How Mountain Men Hunted Elk With No Modern Gear

In the autumn of 1833, a free trapper named Reuben Ford stood in a frost-burned mountain park in the Wind River country of what is now Wyoming, put a hollow reed to his lips, and called a seven-hundred-pound bull elk to within twenty feet of where he crouched. No rangefinder. No rifle scope. No scent-lock suit. A reed, a knife, and a single-shot rifle he'd loaded by hand. The bull came in screaming, close enough that Reuben could smell the rut on him. But the reed is not what killed that elk. What killed it is number one on this list. Strip away a modern hunter's ten thousand dollars of gear, and most of them could not put a single elk in the snow to save their lives. Strip Reuben Ford down to a knife and a reed, and he ate all winter, every winter, for fifteen years. The trick that fed him most, calling a herd bull to spitting distance, is number eleven — and today it would cost you nothing but the breath in your chest. Most people think you can't kill a bull elk without a truck full of equipment. The mountain men would have laughed at that. Number eleven called a herd bull to spitting distance with a whittled reed. Number five ran elk down in deep snow when the powder was gone and the belly was empty. And number one is the reason Reuben walked out of those mountains fat every spring while better-equipped men starved. These are the skills that fed the men who mapped the American West — learned not from any book, but from the Crow and the Shoshone who had hunted these mountains a thousand years before the first trapper ever saw them. Then we buried every one of them under a catalog. Hit that subscribe button, because most of this was never written down; it passed from hand to hand around a winter fire. Let us count down the fifteen ways the mountain men hunted elk with no modern gear.