My 13 year old son had drawn a late season cow tag for our South Dakota Black Hills. The unit he drew the tag for is where I like to archery hunt mule deer and rifle hunt whitetails. I checked my cameras after Thanksgiving to find no elk in the area for the previous two weeks. This is not unusual due to the amount of Hills deer tags that they give out for the month of November. Last Wednesday the 30th I spent searching for elk. I was able to find a nice herd of around 60 elk, which is the picture of the elk bedded. December 1 was opening day, I hiked in with my son and our good friend to a high point about 2 miles in. We spotted a few elk on a far hillside, we spotted 7 trucks and 3 hunters on the hills all around us. . We made our move to get down the 1300 feet of elevation to the bottom of the draw and back up the other hillside. Once there we found a single bull, but no other elk. My son went through his motions of ranging the bull, dialing in his scope, then making sure he was set for his shot. I watched him go through this thinking that after his successful deer and antelope hunts this year he might not need me to take him out much longer. Once he was done and said he could've killed the bull at 280 yards we moved up and over the ridge to try to find more.
We glassed the ridges around us looking for southern aspects that had the sun on them for the elk to sun themselves in. I was able to find the large herd from the day before to our south, which was closer to the road we parked and hiked in from. We took the next hour and half to cover another 1.5 miles back along with two elevation drops and gains of 1000 feet. My son made a point to let me know that I fell once and our friend 4 times while going up and down the snowy hillsides, while he did not fall at all. We closed the distance on the bedded elk to 200 yards to the closest one, and 250 yards to the main group. My son tried to get set up on our tripod trigger sticks, due to the cold and having hiked roughly 6 miles by then he was too unsteady. He told him he was just not comfortable to take a shot like that. We took our packs and slid up about 8 yards to the top of our hillside to try and get him set up. We put his pack on top of mine to get his rifle high enough to find a shot, when he put his rifle on the pack, the empty water bottle he put in made a nice loud unnatural noise for the quite hillside we were sitting on. This brought all eyes and ears pointed in our direction.
We hunkered down behind the packs for what seemed an eternity. No elk had stood up to my surprise. I had done some reading on late season elk hunts, a point that the author made was in cold weather elk will only be up moving for 10% of the day. I was witnessing this firsthand. The elk herd figured they were safe, they hadn’t been hunted in over a month. The temperature at the time was around 21 degrees with a wind chill at 15 degrees. The beds we had seen earlier in the day showed they had urinated and defecated without getting up. This is something that I think they did to keep themselves warm or not waste energy.
The herd slowly started to look away from our general direction. My son then started to get set up again, this time more slowly and quieter. He asked for ranges on the elk, I told him the closet bedded cow was at 180, main herd was at 230, with some bulls behind them around 260. No cow was standing at this time. The bulls were up feeding, the cows that were bedded closest to us were blocked by pine tree branches. He then stated he didn’t want to shoot a bedded elk. This was something that we had not discussed prior to being within ear shot of the herd. He said he would shoot the first elk that stood up that was legal for him. We sat for roughly 15 minutes more before a cow/calf stood up. My son waited for the elk to clear the others, then put a 165 grain Hornady SST from his .308 Tikka T3 Lite in the breadbasket. The elk took one step then went down. The herd all stood up, roughly 8 of them stood around the fallen elk not knowing what happened while the rest took off over the ridgeline. We stood up so that they would take off. We made our way over to his elk. We took our time taking some pictures, along with realizing he had punched his tag on opening day of the 2nd cow season in just about 4 hours. Thankfully the snow and going downhill helped with dragging the elk out to the road. Then we had another 1.25 mile hike down the road to the truck.
My friend that went with us then invited us out to for a pheasant hunt the next day in the middle of the state. My son was able to take a light colored rooster for his first one. I was able to get my limit as well as my friend and most of the guys with us.
I asked my son what he had more fun doing, elk hunt or pheasant hunt. He actually took a couple minutes before he would answer that it was the elk hunt that was more fun.
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