifle. "Are you going to shoot it?" Scott had asked. It was almost too easy a kill and Paul thought about it before taking his rifle, leaning against the large boulder and taking the kill. It was even easier than what had just happened and we told Paul he should save a lot of hassle the following year, set up camp at the same spot and wait.
A second kill of the day demanded more celebrations around the campfire.
Thanksgiving was on Thursday, so we packed up and headed off on Wednesday afternoon. This meant readying the carcass for transportation. We wrapped it in a tarpaulin and laid it on the sled so we could slide it into the back of the campervan. Easier said than done and the first time we tried lifting the sled into the campervan the carcass slid out of the tarpaulin and onto the ground, with an air of elegant 'f*ck you' about it.
It took us two attempts, but we got the carcass into the back of the campervan.
Paul hangs the carcass under 'the Dome', where we spent Thanksgiving. Thankfully, there was a block and tackle for such purposes. Paul attached one end of a rope to the carcass and the other end to the back of the campervan, which was used to pull the deer into its hanging position.
The Dome, which Paul and his family built with their own hands during the 1970s, when geodesic dome houses were all the rage. It was located near to the hunting grounds and, the night before we left, it started snowing.
The view from the Dome (on a less snowy occasion).
Paul butchers the meat upon returning home (the board is used solely for such purposes).
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Words and photos, copyright Giulio Saggin 2018
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