Bull or Nothing

He slept silently in the flannel of an over-sized sleeping bag, a pint-sized anomaly in a tent full of men.

- Jack Ballard

I had just reached our sleeping quarters from the cooking tent, the past two hours whiled away in a cribbage tournament and conversation. The boy in the bag had not moved since prostrating himself on the cot earlier in the evening. I appraised his face, the intensity of his wakeful dark eyes hidden in slumber.

Three days previously we jounced our way up a circuitous, graveled road leading to elk camp in a heavily laden pickup. Micah, my 12-year-old son, was happily tiptoeing into a family tradition spanning over a half-century, a yearly ritual of elk hunting from a camp pitched at exactly the same location high in the mountains of southwestern Montana. Our route wound along a winsome river, modest in size, monumental in its stunning array of scenic wonders. Around one bend the placid water on a beaver pond provided a perfect reflection of soaring, snow-capped peaks. At a bridge crossing, a line of rusty willows coaxed one’s eye up the stream to a lengthy but narrow valley, its flanks spotted with dark stands of Douglas fir trees lightened with pale groves of stately aspens. Absorbed in familiar surroundings and thoughts of the coming hunt, Micah’s declaration caught me by surprise: “I want to shoot a bull, Dad.”