Hunting Stories

My First Bull Elk! A 7x7 & The Best Shot Of My Life

Aug 05, 2026

Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Stories

My First Bull Elk! A 7x7 & The Best Shot Of My Life

My First Bull Elk hero shot

We're recording this one doing 80 miles an hour down a Montana freeway at one in the morning, having just dropped off a Jeep full of meat and a skull to a mate who's kind enough to freeze it for his family through winter. Two days into elk season, and one of our six tags is already filled. I'll be honest — I didn't see it coming this fast.

Learning the Terrain the Hard Way

This Is Montana

The country we're hunting looks deceptively simple from a distance — open, treeless prairie broken up by these draw systems that branch like a hand splitting into fingers, and each of those fingers splitting again. From a glassing point it looks like you'd spot an elk the second it moved. On the ground, those same draws hide banks ten metres deep with brush thick enough to swallow a bull whole, antlers and all.

Our whole approach to finding elk in this country came down to elevation and patience. We'd get up on the highest ridge we could find and simply glass, sometimes spotting animals up to five miles out. The trick with elk in September is that spotting one reliably leads to the whole herd — they're moving as a mob this time of year, so one elk becomes two, then the whole thirty-plus animal group, then hopefully a shooter bull among them. Reading the weather helped too: on the cold, windy mornings the elk tucked into the gullies and onto the sunnier faces, while on hot, still days they'd be shaded up on the western slopes.

Day one taught us that the hard way. We'd located two shooter bulls bedded roughly thirty-five metres apart and closed in from the western bank, planning to shoot nearly straight down into the draw. Everything felt stacked in our favour — perfect wind, two isolated bulls, all the time in the world to set up. Then, in the space of a single gust dying off, the thermals betrayed us just long enough for the further bull to catch our scent and vanish silently up the draw — no crashing, no noise, just gone.

“Devastating in the moment, but it taught us something specific: come in perpendicular to the bank next time, not parallel to it.”

The second bull, somehow, never heard a thing and stayed bedded at thirty-five yards, but with his vitals turned away from us there was no shot to take. We sat off him for half an hour hoping he'd shift, and when he finally stood, the wind swung again and he covered the better part of a kilometre in under three minutes.

Finding the Same Bull Again

Optics & Locating Elk

Day two, same herd, same rough area — thirty-plus elk, the same herd bull among them, distinctive for a strange little “crab claw” split at the tip of his sixth tine that we'd clocked the day before. We tracked them from a distance using two cows on the edge of the mob as our reference points, waited out their bedding pattern exactly like the day before, even stopped for a coffee on the ridge while we let the wind settle.

Closing in from the west again, I moved five to ten metres at a time, popping my head up just enough to check the ground ahead before dropping back below the skyline. Most of the fifteen-odd cows I found were tucked half into brush — just an ear flicking somewhere in dense cover. The bull wasn't. He'd bedded in the one clean, brush-free patch under a tree with a full canopy — almost a manicured little clearing, and dead broadside to me the moment I spotted him at eighty-five yards.

The Furthest Shot I've Ever Taken

I knew immediately I wanted to take this shot bedded, before he had any chance to stand and repeat what had happened the day before. The problem was cows on my left — one bedded with her head down but angled straight at me, two more feeding in a direction that would eventually put me in plain sight. I crept from eighty-five yards to sixty, ranged him again, and made the call: this was as close as I could responsibly get.

Sixty yards is further than I'd ever shot at a live animal — further than either of us had planned on taking a shot at all. But I trusted the setup completely: an 82-pound Hoyt Carbon RX9, built fresh before the trip at Venture Hunting with Dustin Ollerman, a Day Six 275-spine shaft tipped with a Kayuga Zot, a slider sight dialled precisely to sixty yards, and hours of practice behind it. Every day of the trip when we got the chance — sometimes in the headlights of the car back at camp — we'd been shooting out to sixty metres in windy conditions, so this wasn't a distance I was reaching for cold. I stripped off everything that could catch light — bino harness, face mask — and lay flat on my back until the wind settled enough to rise to my knees undetected. When I finally drew, I picked a tiny patch of dirt just behind his shoulder — the dead centre of his body from that angle — and settled the pin there rather than on the shoulder itself, wanting to catch as much lung as possible.

The shot broke clean. He was already beginning to rise as the arrow arrived — enough to shift the impact by perhaps an inch, but it still caught both lungs on a near-perfect line. What followed was almost unnerving: he stood on the rim of the draw for the better part of ninety seconds, swaying, doing slow half-circles, simply refusing to go down. Eventually he started coughing blood, and moments later tumbled backward down the same bank he'd climbed, landing barely five metres from where he'd been bedded.

The most striking part wasn't the shot — it was what happened after. The rest of the herd got up, looked around, and simply peeled away over the next ridge. No barking, no panic. They genuinely had no idea what had happened, which told us everything about how clean and controlled the whole approach had been.

What This Trip Is Really About

The Moment We Worked For

Walking up to him, neither of us had any real expectation on size — I went into this hunt with no score in mind, just wanting the encounter to feel right. He turned out to be a genuinely excellent bull, and butchering him out together, tired and a little overwhelmed, felt like exactly the kind of shared moment James and I keep coming back to this country for. Two years ago I was behind the camera for his bull in this same style of country; tonight it was his turn to film mine. Either one of us could have been holding the bow — that's really the whole point of doing this together.

There's a practical upside to filling this tag so early too. Taking my bull on day two instead of, say, day twenty, means we've now got the better part of a month left to put the same effort into finding James a bull of equal quality, rather than scrambling for whatever we can find in the trip's final days.

It's also worth putting the timing in perspective. Montana's own wildlife agency puts archery success rates on elk somewhere between five and fifteen percent for a full season — and we'd filled the tag before day three. However you look at it, that's not something either of us expected walking in.

One tag down, five to go, and we're back up in two and a half hours to see what else this basin has for us.

Butchering & The Packout