Way back during tag hunting season in February my friend Tom asked me if I’d be interested in going on an elk hunting trip with he and his two teenage daughters in the fall, it was to be their first elk hunt too. After my Idaho mule deer hunting trip last year I was up for an elk. We both looked for outfitters and he finally found Hellander Outfitting in Craig, CO that had openings during the 3rd Rifle Season hunting out of Yellowjacket Ranch between Craig and Meeker. I had to quickly go through Hunter’s Ed and take the Colorado opt-out test so I could put in for tags in time for the hunt and decided that for my first elk trip I would just target a cow figuring a cow elk would be plenty to feed Catherine and I for a year since it would have as much or more meat than the quarter cow we usually buy in the fall. In July we found that we all drew tags, the girls and I for cows and Tom for a bull and it just became a matter of getting geared up fully and waiting until the end of October to roll around.
Monthly Archives: October 2017
Lira’s second season
Acting nonchalant
Last year Lira did pretty well as a pup hunting in the fall, she found birds, she mostly pointed and rarely bumped them and she retrieved most of the time. She also liked to chase other dogs around the field quite a bit and locally found ‘easy’ birds that were not in too thick of cover for the most part. This year she really changed a lot. No more chasing other dogs around or even wanting to outside of the usual parking lot sniffing and the who let the dogs out initial walk into the fields. Once she gets to the grass she is all business, nose to the ground looking for birds. She’s also become fearless of heavy cover. She will go into anything that she can possibly get into to go after a pheasant and has flushed birds out of brambles so thick that i couldn’t get the bird to move by kicking the crap out of the outer layers of the stuff. She’s grabbed cripples and even a few unscathed birds that got trapped in thick stuff and couldn’t get out before she got to them. Just a few days ago she ran down a wing shot rooster who took off up a corn row and brought the bird out still kicking and flapping but Lira’s tail was up. She also finally lets me take a photo without constantly trying to grab the bird on the ground, that was a huge accomplishment. We’ve gotten twice as many birds in the first three weeks of the season than all of last season and I’ve missed or not had shots at quite a few that she found in really thick stuff where shooting can be a challenge to say the least. The season is about half over since I’ll be gone most of next week but I can’t wait to see what November brings.