>>2680247This year in October I was with a guy helping him hunt elk, we got up on a ridge and spotted a few cow elk 1k yards away on the other side of a valley and started making our way down there. After walking about 400 feet, we heard three bulls bugling from the ridge we were just on, literally right where we were standing. We were on a trail with fresh pee and droppings and thought they could be following the others and would walk right up on us in the woods. We got down and waited and heard the bugles get closer. What an intense moment, the shot would have been max 60 to 100 feet in the woods. But then we heard the bugles start to get further away. The guy hunting wanted to stay and wait but I knew that we'd probably never catch up with them unless we started running, so I pushed him to chase them and we set off running after them. We caught up with them and were just a couple hundred feet behind them in the woods following them as they continued walking south towards a bigger open valley. Were hearing cows yipping right in front of us and the occasional bugle. There was so many tracks, probably two dozen cows with a few bulls. The woods absolutely reeked of elk urine and we kept seeing fresh rubs. I was pushing the guy to not stop and to keep running, he is more of a defensive hunter and was weary about the elk spotting or smelling us. We knew that sometime soon they'd break into the field and there's no telling how fast they'd keep going. We decided to flank to the right and run even faster to try to get parallel with them when we got to the field. As we made it within a hundred feet of the opening, we spotted some of the cows walking about 300 feet from the tree-line. We got down and walked from tree to tree and were spotting some of the bulls. The guy got about 70 feet in front of me and laid down with his rifle on a bipod. I had the rangefinder and ranged the elk to 200 yards and told him through hand signals. He took the shot and dropped a 6x6. Picrel
