31-Day Elk Hunt: Part 3, Coming Home

I slid behind the rifle, scanning the dark timber. Silence reclaimed the woods. Then, suddenly, he was just there. He didn’t walk out of the trees so much as materialize, standing motionless at the edge of the willows in the bottom of the drainage. Before I could get him in the scope, he stepped down into the head-high willows, and I caught only a glimpse of his frame from my elevated position. Wide, I thought, but in the dimming light, I assumed he was the smaller six-point Chris and I had seen earlier that week.

The silence returned, longer and heavier than before. A twig snapped to my far left, behind a stand of young pines, and fear flared in my chest. If he’d bypassed the waterhole and worked down the left side of the drainage, he’d briefly appear in a small opening before disappearing up a trail that led straight over the ridge behind me. I stood, gathering my pack to make a run to intercept him. The memory of my failure in the river bottom flashed before me, and I thought of Uncle George’s promise to be watching over my shoulder. I didn’t want him to see me make the same mistake twice. I forced myself to sit back down and trust the spot.

I raised my binoculars, burning holes into the dark willows, and found nothing. As I lowered the glass and my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw the hindquarters of an elk standing behind a solitary juniper just seventy yards below me. I swapped binoculars for the rifle, centering the crosshairs on his shoulder as he stepped out, his head still obscured. I could only see the last couple of points. His main beams looked short with weak 5th and 6ths. It’s the small six-point, I thought. I heard Chris’s voice in my head:“Don’t shoot the small one.”

I resolved to let him walk, already planning the next day’s sit, but then he took a few steps forward, clearing the willows, and raising his head in the last remnant of daylight. His front tines were long and heavy, sweeping outward into a remarkably wide frame.

This was not the small six-point, though I was still convinced it couldn’t be Wide Guy. He began to quarter away, taking his first steps toward the dark timber. If he took three more steps, he’d be gone forever. This was a mature bull, and I’d told myself early in the season that any mature bull taken in this exact spot would mean more to me than a bigger one elsewhere. The years of scouting, the early mornings, and the family history of this place converged into a single moment. I set the crosshairs on the back of his ribcage, anticipating the bullet’s path to his far shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle roared. I cycled the bolt in one fluid, practiced motion, and re-acquired him in the glass. He’d run thirty yards and stopped, head lowered, legs wobbling. He stumbled right, took three unsteady steps, and vanished behind a clump of junipers. A heavy crash echoed up the draw, followed by a long, absolute silence, the same silence I’d heard in the river bottom on September 21st, except this time, instead of panic and regret, I felt the calm finality of a completed circle.

My hands began to shake. I pulled out my phone and typed two words to my wife, “Shot Out.” It was the same tongue-in-cheek message I sent her five years earlier when I harvested my bighorn sheep, a phrase left over from my days on the tactical team. I messaged Chris next with my coordinates.

By the time I scrambled down the slope, the light was fading fast. I found him piled up at the edge of the willows, his head resting against a mossy log. I sat down beside him alone, preparing myself for the work ahead. I propped my phone on my pack to grab a photo or two before the light was gone.

Paul Lewis with his stud elk.

Chris arrived with his frame pack and a fresh knife just as I finished caping the front shoulders. My stepdaughter, Brooklynn, had been studying taxidermy and had begged me to bring home an elk cape for her first shoulder mount. I promised her that if I took a bull in our home hills, it would be hers to mount.

Montana is grizzly country, and quartering an elk after dark in many of the state’s western ranges is a hyper-vigilant, nerve-wracking exercise. But grizzlies are rare enough in this particular area of the state that they aren’t something you actively worry about, and it was a welcome change to work by headlamp without the constant paranoia caused by every snapping twig.

We worked with a relaxed, easy rhythm, knowing our warm camper was close, down a well-worn game trail. Chris and I made two full trips that night, a rear quarter each on the first walk out, then the fronts and the loose meat, backstraps, tenderloins, and trim on the second. By midnight, all of it was safely stowed at the camper.

The next morning, we made one final easy hike to retrieve the head and cape. The morning sun gave Chris the chance to get some daylight photos of the antlers.

Paul and Chris were able to get the bull out in two manageable trips.

Once loaded up, Chris headed home, and I stayed behind to clean up the property before the mountain winter locked us in. It was already November, and in Montana winter doesn’t knock before it kicks down the door.

The true climax of the story didn’t happen on the mountain, though; it happened in the gravel driveway of my home outside Belgrade. My wife, Jen, met me at the truck with an ear to tear smile and helped me lower the heavy head from the tailgate. I was still operating under the assumption that I’d shot the little brother to our target bull, a respectable animal, but not him.

Jen knelt in the gravel, studying the antlers quietly. “This is Wide Guy,” she said flatly.

“No, it’s not,” I replied, the self-proclaimed family elk expert. “The body’s too small. His fifths are weak. It’s a smaller six-point.”

Jen didn’t argue. She pulled out her phone, opened our library of summer trail-camera videos, and we sat there in the driveway comparing them to the animal at our feet. There was no denying it, the distinct, one-inch sticker point beneath the left brow tine, the aggressively downturned sixth point on the left main beam, the sharply hooked brows, and exceptionally long, sweeping thirds. It was him.

The exact bull we’d watched for three years. When Brooklynn skinned out his head, she pointed out his worn teeth and guessed him at eight and a half years old, later confirmed by the tooth I sent to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

The trail cameras had misled us, but only because they couldn’t capture his context. His small, weathered body had acted as an optical illusion, making his antlers look like a giant’s. On the ground, he looked smaller, beaten down by winter and age.

I realized then that I hadn’t been chasing a monster, I’d found a survivor. In the mountains of Montana, survival is a true trophy. When my coworkers Janis and Corey scored him at the office later that week, the tape stopped at 331 inches, including that little one-inch sticker under the brow.

Every hunter lives with a quiet contradiction. We spend months, sometimes years, pursuing an animal with an intensity that borders on obsession. We learn their bedding spots, waterholes, and rhythms of their lives. We project our own desires for wildness onto them, transforming them into legendary figures. If we’re successful, we bring that legend to an end.

As I sit in my living room, looking at Wide Guy hanging on the wall, I feel an undeniable pride. I spent 31 days chasing elk and took my target bull in the exact mountain range where I caught brook trout as a child, on the slopes where my parents’ ashes rest.

But beneath that pride lies a lingering sense of loss. I’ll never see him slip across the screen of my trail camera again. I’ll never search the spring snowdrifts of the surrounding gulches hoping to find his sheds. I’ll never wonder if he’s bedded in the timber above our camper. By harvesting him, I solved the mystery of Wide Guy, but I also erased it.

For me, hunting has never been about the simple act of killing. It’s about the preservation of our connection to the land, the exploration of wild spaces, and the honoring of those who walked these ridges before us. Wide Guy is gone from the mountains, but his story remains etched into the timber of that home draw, a permanent part of the landscape that shaped my past and continues to call me home.

Paul Lewis back at home with Wide Guy.

There’s a quiet code among hunters when it comes to dropping unit numbers, and even with the names stripped from these pages, anyone who knows these mountains will likely recognize the dirt. I didn’t write this to advertise a destination, but to dismantle a myth: this coveted tag isn’t a golden ticket, and it’s certainly no guarantee. Many who finally pull this permit treat it like an easy harvest, only to go home humbled by public pressure, UTV traffic, and the sheer size of the unit. This story isn’t a map to a honey hole; it’s an honest look at my ties to the land, and what it actually takes to hunt a landscape that anyone can access, but very few truly understand. The country is real, the history is real, but the exact draws, parks, and waterholes remain hidden except to those who’ve put in the miles.