Opening Day

I was dressed in camouflage, sitting on a hillside and using my sweet hub's binoculars.  Scanning the hillside, I was looking for a bull elk and hoping to get a shot at one.  The sun was shining on the hill and I was looking in all the pools of shade under the trees.  I tried to pick out the shape of an antler, an ear, the white rump, anything.

Antlers!  I looked and looked and looked some more.  There were definitely two antlers, and a big tan body with brown legs kind of splayed out.  The more I looked at that bull, the more I was sure he was dead.  He was utterly still and lying in an awkward-looking position.  Some other hunter must have seen him before I did, and was probably tracking that bull right then.

I looked away and looked back many times and the bull never moved.  No question in my mind, he was dead.  And then the sweet hubs and our towering baby came hiking up the hill toward me (while I was looking on another ridge) and the dead elk must have heard them because he got up and left.