Hunting the High Country

 

My mountain-hunting days are over. I’m pretty sure of that. Recent back surgery, and its attendant recovery, has pretty much assured me of that.

Any big game Conrad takes in the future will of necessity be found in the flattest of country, or in my memory. I have become a “flatlander”, that most dreaded of beings to the old time mountain men. Sometimes flatlanders were referred to as “pork eaters”. Of course: There are no pigs in the Tetons.

It’s good that I got to hunt the mountains at all. Doing so was never a sure thing, only an intense desire that I made happen by force of will, not money per se. I hunted, high (no, not that way) in Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico; some of those places several times. It’s something every hunter ought to do at least once, if for no other reason than point of comparison.

There are other reasons, of course. There’s that damned, incomparably clean mountain air. My life would have been sensory incomplete without tubfuls of that every mountain morning I can remember.

Look yonder, and see that distant mountain hollow filled with a gold vein of yellow aspens tracing a stream birthed somewhere up near the top, and flowing like gold blood from the heart of some unseen mythic god of the mountains. And then, an elk bugles; a great white ram steps into the clear of an emerald pasture framed by a sky so blue it hurts your eyes to look into it; or a cinnamon brown, silver-tipped grizzly rambles into view like a lost, angry piece of heavy construction equipment, with an attitude afraid of nothing in the world.

The last time I was in one of these such places, Wyoming, Thoroughfare Wilderness, 2006, I dropped a nice five by five bull elk in a pine circled “park” just under ten thousand feet high; right at timberline. Just an hour before sundown, cold, night air was already filling the creek bottom where my guide, Bret McKinley and I were butchering my elk.

Butchering an animal the size of a domestic cow requires attention and focus so as not to cut off a finger, or such, and Bret and I were as quiet and intense as men working while racing coming darkness can be. Then darkness came while we were still working. We took turns holding a flashlight. Then something growled in the dark, right over there where the horses were tied out of the way of the work at the edge of the park, causing them to nicker nervously.

Then I asked a stupid question, one I already knew the answer to: “What was that?”

“A bear”, Bret said, not looking up from what had become a fresh pile of meat, still becoming such.

“Grizzly?”

“Yep. He smells the meat. He wants us to leave. We need to think about doing that.”

Which we did, Bret’s horse’s hooves, and that of the pack mule, striking sparks from the rocks in the trail back to camp; oats for the horses, and sirloin tips in brown gravy and onions for the men, and so many stars in that clear night over our heads it made you dizzy to look up into them. Could there possibly be a better life up there, somewhere, than what I had right here?

I don’t think so. High country. Way up yonder. Where I am right now, even with a bad back.

God gave memories to old men.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen