By Jeff Waring, Publisher

SPOUTS OF SMOKE puffed and swirled, spreading a warm haze over the mountain tops, hiding the Tetons. No fewer than three forest fires burned in nearby drainages, and a key road had been shut off, but I couldn't smell the smoke as we dropped down off the ridge into big timber.

In the shimmer of mid-afternoon heat, a bull had answered Bowhunter Editor Dwight Schuh's pleading bugle as we ate our lunches and sipped from our hydration packs. "You just never know," Dwight said, shaking his head. We were well into our second week of hunting, and this was the first bull to answer our calls. Why would a bull stay silent all morning and then have something to say? Who knows? "That's why you keep calling," Dwight concluded.

He and cameraman Steven Jones quickly gathered their gear, threw on their packs, and began picking their way down a steep slope toward the bull. I shuffled along behind the two experienced elk men, steeling my nerves and hoping the bottoms of my feet wouldn't sheer off.

Massive thunderclouds to the west had begun to rumble, and the wind was churning. Several times we turned away from the bull to get the wind in our favor. The changing wind would make this difficult, but the bull was still coming. So we were still going. In fact, the bull was coming hard.

As he bellowed and chortled below us, we raced into place. At Dwight's direction, I slid ahead of Steven and hastily swept clean a spot on a sidehill game trail. Steven hunkered behind a fallen spruce tree, while Dwight called from thick cover above us.

With horse-like strides the bull silently crossed a brushy bench below us and angled to the right and uphill. And then suddenly he stood 25 yards away behind a large spruce blow-down, where I could see only his antlers and head. My arrow bounced rhythmically on the rest. Stay calm!

Then the bull began to rake a tall, spindly sapling. With no way to thread an arrow into the bull, I simply watched in amazement as he thrashed the little tree. Then I felt a dreaded, cool wisp of air upon my neck, and in seconds the bull was gone.

"Well, there you go," Dwight said as we regrouped.

"That was your chance," Steven chuckled.

They were just kidding, I think, but I felt some emotional cord draw tight in the pit of my stomach. They could be right, I thought. Had a breath of wind ended my one-and-only chance, all the while cruelly stoking my fires within?

I just couldn't get over how quickly the bull had called off the fight. One nose full of our scent, and he simply turned off, dissipating into the forest like a puff of smoke.

WE'D ARRIVED MORE THAN a week earlier, on August 31, the day before the archery season opener. I'd flown from my home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Dwight's home base in Boise, Idaho. He and I made the 10-hour drive with Dwight's Dodge pickup, truck camper, and a trailer loaded with Dwight's three llamas. We would use the llamas for setting up spike camps and packing meat - we hoped. On the way, we picked up Steven in Jackson, Wyoming.

Driving toward our unit near Pinedale, Wyoming, we could see fires burning in several drainages, and the Forest Service had warned us that the fires had closed some major access roads. A heavy pall of smoke hung over the mountains.

Arriving in our unit we set up a base camp consisting of Dwight's camper and a 10x12 wall tent equipped with a woodstove that proved welcome on rainy days and chilly mountain mornings.

Base camp.

Continued -- click on page link below.