The Hunt

I woke up wondering if Larry is going on the elk hunt this winter in Wyoming.

He may already be in the woods above the South Fork near Cody, ready to hunt, to take an elk home and live off the meat all year. But he may not be, being as old as I am and beginning to feel as I feel certain physical feelings in his knees and his hips.

The year I went with him it snowed almost straight for 3 nights and 4 days.

We left his house in Powell at 3 a.m. under icy moonlight to fetch the horses where he leaves them to roam in an alfalfa farmer's field near town.  Larry showed me the carcass of the oldest horse of the three; he'd had to shoot the horse that spring and had left him right where he'd fallen.

We finally got the horses into the trailer and headed into Cody, stopping at the trading post. Larry wanted me to see the 16-point elk he'd shot a couple of years ago that was mounted on the back wall of the store. Peering through the window I could see the head of the monstrous buck, its eyes wide open in wonder, like it was seeing the end of the world.

By the time we got through Cody and out to the South Fork it was daylight, as light as it could be on a bitter late November morning in upstate Wyoming  The horses saddled, the packs full, we rode across the river and up the steep bank to the other side, on into the wilderness from which there was no turning back. I knew it was below freezing and that I was on the back of a horse, but otherwise I didn't know what to expect, I'd never been on a hunt before.