I scout all year. Winter is for map reading, it's amazing what you can find in a map after staring at the same drainage for 3 hours. During meals, for instance, I've got a map propped up on the table, just to sort of idly stare at while I eat. Did I mention I don't have a significant other?

Summer is backpacking and scouting season. I keep tabs on three separate areas in three different mountain ranges in western MT. I'm still learning the basics in two of these three areas, as I've only been back in MT for five years. I actually have more country scouted than I can hunt in one season. Right now I have tentative plans for the 2005 season, both in terms of scouting and hunting. I might be more effective hunting just one area, but it's about more than just killing to me, although that elk meat is premo. I like seeing new country. Even so, I wind up hunting many bulls that I actually know, in the sense that I recognize them from the year before, and that's really cool to me.

Come hunting season, 32 days hence, I'll backpack in 8 1/2 miles to my first area for a three day hunt. I should be set up the night before season opens, and hopefully have an elk herd located (about 80% likely in that area). I'll put that herd to bed, staying in glassing range until dark, then go back to camp and try to sleep. Next morning I'll press in as close as I dare in predawn, then the hunt begins. Elk hunting with a bow in the rut has to be the most fluid pursuit in the human repertoire, you just never know what's going to happen or what you're going to do until the moment arrives.

That hunt over, I have to go back to work for five loooong days, then I start 16 days vacation. I'll backpack 9 miles to an area in my second honey hole, set up and commence elk hunting until the food runs out - 8 days. At that point, I rush home to shower up, do laundry, and pick up the next 8 days of chow. I'll either return to that honey hole, or migrate to honey hole number three, an easy 7 mile hike in country. Hopefully at some point this odyssey will be interrupted by my arrow disrupting a bull elk's organ function. Then the fun begins. Bone the bull out, get the meat cooling, and start hauling it out, pound by painful pound.

I love, and I mean love in the fullest sense of that word, hunting.