Now that we had the bull down it’s pretty straight forward right?
I sent the guide back to get pack horses, and to tell my dad and brother in law I had one down. They finally came up to my location after I walked down to the creek a 1/2 down canyon and waved to show them the way. We got out my Wyoming saw and started quartering the bull, in anticipation of pack horses arriving soon.
If you have never sawed through a back bone of a mature bull elk, let me tell you….You had better pack a lunch! It is one of the hardest tasks known to man. Just before you make it through another Vertebrae, the blade binds. You try to position the critter so that you can pull the saw, and finally, you hear the bone crack and you start sawing on the next vertebrae. All the way from the tailbone through the neck! Imagine sawing a juniper tree lengthwise in half that is about 10 feet tall and 6 inches thick…
I am done quartering elk with a saw. I will go gutless from now on….More about this in another column, I promise…
We finished the quartering job, and cut the antlers off and sat down for lunch with our eyes on the treeline 100 yards away. I had told them both about our bear run in and so we didn’t want to stick around a kill site very long. I stated as we worked on our roast beef sandwich that if the pack horses weren’t here by the time I finished my lunch that I was going to load the quarters on my saddle horse and walk out. Mike, my brother in law volunteered his horse also. We didn’t want to meet the local “Golden Bear”.
We loaded the front quarters on my horse with a basket hitch and crows foot, using 50 foot of 3/8 kernmantle climbing rope that I always carry in my pack (I was going to get rid of it but not now!) I half hitched it around the horn and looped it around the cantle of the saddle. The hind quarters I used a barrel hitch with 100 feet of Parachute cord, that I won at our annual 3-d archery shoot raffle! I put the liver in a garbage sack in my Badlands 2200, and put the rack in the meat packing pullout and we started down off the mountain on our 6 mile hike back to camp.
