Arizona Elk

"Well, get some," said the editor. "Get some pictures of 'em right out in the woods."

Simple. I gathered up my cameras and took off.

"Just find where they're running and sit down and wait," said Gene Holder, game ranger on the Mogollon Rim.

He sort of indicated I could get pictures of them right up the draw.

Gene's house a square roomed log cabin-sits up on the edge of a mountain park. Big spruce tower behind it and surround the park. In the upper end, the forest closes down and aspen fill the open places. It is here the elk come to graze in the evening.

I picked an old spruce and sat down to wait.

I checked the light with my meter. It was down then and as I waited it dropped off rapidly and finally was gone. There would be no pictures that night, but I waited.

Some time during that mysterious hour when day insects sign off on their broadcast and the night insects tune in, I heard the first step behind me. An elk had crossed the old wire fence around the clearing. "Don't move," had been Gene's last warning. I didn't.

A queer new tearing sound at my back chilled me. It wasrepeated, and again, again, again. Each time closer, then suddenly it fell into place. What would an elk be doing? Just grazing. Biting off clumps of grass as it walked up behind me. Finally, it sounded as if it were eating right out of my hip pocket that close. I sat rigid.

Charles C. Niehuis

Finally it walked into my angle of vision. A cow elk. She saw me then, almost the same instant. We were both frozen in position. Me my back to the tree and chin on my wishbone, as I had slumped down during the long wait. Shewith one foot poised for a step, like a pointer dog holding a covey of quail, her head turned my way, ears pivoted forward trying to catch a sound, any sound, and nostrils drinking air, tasting it. A full minute passed, another, but not one muscle quivered. Then she took another step and again was a carved statue. My finger crept along the edge of the lens, sliding the diaphragm wide open. Moving, very slowly, I adjusted the shutter for a time exposure. Then I coked it a tiny soundyet immediately she coughed a warning whistle.

Half the forest seemed to fall down behind me as the rest of the herd of which I was unaware wheeled and ran. The cow, off on a long swinging trot, was right behind. They hit the smooth wire fence and it screeched half way around Gene's 100 acres as it tightened in the staples. The elk were gone.

Now Gene had a "tame" deer, a two year old buck, "MacArthur", a fighter too. He'd rear up on his hind legs and strike deftly with his knife-sharp hooves. He'd fight anything on two legs or four.

Mac followed me out the next afternoon and watched as I set up reflectors loaded with flash bulbs and concentrated on the path of the elk. I made elaborate preparations and stretched my rubber-insulated extension cords to the blind I had built. Finally everything was ready and I settled down to wait.

Mac browsed around, and as I idly watched him he suddenly threw up his head, listening. His action indicated visitors. The elk were coming out of the forest several cows and a magnificent bull.

Mac went on about his browsing. He nibbled a leaf, then a twig, took a bite of weeds and then found my flash-bulb extension cord. He sniffed it, nipped it and then took a big mouthful. There wasn't enough slack so he could chew and watch the coming elk at the same time, so he threw up his head and pulled down the lights.

I am probably one of the few men who ever kicked a buck deer in the end opposite its horns. Mac didn't run; he turned for argument. The elk? Oh yes, they left.

Just like any male, the bull elk is more easily observed and photographed during the mating season than any other. During this time he takes on some rather gentlemanly habitsspruces up, so to speak.

Not many evenings later, I was sitting in the same blind and as dusk fell a bull elk in the aspens at the head of the park bugled his challenge.

It's a disturbing sound in that mysterious time of halflight when all shadows seem to come alive and move. It begins with a deep and hoarse note running up the scale until it ends in a long, piercing whistle. This is cut off sharply and the whole is ended with two or three coughing grunts. Once in a while, if it is handy, he'll straddle a dead tree with his antlers and rattle an additional challenge to any other swaggering swain that might have ideas of cutting in.

And this old boy was a gentleman during the love making moon. Yes. He let his lights of love enter the open park first. They grazed toward me and past me. When everything appeared perfectly safe he came mincing out of the forest.

Just across from the blind a cow found a tidbit and stopped to grub it out. Mister Big came sidling up, head next to hers. A peculiar high-pitched, throaty noise, made with a closed mouth, barely reached me across the park. But she would have none of his blandishments and trotted on ahead.

He threw up his head and bugled a challenge. Far away, over the next ridge in Buck Springs Draw, he got his answer. But the old Casanova didn't really want to start trouble. He just ignored his distant rival and trailed his harem, already passing the water hole.

When he reached the hole, he, like Tommy just turned teen-age, must have had an unwonted yen for cleanliness. I doubt if he ever takes a bath at any other time of the year again the male but he stepped in and wallowed. As he came up he shook himself like a dog. Not once, but twice, he laved himself. I made my plans. The next night my blind would be within camera range of that water-hole, and lights up.

Also staying in the cabin were a party of first generation Italians, and friends of Gene. They listened with enthusiasm to my observation, especially one, Andres.

"Ah! Tomorrow night, Charlie, I go with you to see the bull."

Andy and I were under a gray canvas covered with brush. The front was open and we sat with legs stretched out in front, silent. We sat so long we could feel earthworms burrowing through the ground two feet underneath.

The bath was drawn and the master was about to step forth. In fact, he was roaring to his maids who were ushering him into the park.

Andy squirmed, "The ant, he is in my pants," he complained, as he eased himself a degree to the left. His fingers slid underhim and a stick the size of a match came out. He handled it like a log, and undoubtedly it had felt like one.

The bull bugled again.Andy was a longshoreman from Pedro and given to expressing himself, and volubly.

"Damn! Listen to that big-a-son-of-a-dog." He's-a-crazy!"

The bull assured us he was by hooking at an imaginary rival.

I urged quiet a picture of a bull elk taking a bath with ladies-in-waiting looking on!

Andy subsided, squirmed, wriggled a hairsbreadth and twisted an ant to death in the folds of his pants.

You have to go away in deep after the elusive Elk and it isn't the kind of country wherein the tenderfoot or the faint-hearted should venture.

The bull came on with all his exasperating slowness. To the left of us, a finger of the forest felt out into the park. It was then that a doe deer minced out. Beside her toe-danced a late-born fawn.

She froze. The blind was foreign to her. So was that ever-so-slight movement as we inched out heads around until we could focus out of the corner of an eye.

"Ha!" whispered Andy in sotto voice that carried to the cow elk, "Look there, she is a deer!"

My restraining hand only made him aware of another ant which he cornered half way to his knee.

The cow elk was poised near the pool, ears forward, tuned to catch the next creak of our neck bones if we turned our heads again. But there was still a chance. The bull was in his pompous stride.

But the deer fawn, full of the sprightliness of youth, bounced away from beside his mother, capered around in a Disney movement, then back, and enthusiastically set to work on his own private milk bar.

Andy, with true longshoreman delicacy and appreciation, spoke up with a voice that did carry back to the wharves of San Pedro: "Golla damn, Charlie, the little son-of-a-dog, ain't-a he cute!" The picture fell apart, shattered.

The cows coughed the warning. The bull retired faster than they, and the fawn and doe disappeared in the forest dark.

The next afternoon, with Andy stepping in my tracks, we were working up Buck Springs Draw. He, fully contrite for his blunder of the previous evening, was dogged in a display of patience and silence as I hunted the elk sign. We had gone quite a way, in the open, when I felt a gentle, apologetic tug at my shirt-sleeve.

"Charlie I think if we go into the brush, the elk she not see us, eh?" he suggested.

The forest was full of dead twigs, logs, fallen branches, all obstacles to clumsy, city-trained feet. But we moved up into cover and walked along slowly. Two or three steps at a time and keeping the open draw in sight, stopping often to look around, and being quiet.

We were nearing the end of the draw when Andy touched me gently on the shoulder. I stopped and turned just my head. His dark brown eyes glistened and his stubby, powerful finger, curved with long hours of heavy lifting, pointed ahead.

"She is a cow."

He half crouched, pulling me down, pointing. Then I saw her. She was lying under the sheltering branches of a pine. Her brown and grayish white blended with the filtering sunlight on the dead pine needle covered earth.

We watched, not moving.

Suddenly, after some little time, a bull bugled back of her. Andy gripped my elbow tightly. We went flat to the ground. Halfway, out in the park, a cluster of seedling pine was between us and the cow. We began creeping. By lying flat, head down, we had the additional cover of eight or more inches of grass.

Measuring-worming over the ground is hard work, especially if you are not used to it; but we made it. Right into the middle of the clump, with a six inch sapling trunk to hide behind.

Gene Holder's warning had been: "If you don't move you can be right out in the open. They won't scare unless they wind you."

The breeze was cool in our faces after that crawl, and we just lay there.

The bull bugled again; he was closer. Then our cow stood up. Behind her we saw some movement in the forest. It was the black legs of elks. They had been there all the time, looking like black-barked sapling pines.

Three cows stepped out of the forest at once. Then came a yearling elk, and still behind, out of sight, was the bull, heading his harem in front of him. Followed two more, another yearling wearing spikes. Finally eleven were in the open grazing toward us. Still behind, still out of sight, was the bull. We got one glimpse of him as he trotted across an open space, head up and antlers back.

All this had taken time. The light was low, for the sun was already behind the ridge on the west of Buck Springs Draw and giving its last caress to the tallest trees on the east