407 Montana Archery Bull Elk

Montana Monarch
by Tim Hite

I can’t get enough of southeastern Montana. This would be the eighth year that I had hunted with Craig Hueter of Trophies West Outfitters. The amount of deer that I see each year is amazing. I have taken six mule deer over 170-inches, my best was a 5×7 that scored 190. However, I could count the amount of bull elk that I had seen over the years on one hand. This was the first year that I would be hunting in September. The muley bucks were still in bachelor groups and the elk were in rut and bugling. There are not many elk in this part of Montana, but you can run across occasional pockets of elk. These herds have great genetics and don’t get hunted like they do farther north.

Drawing a rifle tag for this area is hard to come by, but you can buy a bow tag over the counter. The first day of the hunt started out with us driving up on a big 6×6 that had pushed his cows out of the timber into a big grassy meadow. He didn’t see us, but a few of the cows did. They started working their way back to the timber so we tried to get in between the bull and his cows.

Unfortunately, there was just too much open space between us and the bull. We pacified ourselves by getting some video of the bull and watched as he pushed his cows up into the timber. We hunted the rest of the day and ran into a few more bulls, but nothing that I wanted to try to take on the first day….

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See this bull’s image featured in the 2009 King’s Bull Elk Calendar