The Secret Lives of Elk

Join backcountry sleuth Peter Anderson as he uncovers the secret lives of elk, in this delightful piece from Deep Wild 2024.

Party Animals

I must have missed one of the rock cairns that marked the trail and walked off the map, but I did find a fine camp in a high meadow. An island of spruce shielded me from elk grazing though the waning tundra sun in a snow-rimmed cirque a mile or so off toward the Divide. If my inner compass was a little off, so what? This was a good place to be lost. As the elk herd approached, a slight breeze came down with them, floating my scent off toward the sun which had gone down behind a distant ridge. As far as the elk were concerned, I wasn’t there. Even when the walls of my tent billowed out in an occasional puff of wind, I didn’t exist. So they came closer and closer and soon I could hear the cows and calves mewing and bleating to one another on the far side of the spruce. Right around dusk, I saw something strange. Two cows got up on their hind legs and faced off toward one another, hooves pressed chest to chest, not in an aggressive way, but more like a dance, maybe a cha-cha-cha wapiti-style. A friend once told me he had witnessed elk sliding down a snow field for no apparent reason other than their own amusement. It wasn’t long after the full moon had risen that I noticed another curious behavior. Over on the edge of the meadow, a cow elk kicked an unidentifiable moonlit object into the air and then jumped back as if she had startled herself with the sparkle of it all. Then she did it again. And again. And then a few more curious cows came over to see what was going on and joined in on the action. I watched them through the skeeter-mesh wall of my tent until I was too tired to hold my head up any longer. That’s when I zipped up my sleeping bag, the sound of which spooked the whole herd. They vanished into the trees and shadows, leaving me to ponder the dreamy scene I had just witnessed. The next morning, if only to get a grip on what was real and what wasn’t, I moseyed out into the meadow looking for evidence of the previous night’s follies and found the remains of a deflated tinfoil balloon. The elk were long gone. So was their piece of the moon.

“Party Animals” is one of over fifty tales from the backcountry in the 2024 issue of Deep Wild Journal. To learn more or to order a copy, visit deepwildjournal.com.