A Night On Elk Mountain

by Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel

Alpenglow flowed up the mountain. The green meadows faded to black still empty, as they had the evening before, and the evening before that. No bull, no cow, not even a mule deer came to feed.

"It's the moon," Galen said when we got back to camp. "It's the bright moon at night and the heat during the day. The elk are coming down after dark and going back up before first light." He looked at Peter and Kurt and me.

"Since they're not coming down, we'll go to them," he went on. "After we eat, we'll go up on a ridge and set up a cold camp."

I found the irony delicious. Peter and Kurt are both Lieutenant Colonels in the German army. They had been in the United States on REFORGER--Return of Forces to Germany--when they decided they wanted to go hunting. An NRA official steered them into our camp.

Our guide, Galen, had similar military experience. He served in Vietnam, and once walked partway across Afghanistan.

I'm a flatlander, born, raised, and still living in Florida. I'd been camping perhaps 10 times in my life, always in comfortable, commercial campgrounds.

To the three of them, the idea of going up a mountain in the dark and finding a place to sleep was as simple as walking across the street. For me, we might as well have been talking about rowing a boat to Africa.

Paul, our second guide, would stay behind and hunt with the other three members of our camp. Peter, Kurt, Galen and I would tackle the mountain.

By the time we finished supper, the moon was under full sail. Away from its brightness, hundreds of stars glittered in the night sky. An icy breeze turned our breath into plumes of steam.

I felt like someone's Christmas tree. Besides my rifle, I had a sleeping bag, a Bota bottle, camera gear, and a backpack full of miscellany Galen assured me we'd need. I had on so many layers of clothes I waddled like a kid in a snowsuit.

Galen dropped Kurt and Peter at the foot of one ridge; we would go up the next one. As soon as we started up the slope, I began to pant. Even in the cold air, I could feel little drops of sweat teasing their way down the middle of my back.

Halfway up the ridge, Galen stopped.

"Are you ready to shed some of that stuff?" he asked, clearly amused.

"No," I said. "Just...let me...breathe." We climbed on. I trailed farther and farther behind Galen, as my oxygen-starved lungs tried to keep up with the demands of my legs.

Finally he stopped in a small clearing. The cold, hard moonlight revealed a dozen or more small dead bushes whose broken branches would make good firewood. On either side the slope dropped away quickly, giving us a clear view of the ridge where Peter and Kurt walked through the darkness, and of the ridge on the other side of us as well.

"This is good," Galen said. "Hang your stuff in a tree and start gathering some wood."

I looked up at the stars. Only the brightest of them outshone the moon now.

"I've never slept under an open sky," I said softly. "You're kidding. Never?" Galen clearly was astonished. "Nope."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

He spread out the ground cloth for me, and the two-man tent for himself, then slid one sleeping bag into the tent. I stuffed the other sleeping bag into a space-blanket sack and laid it on the ground cloth, where it reflected the moonlight like a huge sliver worm.

By the time I gathered a double armful of dead limbs, Galen had a small fire going. From my backpack he produced a pan of water, two cups and a tea bag. I sat cross-legged in front of the fire, my face so hot it was sweaty, and my back so cold I shivered.

Galen asked how I'd managed to reach adulthood without ever sleeping completely in the open. I told him about growing up in the city, and how my family never camped or hunted. I told him a bit about my childhood, and about the little sister I had alternately fought with and loved, as most siblings do. He asked if we had become friends as adults.

I stared into the fire for a long time before I answered. It's a subject I rarely talk about. But a campfire against the night evokes its own intimacy; this time I did.

I had gotten the call on a Thursday afternoon. "Come as quickly as you can," my mother's voice said. I knew, of course, that Susan was gravely ill. For four years she had fought Hodgkin's Disease, a lymphatic cancer easily put into remission--most of the time.

Now she was dying. The only hope was a bone-marrow transplant: a hail-Mary pass from far down field.

As her only sibling, I was her sole chance for a perfect match. We already knew Susan and I shared the same rare blood type; that gave us all hope we'd have a match.

But tests showed we were as different as if we were unrelated. There would be no transplant.

Over the next six weeks I spent hours on the telephone, talking to clinics from Oregon to England, combing local bone-marrow donor lists for an out-of-family match. Even if we found one, we still faced locating a clinic willing to do the transplant; Emory handled only in-family operations.

While I searched for a miracle, I watched Susan balloon to twice her normal size from steroids. Just as quickly, she shrank to a frail skeleton of herself as the doctors discontinued the steroids and put her on a diuretic. And through it all she hallucinated--terrible waking nightmares that spun their web of horror around all of us.

We found no miracle. On a sunny Monday afternoon, two months short of her 28th birthday, Susan's battered body gave up.

For years I had understood that my parents would grow old and die. It's the natural order of things. But I expected Susan and I to be there for one another--to share in each others' families and careers, to bury our parents together, to grow old as a team. Now she was gone.

I fell silent, wondering what Galen thought of the story, if he appreciated what it is like to lose a sibling so young. He was quiet so long I thought he wasn't going to say anything at all.

Then I heard him take a deep breath. He told me about his brother Albert.

Albert had been the older brother whom Galen-the-child had adored, the one who taught him to hunt and fish, the one who encouraged him to be whatever he could. Like Susan, Albert died early in life, cut down by the same insidious specter of cancer.

Galen and I laughed together that night, for the joy the two of them--my sister, his brother--had brought into our lives. And we wept, too, for the tragedy of bright promise unfulfilled. Why is it the best so often are taken young? Does such a flame burn so bright that it is spent before its time?

We pondered those questions and others there in the dark on the mountain. At last the fire began to die. The hands of my watch stood at 2:30. It was past time for sleep.

Galen slid into the tent still spread out flat on the ground and disappeared. I wormed my way into my sleeping bag--and discovered I had a problem.

When I crawled into the bag, it had slid about four feet down the slope. My head and shoulders were still on the ground cloth, but the rest of my body was lying on bare broken shale.

I was thoroughly chilled, and the idea of getting back out of the sleeping bag didn't appeal to me at all. But I didn't want to sleep on bare ground either.

I rolled over onto my stomach, drew up my legs, dug my toes into the ground, and pushed. I gained about six inches. Twice more I repeated the procedure. I was now halfway back onto the ground cloth.

The tent next to me rustled.

"What are you doing?" Galen asked, peering over the edge of the nylon fabric. Then he started laughing. "You look like a big silver caterpillar!"

We both went into a fit of giggles that lasted until I finally wormed my way back up onto the ground cloth. He was still laughing when I dropped off to sleep.

I couldn't figure out what woke me. In the moonlight, my watch read 4:50; I'd slept a little more than two hours. Dawn was another two hours away.

Crunch, crunch. The sound of footsteps on a shaley slope. Now I knew what woke me; what was causing it? A coyote? A bear?

The footsteps came nearer. I tensed, expecting any moment to feel something pounce on my feet. I tried to decide whether to say something to wake Galen, or just stay very still. He snored on, unaware.

Crunch, Crunch-crunch.

The footsteps began to recede, moving on up the mountain. I was so tired I simply went back to sleep.

An hour and a half later, I woke again. Orange light glowed in the east; it was almost legal shooting time.

We crawled out into a frosty morning. I told Galen about the footsteps in the night. He began to circle the campsite, looking for tracks.

"Here," he said, pointing. "And here." A set of fresh elk tracks showed clearly in the early morning light. An elk had walked within 30 feet of us while we slept.

We followed the tracks up the mountain, moving quietly, peering over ridges, trying to anticipate where the animal had gone. Finally, just below the crest of a ridge, we found a still-warm scat; we were tracking a bull.

"He's just a few minutes ahead of us," Galen whispered. We eased up to the crest of the ridge and peeked over. The tracks led straight down--into deep, dark timber that ran up the next ridge and beyond.

Galen shook his head. "That's probably the closest anyone's going to get to an elk all week," he said softly. "But at least you heard him when he walked by."

We climbed back down the mountain to eat a quick breakfast before we picked up Kurt and Peter. As we walked, I thought again about our conversation of the night before.

After Susan died, I lived for a long time with fear--the fear that something would happen to me, too, leaving us both with our lives unlived. But then the fear began to motivate me, to make me reach out and grasp everything I can from life while I have the chance.

And I thought that at some point each of us makes a decision--we either take the responsibility to make things happen in our lives, our we let opportunities pass by unheeded. The only way to avoid looking back and saying "I wish I had..." is to tackle the mountain, to savor the fear that comes with walking close to the edge, because that is the way you know, when the end of your life comes, that you have not just existed but have truly lived.


Copyright (c) 1997 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.

Home | Library | Hunting | Big Game Hunting