We arrived in the unit in the afternoon Friday, saw a bunch of deer with a few bucks. We slept in the truck up on the mountain, it was so cold my temperature gauge stopped reading correctly! We ran the truck all night to keep the heater on, it was well worth the $12 in gas it burned idling let me tell you
.As it started to get light, I started scanning the area with the spotting scope and right as we got to legal shooting hours, I spotted a few cows a mile away below us. We drove down and parked, then hiked out the ridge and there they were! 4 Cows calmly feeding at 250 yards below us. We crouched down and I maneuvered him into a good shooting position and got him all set up on the steady stix. He thumbed off the safety and had plenty of time to locate them in the scope. I was hovering behind him helping him like a baseball umpire lol. He had a good 3-4 minutes of them in his scope while he waited for the one he wanted to shoot to turn broadside. When he finally got ready he squeezed off the shot but I knew immediately it was a miss. I didnt hear a impact but even more telling was the body language of the cows, all heads up and looking at us fully alert. He tried to get another shell chambered but they scattered just as he got it reloaded. Another 15 or so burst out of a depression that we couldnt see. Must have been 20 or so there that had bedded down there during the night. I guess staring at them that long gave him some "buck fever", I think he shot just a tad low and the bullet fell short. We hiked down to check for blood but it was a clean miss.
I felt really bad he missed, but was positive with him telling him how most people havent even seen a elk down there let alone get off a shot. I was worried the only elk we would see would be on the move and harder for a kid to get setup on. We got really lucky, just wasnt in the cards to kill it. I didnt tell him but I was kicking myself when I later saw there was a road 150yards below where the cow was standing at... it would have been soooo easy to get it out lol.
Ah well, he's already talking about more practice over the summer and doing it again next year. Pretty fun as a proud dad to see a kid take his first poke at an elk. He'll be old enough for deer this next fall so if he gets a tag it will be alot of fun watching him take his first big game animal.
-DallanC
