DENTRY: Some bowhunters muddy tradition

Published August 31, 2007 at midnight

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TINCUP - Bowhunters sneaked into mountain forests before dawn Saturday with high hopes and senses honed keen as broadhead blades.

With attention to air currents that betray, some hunters stalked into the breeze. Others sat in ambush.

From his tree stand overlooking elk trails, Levi Judge, of Denver, watched the forest wake. Dawn of opening weekend is the purest of times.

It also is the last time you can expect elk to behave naturally. Soon, as it typically happens in national forests in Colorado, the human circus would arrive.

Meanwhile, pine squirrels, the eyes of the woods, sounded the first alarms: "Ticket-ticket-chick-chick."

Daylight swelled. Gray jays piped and whistled. A pack of ravens harassed a hunting coyote. A bull elk bugled deep in the woods.

This is the pregnant hour.

"The hunter is the alert man," Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote in Meditations on Hunting, in 1942.

Thus it happens in these parts (for which archery licenses are sold in unlimited numbers) that the alert man is the first to hear the growl of machines.

Judge owns one. But he left his ATV miles away and hiked in the dark to the place he calls the Elk Funnel. He didn't want to scare away the herd he had scouted, nor molest someone's hunt.

Others didn't mind. First, Judge heard the ATV. Then he spotted a big silhouette decoy pretending to look like a cow elk's rump. Some hunters hid near the rump in plain view and tooted cow calls.

"I felt like a forward observer on a skirmish line," Judge said.

On the hike out, he met another man dressed like a TV commercial driving past on a shiny ATV. The man pointed to the Funnel and told Judge he was headed there.

So much for philosophy.

Last year, 38,634 bowhunters bought archery elk licenses, most of them for the 75 percent of game- management units that are open to hunting with over-the-counter licenses. Another 11,835 drew limited archery deer tags.

Needless to say, archers who haven't stored up enough preference points to flee the circus or hermit up for a week in some remote wilderness area can expect to encounter other people.

That's OK, but hammering pistons are not.

Even on opening weekend in a tame forest bustling with ATV convoys and dirt bike races, it is possible to find a niche still occupied by elk.

In fact, Judge located a narrow swale in the woods that elk had been using for food, water and bedding. Cow elk munched grass while a big bull watched from the woods. A pair of calves chased each other in circles.

Problem was, an old logging road ended nearby. It was only a matter of time.

That evening, the rust-bucket SUV roared in precisely when the elk were coming down out of dark timber for supper. Four lads jumped out, slammed doors and crashed toward Judge's hiding place.

"I knew it had to be a big herd of elk coming," he said later. "Nothing else makes that much noise in the woods.

"Then these four morons sit right in front of some trees a few yards across from me. I stood up so they could see me, and they just waved."

Judge retreated, to be on the safe side. But he said he plans to return "when the weather sucks and the Yahoos are gone."

Meanwhile, he remained philosophical about certain traditions.

"Well, you have to hunt the opening weekend," he said.

dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com

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