Last May, 47,724 hunters asked the DNR for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hunt elk in Michigan. The DNR said yes to 260 of them. My dear friend, Bret Gutknecht, was one of the lucky ones. And in case you don’t know how lucky, if you divide 260 by 47,724 you’ll get a quotient of 0.00544799. That means the chance your name will be drawn from the lottery is ½ of 1 percent. Now before you go all statistical on me and point out that each year you apply and don’t get drawn you get another chance, up 21 chances you’re right. But no matter how you calculate it, if you get an opportunity to hunt elk in Michigan, you’re darn lucky.
I was lucky, too. For the weekend of the December hunt, Bret had rented a cozy cabin in Johannesburg, and he invited his father Ward, his best friend Dan Stilson and me to join him for moral support. Not that he needed any. Bret has spent 14 seasons hunting elk in Colorado including three full seasons guiding other hunters to more than 30 elk kills. If you add all the nights together that he’s slept in a canvas wall tent on the side of a mountain to chase elk, they amount to just under a full year of his life. When it comes to elk, Bret is like the guy from Farmers Insurance who knows a thing or two because he’s seen a thing or two.
Which is funny because when we gathered in the predawn darkness on Dec. 9 to head into the Pigeon River Forest, Bret said, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
In a sense, it was true. Elk hunting in Michigan is very different than elk hunting in Colorado. Hunting elk in Colorado is really hard. Hunting elk in Michigan is supposed to be super easy. If you draw a permit, the DNR requires you to attend a meeting the day before the hunt in which they explain the rules. They share maps with boundaries where you can hunt and little dots on the maps showing where all the elk were killed from last year’s hunt. There’s even an elk help hotline you can call for advice, but we were all too proud to do that. Any call to that number would have to be anonymous. “So, I’ve got a friend who is having trouble finding an elk, and he was wondering … Think of it as the hunting equivalent of sending your buddy to ask a seventh-grade girl out on a date.”
This wasn’t my first rodeo either. I tagged along with a hunter from Grand Rapids about 20 years ago to photograph and write about his experience. To make a short story even shorter, we were guided by a team of guides with CB radios along with two other hunters who we didn’t know were also being guided by them while we were shuffled from vehicle to vehicle in something equivalent to a Pigeon River Country road rally. By early afternoon of the first day, my hunter shot a bull while it crossed a dirt road with three vehicles parked along the side of the road and about 15 people watching him. It was a beautiful bull that will hang on the wall of his home forever, and if you didn’t know the backstory it would seem like an amazing thing. But when it was all said and done, he looked up at me with more than a little remorse in his voice and said, “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
Bret knew this. He had seen the videos posted on youtube of Michigan elk hunts that seemed disturbingly easy. Our strategy was to find fresh tracks and follow them into roadless areas as far away from other hunters as possible. We were all experienced deer hunters, but elk are not deer. Deer live in a much smaller range. You set up for them and wait for them to come to you. Do that with an elk and you could be waiting for a very long time. Elk can be in an area for a couple weeks and then overnight they vanish, moving a long, long ways away for no apparent reason. That’s why knowing where the elk were shot last December helps in a general way, but that knowledge only goes so far. By the same token, if you were able to take the entire week off before the elk season, you could cruise the roads and scout for fresh sign, but come opening day the field you planned to hunt could be staked out already by other guides or hunters. Or the elk could have moved out of that area the day before.
Instead, Bret, Ward, Dan and I drove very slowly in the dark, looking for any track we could find. Eventually, we did find multiple tracks of the smaller variety which indicated a small group of cows.
Bret’s license allowed him to only shoot a cow, which was fine for him. He was hunting for the experience and for the meat, not for antlers. The idea was the three of us would hike in the early December fog and rain over dense crusty snow for as far as we needed to while Ward dozed in the truck keeping warm under his multiple layers of wool and keeping an eye on us with the GPS tracking devices that the three of them use for rabbit hunting. When we emerged from the big timber hours later and miles away from where Ward dropped us off, he would show up with the truck to move to some new country. It was like having our own personal elk hunting Uber driver.
And that’s what we did from sunup until sundown on the first day. The first half hour or so we walked slowly and intently, stepping on the sides of our boots and rolling our feet inward in stealth. Bret took the lead with Dan carrying his shooting stick and sticking on his shoulder. I would bring up the rear, taking photographs of interesting growths on trees, mating porcupines, acorns next to elk tracks, moss and anything else that caught my eye. Like a soldier on point, Bret would stop and Dan and I (when I was paying attention, which was not often) would freeze in mid-step our eyes searching ahead. But that only lasted so long. The Pigeon River Country is not level. Spend a day in the PRC and a Stairmaster will seem relaxing.
We climbed hills so steep you needed to lean far forward and on the way down, you slid on wet leaves and patches of snow, grabbing trees for support. We traversed huge sections of old growth hardwoods, beautiful country where one could see a hundred yards or more. We crossed thick stands of jack pines shredded by bull elk and clearcuts with saplings so thick it felt like a flea weaving through the quills of a porcupine. Meadows appeared between thick stands of pine and alder.
The Pigeon River Country is big, so big that it’s hard to describe. And it’s beautifully diverse. You can’t really capture it with a camera lens. The best tool to capture its size and majesty is a drone.
By four o’clock, we were no longer scouts padding unheard in our moccasins. We were more like prisoners of war, stumbling forward blindly.
We had been rained on, snowed on and were now facing gale force winds that cut through our light clothing. All three of us are in decent shape and yet our backs and feet were killing us. After slogging two miles down a muddy road looking for Ward, Bret and Dan slumped against a stop sign at the intersection of Camp 30 Road and Growler Club Road.
Cell service is non-existent in much of the Pigeon, and for some reason their GPS signals had failed. I offered to climb a steep hill in an effort to reach Ward. It was self-serving. I was so cold I just wanted to keep moving. Plus, elk hunting was like an Easter egg hunt. I couldn’t stop searching. In my mind, I always believed they could be just over the next ridge.
A DNR officer pulled up to Bret and Dan, offering help. “Well, if you see a guy in a Ford F-150, send him our way.”
The officer burst out laughing. “Right.” (The only vehicles you’ll see in the PRC in December are F-150s.)
After 20 minutes of trying on the high ridge, a text somehow threaded the needle and reached Ward. 10 minutes later he picked us up where we headed back to the cabin, too tired to even really want to make dinner or play cards.
It was the best kind of exhaustion. The kind from walking miles and miles through God’s country in search of a magnificent creature that proved wonderfully difficult to hunt.
Epilogue: Bret took off work and was able to hunt four more days. Twice, he walked up on bulls, two at 200 yards and then three more a day later at only 30 yards. Had he carried a coveted bull tag, he could have shot all of them. He never did find a cow. It wasn’t discouragement that pulled him from the woods but a bad case of the flu. His half-percent chance was gone. Now he’d have to wait another 10 years before he could even apply for that half-percent chance again.