"Like a challenge, don't you?" With a scoped centerfire rifle slung over his shoulder, the lean hunter eyed the muzzleloader in my hands with equal measures of pity and suspicion.

"Yes, I do," I replied with a smile as I told him what had just taken place.

"Wow," whistled the young man whose blue eyes instantly transformed from squinty to saucers. "Did you really kill an elk with that thing?"

An hour earlier, 10 minutes into Montana's elk season, the half-inch bore of the blackpowder gun rested on my backpack. Framed in the open sights, a five-point bull had seconds before materialized from behind a herd of cows and spikes. When the bull stopped broadside at 110 yards, I unleashed the charge and watched as a dozen animals disappeared in a swirling cloud of gray. The sound of the bullet striking was unmistakable, yet in the confusing fog I momentarily doubted the shot. Scrambling to my feet, I lunged up the clearing and spied the rest of the herd ducking into a dark oasis of timber. Three spikes brought up the rear of the herd, but the branch-antlered bull was absent.

In fact, the bull had gone nowhere. The big 345-grain Powerbelt bullet had literally dropped the elk in its tracks. With the sun yet to rise over Black Butte, the lonely sentinel of the Gravelly Range, I pulled a camera from my pack and waited for dawn to take a photo.

Although my elk season lasted but moments, preparation for it was months in the making. Montana doesn't have a designated muzzleloader season, so those who choose blackpowder must hunt the rifle season with others whose short and long magnums have an effective range of four times that of the pitiful fool who packs a smokepole.

My decision to hunt elk with the muzzleloader revolved around two factors. First, the gun was free. Three years earlier, I'd won the .50 caliber CVA Hunterbolt in a photo contest. Having killed an antelope with it the previous fall, I was hankering to see what it would do on elk. Second, my wapiti wanderings invariably take me into timber where shots seldom reach beyond the throwing range of an NFL quarterback. In a dense copse of lodgepole pine, the fat, fearsome projectile would suffer little disadvantage over a centerfire rifle.

The evening before the hunt, as slinking shadows gobbled up the last golden rays of daylight, my cousin's husband, Bill, and I spotted several small bunches of elk feeding on a distant mountainside.

The animals were completely in the shadows now, sunlight kissing only the rocky summits of yonder peaks. Nonetheless, with the help of a 20-60X spotting scope I could distinctly discern branched antlers on not one but three five-point bulls weaving in and out of the sagebrush, grazing and occasionally screaming a post-rut bugle.

When Bill and I pulled back the flap on the cook tent later that evening, we were less than surprised to find the crew eating without us. As always, evening dinner conversation eventually turned to the morning's hunt. Bill, Casey and Mike had decided to ride up the ridge flanking Stone House Mountain. My uncle Tom was planning to slip into the timber behind camp.

"Where you going?" Casey asked.

Stuffed with ham and halfway through a mound of mashed spuds, I suddenly realized I was eating too much. "I'm going after those bulls Bill and I spotted," I said.

Comforting advice came from all sides. "Better start early." "That's about four miles over there, you know." "Long walk in the dark." "Sure you want to pack a muzzleloader over in that open country?"

At the final comment, Tom (maker and renovator of blackpowder cartridge rifles), let out a snort. "That thing ain't really a muzzleloader." I let the comment pass. Men in their late 70s who still hunt the high country are entitled to their opinions.

Five minutes before legal shooting light the next morning I was sure of two things: It was a long walk in the dark, and the bulls were still in the vicinity. Pausing to catch my breath, I heard the unmistakable note of a bugle. Knowing other hunters could also hear it, I hastened up the slope.

Another bugle pierced the stillness, and I knew I was getting close. A patch of timber provided concealment, so I darted into the firs. Hearing yet another bugle, I paused to listen, but the deafening blast of a rifle smothered the sound--and my hopes of a close-range ambush. I burst out of the timber onto a knoll, just in time to see tan bodies trotting through the sage not 50 yards away. The elk jogged down the narrow clearing then paused, milling about.

A scrubby pine offered cover and a better shooting site just down the slope. Easing over to the puny evergreen, I lifted my binoculars. At least a dozen cows and several spikes made up the band. The bugling bull, I surmised, had been plucked from the herd by a lucky hunter. Nonetheless, I decided to stay put. Moments later the five-point appeared as if by magic, nose to tail with a young cow.

Standing over the fallen form of the bull after my own shot, I felt sweat soaking my undershirt and shivering skin. I pulled off my shirt to change into a dry layer, and when I put it back on a short time later, the shirt was stiff with frost. Two days later, we packed out the frozen quarters of the elk in a snowstorm.

Two weeks after that, I camped with my seven-year-old son on the eastern Montana prairie, preparing to introduce the boy to big game hunting and an antelope buck to blackpowder. I wasn't sure that a grade-schooler and a short-range gun forged a winning mix for hunting the plains, but I'd promised Micah a pronghorn hunt.

Early the next day, we drove into an expansive block of BLM land and began searching for antelope. I hoped to spot a herd from the truck and then make a stalk. However, between a steady wind and nearly a month of dodging hunters, the antelope were wild. After the third bunch spooked from well over a mile at the sight of the vehicle, I began to fret about the possibility of even getting a shot.