Five Guns, Five Elk

Some days in rural Arizona begin particularly well. At the intersection where I turn to go to work, I was greeted by the sight of a bald eagle perched in a cottonwood tree. Those big raptors nest up by the high mountain lakes, but a few spend the winter down here at 7,000 feet. In a pasture just west of my home, I’d seen one feeding on a dead elk and I was surprised to see its presence tolerated by the three coyotes that were also there.

Elk come down from the heavily forested mountain slopes into the outskirts of town via Dry Canyon and graze on a well-kept pasture. You can see them appear just before dusk, perhaps 20 or so at first, then by 10’s until well over 100 are in sight. Only about five bigger bulls (nothing over the 370 class), a few rag horns and spikes and something like 18 to 20 cows per big bull frequent this particular location.

There are some better-quality bulls in this part of the state. A rack that dry-scored 411 came off the White Mountain Apache Reservation in 1996, and a 480 bull was harvested there this past season. Unit 9 by the Grand Canyon Village produced a 9x11, and a handicapped hunter using a cross bow got a 414 bull in mid-October this year.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation calendar indicates that Arizona is home to only about 35,000 elk. However, it seems like most of them are right here in Unit 1. My friends among the cattle ranchers complain that most are grazing on their cow pastures and hay meadows, but I feel truly blessed to live where elk do.

My wife and I have taken up elk watching for pleasure and education. The more we know about these large deer, the better equipped we’ll be next season. Even so, I maintain that elk are not really predictable. I have had them run right at me even though my sweaty body odor was in their faces. I’ve also had them continue feeding even after a cow has seen me and barked an alarm.

I’m really just an amateur black powder hunter. Jack O’Connor had killed 35 of his 37 elk with a .270 before I ever saw an elk over gun sights. My first one, in Wyoming, was a 7x7 taken with a 275 Holland & Holland, of which O’Connor wrote, he was “breathless until he got one.” The next was a whopping big 6x6 that yielded 381 pounds of boned-out meat taken with a black powder rifle here in Arizona. Since then, I’ve not harvested another elk with anything else. My modest black powder record now stands at two bulls and three cows, each taken with different black powder firearms.

In December, 1983, I left Laramie, Wyoming, in a blizzard and arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona, in a heavy snowstorm and established residency within six months in order to apply for one of 100 muzzleloader bull tags in Unit 7 north of Flagstaff. Being of the opinion that large animals require large projectiles, I acquired a 12-bore Magnum Cape Gun from Dixie Gun Works. Yes, it was a smooth bore, but I had a plan to get close. My plan included a friendly Arizona Game and Fish Law Enforcement Investigator who knew where to hunt, and how to bugle. To enhance sighting, I put a solid rib with rifle sights onto the smoothbore.

I practiced shooting offhand with full loads of 100 grains of 2Fg powder until I could keep those .69 caliber lead pumpkins on a paper plate at 85 yards. It wasn’t necessary. At exactly 8 a.m. a 6x6 bull responded to bugling and brush-whacking, and walked to within 24 paces. He might have come even closer, but I couldn’t stand it and pulled – not squeezed – the trigger. He put on the brakes, turned and disappeared in the cloud of smoke. Did I mention that I was excited? I was so excited in my haste to reload that I stuck a ball about six inches down the bore of the Cape Gun, which I had never done before.

It wasn’t necessary to reload, either. The .69 pure lead ball had entered midline low on the neck, ricocheted off the seventh cervical vertebra and down through the heart. The bull dropped 26 paces from where it had been hit, and was dead when we got to it. The Game and Fish agent was prepared to administer a coup-de-grace from his ankle holstered .38 “snubbie,” but the 100-grain black powder load had been effective. It was a good thing too, with me having tied up the muzzleloader, and the ground devoid of spoor. That roundball had parted the hide, which closed over the entrance and left no blood trail. Nor did the animal bleed from nose or mouth, and there was no exit wound to leak.

The next time I was drawn for an Arizona elk it was a cow, and I had a custom .54 caliber rifle made with an 1841 Mississippi barrel. It threw roundballs accurately, but it was even more accurate with 450-grain, Minie-style bullets from a mould for the .54 Sharps carbine, using 110 grains of 2Fg.

So, when I was blessed to draw one of 100 cow tags in Unit 6 near Flagstaff, my strategy that year was to hunt in the Le Barron Timber Sale area on the edge of town where hunting pressure was nil. Elk came to a lick near my tree stand, but left before legal shooting light.

My sights were all over several fat cows – but legal is legal and illegal is illegal – so I waited until legal light and began trailing the little herd as they moved away, the bulls bugling all the while. Evidently, there were at least five bulls engaged in vocal challenges. Not that I could harvest one of those anyway, they just kept me apprised of where the quarry was.

By 9 a.m., I had blundered into the herd and spooked them. At 6-foot, 2 inches I am too tall to see under tree limbs well; I must learn to walk quietly in a crouch. At straight-up 10 a.m., with the wind in my face and a logger busy felling a tall Ponderosa pine about 100 yards to my right, I looked uphill at a fat cow that was quizzically looking back. I dropped onto one knee, aimed and fired. The range proved to be 42 paces. Shot location and load proved adequate, and she dropped about 80 yards farther off.

The Minie ball entered just behind the right shoulder, broke a two-inch section off a rib, angled up through the lungs and liver, and stopped just under the hide on the off side, having expanded from .535 to .85-inch. She raised her head but couldn’t move when I approached. Another Minie through the brain and it was time to go to work. I’ll spare the details of how I became not lost, but terribly confused about where my truck was parked for the better part of four hours, and that was on the edge of Flagstaff!

Elk tags are not sold over the counter, and it was not until 1996, that I was lucky enough to draw one of 900 cow tags here in Unit 1. This was for a center-fire hunt and the last day of the season dawned with me using a Dixie Gun Works (DGW) 1874 Sharps Silhouette rifle in 40-65.

After working extensively with the rifle, I finally doped out an accurate load using Federal Magnum primers, 56 grains of 2Fg, an over-powder card wad, and the then-new DGW “Bore Rider” bullet (which weighed 412 grains as cast from the mould), sized to .410 and lubed with SPG Lube in an old Lyman 55 lubricator-sizer.

The hunt was on the Arizona Game and Fish-managed Sipe White Mountain elk refuge. I found a little cow hanging back as the remainder of the herd drifted west into the wind. It was like a deliberate offering. The animal just waited and waited as I eased up to within 55 yards. At the shot, the little cow just dropped. The .40 bullet entered low in the lungs, passed through the heart, and broke the leg on the off-side. I had hoped to recover the bullet, but was plenty satisfied to have the elk down and dead with one shot. That might have been the first elk taken with Dixie’s Sharps and probably the first taken with the “Bore Rider” bullet.

The next hunt on the Sipe Elk Refuge was with a lovely antique Scottish double 16-bore roundball rifle by Thomas Kennedy of Kilmarnock, Scotland. Arizona does not allow double rifles for muzzleloading, but my tag was number 388 for center fire, and a double muzzleloader was permitted.

Kennedy was a well-known rifle maker and rifle shot. He was so talented that he was appointed “Maker to HRH Prince Albert” in 1841. The gun weighed eight pounds, had Forsyth rifling with wide shallow lands, narrow grooves, and a twist rate of 1 turn in 120 inches. I had Jamie Andrews at Dixie Gun Works make a .665 roundball mould that cast a ball weighing 448 grains.

Expecting it to devour powder, I started by loading four drams of Cleanshot and couldn’t hit a 50-gallon drum at 50 feet! Advice from black-powder guru, Ross Seyfried, was 2½ drams. That load consistently produced “snake eyes” out to 75 yards. Perhaps all those extra leaf sights were for shots at game more than 75 yards off.

Scouting on Sipe found a saddle where the elk came off the lowland up into the forest. Overlooking the well-used trail, I established a ground blind and settled in to wait at 6:05 a.m. opening day. By 7:30 a.m. I had cooled off a lot. By 8 a.m. I was shivering, but moved no more than my eyes when I heard the tell-tale clatter of hooves coming up hill.

Two large elk appeared; the lead bull had larger antlers, and although we don’t eat antlers, size matters, so I chose him. I squeezed the left trigger, eased the left hammer back, and settled the sight just behind the right shoulder. The elk was only 33 paces away, and the big ball collapsed the bull in his tracks, down on his right side with his feet uphill. A second shot was not necessary; then the work started.

I tagged and “gralloched” (Gaelic for “eviscerated”) the animal and was able to back my little Chevy Luv pickup close enough to hoist the elk up onto a massive Ponderosa pine limb, back under it, and let it down into the bed.

My last cow elk hunt also involved a fine rifle from the British Isles, (and made by another man who had a Royal Warrant from HRH Prince Albert) dated 1838. This was a single barrel percussion rifle by Charles Jones, whose shop was located at 26 St. James Street, and was a very short walk from Buckingham Palace. It took a .535, .015 patched roundball, 80 grains of Cleanshot, and 4Fg packed in the nipple under the percussion cap. Shots from a clean bore were always six inches high and six inches right, so hunting was done with a dirty bore. It weighed 8.75 pounds, had a 14¾ length of pull, 29¾-inch full octagon barrel with a twist rate of 1 in 46 inches.

Permit number 17 of 30 licenses allowed for a depredation hunt on the Arizona Game and Fish Department fish hatchery (less than 15 miles from my home) arrived, and I was eager to scout for recent activity as well as find a site for a tree stand. Two early selections proved to be wrong, so it eventually went into a scraggly juniper tree, which was 40 yards from a well-used trail.

Who knows how many times I had fallen asleep between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. when a coyote barked and woke me up in time to see a small cow on the trail. I eased the hammer back and settled the front sight just behind her right leg, squeezed off the shot and she disappeared in a cloud of smoke. She had bled out by the time I got to her. A very friendly Game and Fish employee brought over his ATV and drove her to a large oak by the parking lot, where she was eviscerated and loaded into my rig for the trip to the butcher shop. She weighed only 198 pounds but provided some very welcome fresh meat.

Five elk taken with five different black-powder guns that have provided a lifetime of good memories; not to mention some excellent eating, as well. For the hunter willing to actually hunt and stalk, there is nothing more satisfying than filling a tag with a black-powder firearm, especially when one is blessed enough to use a different one each time!