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Well, there we were. Elk Season of ‘87. A haggard and ugly bunch made up of my Dad, Uncle, four cousins under the age of 18 and me. I was the oldest of the kids. We’d been hunting Tomichi for years by then, so everyone knew the lay of the land. We’d been up on this hunt for over a week and it was the last full day of hunting we had left in the season. Tomichi Dome, as dammed a place as you’ll ever walk, is absolutely beautiful. If you google maps Tomichi Dome, you’ll notice the sides of the mountain are gray. Well, that ain’t dirt. It’s rocks. Big rocks. Rocks bigger than a F-150. And in between those rocks? Holes. Deep ones. My dad fell into one of those holes a couple years earlier. He’s 6’2” and didn’t touch nothin’ but air. The only thing that kept him from disappearing was his rifle, which got hung up, and he was able to use it to pull himself up with the help of his brother, my Uncle Steve. Thank goodness for the Remington 700.
It was just after lunch and we were all sitting about midway up the “Lower Slide” which is on the North Side of the Dome and overlooks a hot water lake we like to fish out of. Nice trout in that lake.
I had just finished eating my second green chili burrito when I looked over to my right and down the hill at my Cousin Shannon who was pointing out over the rocks.
Damned if there weren’t a dozen head of elk on the slide, and they weren’t walking brother, they were flat out running across that slide.
My Dad, who was on my left side and uphill, saw them just about the same time I did, and he started calling, “All in a line! All in a line! Steven take the lead cow! Everyone else cover down!”
Now, you’d wonder if teenagers knew what the heck my dad was saying, but raised as we were, we understood completely what he wanted us to do.
Steven, or Little Steve as we called him, was way up the hill from me. He came down on the lead cow as told. Travis had the second shot, Tyler had third, Dad fourth, then me at five, followed by Sahnnon and finally Uncle Steve on the tail.
We were all lined up going up the hill and the damned Elk were running the same direction. It was a total broadside sight picture pretty as you please from less than seventy-five yards.
Little Steve touched off his first round and from then on, it was just a flurry of gunshots, followed by a lot of yelling and a dizzying amount of action in front of us.
About five seconds after the first shot I found myself running out across the rocks shooting as I ran. Just jacking that bolt as fast as I could. On my final shot, I saw the hide on a cow ruffle, and I knew I had hit her. She went down... and completely out of sight.
My hearing was shot, the adrenalin was pumping so hard I felt like my eyes were going to go black right then and there. After about twenty seconds or so, things started to clear up. The fog was lifting. I could hear my Dad laughing that laugh of his, kinda high pitched but very manly. He was bent over holding his knees. Uncle Steve was down the hill from me and facing me with his rifle on his hip kinda gun slinger like and was yelling at Travis to, “Simmer down son. Just simmer down.”
Pumped up? Oh yeah! Dad told everyone to safe their rifles. We did. Then he told us to start walking up towards the elk. He said if any of them were still living, we need to kill them so just be ready.
We walked about fifty yards and started to see elk. Dad started counting, realizing that had we killed more than we should have, well, that would be a bad bad thing. I knew exactly where mine went down and sure enough, she was right where I thought she would be, but not HOW I thought she would be. She went headfirst into a hole. All I could see of her was butt and hindlegs and I knew what that meant. Lots of work to pull her out of there. We killed five cows and the one cousin who was pissed because he didn’t pull a cow tag, actually got his bull... we think. We always say it was him because, you know, tags and all, but his tag went on the bull and everything was legal. Shannon was the only one who missed and after a little while she admitted she never pulled the trigger.
Then the work began. Pulling animals the size of a horse off a rockslide is no fun. It took us the rest of the day just to get them down onto solid ground after we dressed and quartered everything up. It was dark and it was frigid cold. We were all covered in blood and hair and stunk to high heaven like elk. It was amazing to me we never attracted a cat or a bear. I think it was because we were all making up a rap song called The Tomichi Dome Massacre and singing it as loud as we could. I wish I could remember the words. We even got Uncle Steve and Dad to pitch in on a verse or two!!
It got dark and down to around -5 or so degrees before we stopped working. We just couldn’t go on anymore, so headed down to the camp and ate a late dinner and went to bed. I got to sleep in the camper with Dad and Uncle Steve while the others stayed out in the big army tent we had with the stove in it. We could hear the kids still singing the Tomichi Dome Massacre rap song!
We woke up early the next day, which was our last day before Dad and Uncle Steve had to be home for work. In 1987, the only folks who had four wheelers and things like that where Texans and folks from Pittsburgh who came out our way to hunt. We weren’t them, so we humped everything down as far as a we could by hand. We got three of them down to the trucks before we had to break camp and drive back down to Pueblo. We hung the rest in the trees and came back for them the next weekend. We brought all the women with us and a couple more adults to help. It was snowing like crazy too. Those elk fed three families for over a year. Best time of my life!!!
I joined the Navy that spring and haven’t hunted elk since.