The author's elk fell to a single shot from the new .325 WSM, an 8mm that shoots as flat as a .300 and hits as hard as a .338.

Most of us know all about elk hunting. Ideally you go in September when the weather is warm and the bulls are high and singing, which makes them easy to find. And exciting. A 700-pound deer with a dozen swords projecting from his head is an impressive sight. When he screams in your face from 30 yards away he looks twice that size, and if you've been impersonating his chief competitor for the first romantic connection he's had in 10 months he looks positively monstrous.

The next best option is a late hunt when deep snows have pushed even the biggest bulls into the foothills, where they plow deep trenches to their feeding and napping spots. The going is sometimes tough, but the elk are easy to track and see in their world of white.

The absolute, bar-none worst time to elk hunt is mid- to late October when bulls are worn out, hiding out, lying low in thick, dry timber where an elephant in stiletto heels wouldn't leave a track but a bobcat in fuzzy slippers would sound like a mariachi band.

We were hunting in late October.

But something was wrong. We were seeing not only tracks but also elk. Not just a few cows and calves but bulls--lots of bulls. Branch-antlered bulls. Bulls in the open on moist, quiet ground where we could follow them, stalk them, maneuver for clear shots at them.

"I heard a bugle! Two of them!" I said after strapping on my pack beside the truck. Veteran guide Jim McCoy just nodded, cool as a chrome bumper, as if he were expecting nothing less. "There goes another one, south there," I said, pointing.

"Yeah, that's the ridge we left them on last night," Jim said, grinning through his beard. "We're hoping they'll move up it as they come in from feeding."

That sounded good to me, so I strapped on my pack, shouldered my Model 70 and followed our leader as he led Wayne van Zwoll, Kevin Howard and me to the glory hole. Kevin had hunted this very spot the previous day and had seen the herds, stalked the bulls, even passed up an easy shot in the hopes of finding a larger specimen. All this had gone on while I, a few miles away and a few thousand feet higher in elevation, had been riding through a winter wonderland in a vain search for fresh tracks--a form of elk hunting with which I was all too familiar.

"We'll tie the horses here and hike about a mile," my first-day guide, Randy Gurr, had said. "Call down into some basins we haven't disturbed recently." He snubbed his mount to the waxy white trunk of an aspen. I swung my legs over leather and landed silently in the snow.

We'd ridden an hour since the lantern glow of camp had faded behind us, seen a snowshoe hare, an enthusiastic patrol of chickadees and a half-dozen old elk trails slicing between dark firs draped with frosting. It looked beautiful, but it didn't look good.

"We found two fresh tracks yesterday," Randy said by way of encouragement. "Both were headed down. There should be a big, old bull or two holed up here somewhere, but we'll have to cover some country to find them." So our party set out, single file like elk, letting our leader bust trail. Every few hundred yards he stopped to bugle and listen. We stopped to rake in oxygen from the 9,000-foot atmosphere.

"They called in a bull two days ago, right after the snow," our young leader said, anticipating our questions. One doesn't expect bugling on October 25. We didn't hear any either, probably because the old bulls that should have been lingering high weren't. Meanwhile, Kevin and Wayne were down in the sage, enjoying an all-day concert by the boogey woogey bugle bulls and looking over 300 to 400 elk.

Kevin told us all about it that night over dinner.

When snow comes to the high country, the elk are quick to depart, moving into the lower elevation ranchlands. Fortunate hunters have access to both habitats.

"And they're out in the open, just running around in the sage?" one of us asked in disbelief.

"Yeah! Like big antelope."

"You can just spot them and go after them?"

"Yeah!"

And now I was going after them, following Jim down a damp, sagebrush hill and up a steeper one increasingly dotted with young, scrubby oaks. We topped the ridge, and it looked like a slice of Jackson Hole in January, minus the snow. There were russet and yellow elk standing, grazing, walking, trotting and bugling all over the far slope, bunched here, strung out there, a moveable feast of elk. Problem was, we couldn't hunt there. The elk were on the wrong ranch.