PICTURE

JOHNSON’S GEAR GUIDE

No fanfare here, but rather a simple list of the gear Eric Johnson used while on his September elk hunt:

Binoculars: Steiner 10x42

Spotting scope: Vortex Viper

Bow: Mission MXR, a subsidiary of Mathews

Arrows: Carbon Express Maxima

Broadhead: Fixed, model uncertain

Pack: Exo Mountain Gear

Rangefinder: Vortex Diamondback HD-2000

Scent elimination: None – “I play the wind really hard,” says Johnson.

Scent: “Cow urine scent wafer”

Cow call – Born & Raised Outdoors’ Sound Bite open reed

Diaphragm/Bugle tube: Phelps bugle tube, with Elk 101

September 12: An entire day, Johnson recalls, was spent in GMU 340 on the move, bugling and listening. And bugling and listening. “Right at dusk,” he says, “we got one to holler at back us, so we set up camp (nearby). Our goal was to stay mobile and go where we needed to go.” Four days they hunted, with, as Johnson relates, “a lot of curious cows and spikes coming in to check us out, but no big bulls.”

Next Johnson experienced a hunt interruption known by a certain four-letter word, “work,” but as soon as his two-day shift was over, and he’d had a chance to have breakfast with his wife and children, he headed back out in GMU 340.

September 18: “We went to a new area where (one of) my buddies thought there should be elk,” he says, “but there weren’t any.” Getting late now, the guys parked their rig back where they’d last seen animals. “We’re sleeping in the truck,” Johnson recalls, “and woke up about 3:30 to three or four bulls bugling just outside the rig … probably within 100 yards of us. We could hear ’em thrashing around.”

A plan was quickly formulated: The crew stayed bedded down until roughly 5:30, “so as not to scare anything off,” gear up, and have some breakfast. “We chased bugles for about 3 miles,” Johnson says.

Now it gets really interesting. Moving fast, Johnson outpaced his two friends, and found himself on a dirt road cutting across a hillside; thick timber gulch to his left, and broken pine scrub above him to the right.

“I could hear two bulls above me that were bugling,” he says, “and what sounded like a monster down below me bugling.”

With the wind blowing downhill, he opted to go up and focus on the bulls above him.

“I was calling pretty aggressively,” he remembers. “Every time he’d bugle, I’d call and move 10 or 15 yards.”

Finally, Johnson cut the distance between himself and the bull to 30 yards, but there was, as he puts it, “a giant bush” in between them.

“I knew if I moved any closer, I’d spook him,” he says, “so I set up shop where I was, and picked my shooting lanes left and right.”

The bull, Johnson remembers, was all worked up. “He’s bugling and bugling,” the