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Hunting for elk horns near Dubois is competitive DUBOIS, Wyo. (AP) – The high-pitched squeal rising from the stand of timber below wasn’t a dog.
As Monte Baker stood motionless on the ridge slope, peering down into the shadows of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, he concluded that the distress call was coming from a bear cub, probably separated from its mother. “They were probably spooked by the four-wheeler,” Baker whispered. Seconds before, Baker had heard something scamper through the brush below. A large creature, he guessed, judging by its speed and heavy footfalls. His experience told him bear, and he froze. “Do you hear that?” Baker said, nodding toward the top of the opposite facing hill. The faint sound of an engine hummed, most likely a four-wheeler, camouflaged by the forest. It was the second all-terrain vehicle Baker’s keen ears had detected that day. In a rugged forest landscape of rocky cliffs and dense Douglas fir and lodgepole pine, where grizzly bear scat is a reminder of what may lurk behind the next boulder, what would bring Baker and the four-wheelers out on the same morning in the middle of the week? The answer lies on the ground. If Baker is lucky, he’ll walk out with a big load of calcium and limestone formations tied down to his pack and call it a profitable work day. Monte Baker is an antler hunter. At $6 to $7 a pound, the antlers that elk shed every spring are in high demand. They are sold to artists such as Baker, who transform the majestic crowns into chandeliers, stools, coffee tables and wall hangings, pieces desired by those who want a keepsake of the natural world in their homes. “It’s the adult Easter egg hunt,” Baker said while driving up East Fork Road east of Dubois at dawn. “When someone says ‘Go,’ it’s a mad rush.” The East Fork is home to one of the largest naturally fed elk herds in North America. Several thousand elk winter between Spring Mountain and the Wyoming Game and Fish property in the East Fork of the Wind River drainage. The agency bought the land to provide winter habitat for big game species, primarily elk. The elk usually lose their antlers in March and April, but the East Fork doesn’t open until May 16, after a six-month closure, to allow elk to winter and begin calving without human disturbance. As Baker pulled off the side of the dirt road to park, a view of wide, open, rolling hills before him, a herd of more than 100 elk several hundred yards away turned, looked and bolted out of sight. Baker knows the area as well as his back yard. All he takes with him is a backpack and lunch. He doesn’t need a compass or water; he drinks water from various springs in the forest. An artist from Dubois, Baker has a degree an electrical engineering. In order to make a living in Dubois, however, he decided to carve antlers into art. Business is good, he said. Sometimes he looks for moose antlers in willow bottoms, but mostly he searches for big elk horns. “By the time I got to sixth grade, I actually started using the antler,” Baker reminisced. “I would cut off the rosette (antler base) for a belt buckle and leave the rest of the antler there.” That was when there was no market for antlers. Things changed about 1978, when a demand for antler products emerged. Although the sun was still rising on the morning of May 16, Baker was not the first human to tread on the Game and Fish East Fork property. Several trucks with ATV flatbeds were parked off rough roads that wind through the Game and Fish unit into the forest. Baker drove by a man dressed in camouflage, sitting on a four-wheeler, scoping out the valley below with field glasses. Humans were already on the antler trail. “They know now that this is the best time to get there,” Baker said. “In two days, this country will have been scoured.” In the 33 years that Baker has searched for antlers in northwest Wyoming, the hunt has changed tremendously. Where once Baker and his father typically collected 180 pounds of antlers in a day, nature’s prize has been increasingly hard to find. “You can’t do that anymore,” Baker said. “There are so many people that pick up antlers now, you’re sometimes lucky to find one antler.” Cole Thompson has been Dubois game warden for nine years. He has seen “horn hunting,” as he calls it, develop from a hobby of a few into a pastime almost as popular as hunting. “It’s rivaling regular elk hunting for pure numbers,” he said. “It’s just amazing. We see people from Wisconsin, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado – from all over the country. “It’s almost a frantic attitude to beat other people. They go crazy.” The frenzy for pieces that blend into the forest floor as weathered deadfall has changed the rules of the antler-seeking game. Not only is there more competition, but some hunters sneak into the East Fork before it opens, or drive closed roads on the Shoshone National Forest to get a leg up on those who follow the rules. Baker increases his odds of finding antlers by hiking into less-accessible areas. He doesn’t hesitate to ford rivers filling with spring runoff or carefully step across rocky ledges to get to an elk wintering ground. What has sapped some of the pleasure from antler hunting is competing against people who don’t play fairly, as Baker has experienced firsthand. While climbing a slope littered with elk scat, Baker found a six-point antler and walked the hill, searching for its match. A bull elk tends to shed its horns in the same vicinity, Baker explained. Once one antler detaches on its own, an elk will butt up against a tree or log to knock off the second, as the unbalanced weight on its head is uncomfortable. The horse tracks in the soft dirt explained why Baker could not find the other antler. The sly horseback rider was probably not the first person to start the antler hunt early. Thompson has observed evidence this year of four or five incidents of trespassing into the East Fork before opening day. “I worked it really hard this year,” he said. “Other years, when I didn’t work enforcement hard, there’s been four wheelers and snow machine tracks, people’s tracks and car tracks. It was a mess.” Entering a restricted area early isn’t the only way to bend the rules. Lander game warden Bob Trebelcock has heard reports of people running elk with four-wheelers in hopes that their antlers would fall off. Thompson has heard similar stories of “people chasing elk or trying to knock the horns off with a baseball bat” but has never witnessed those activities. Regardless of whether elk are being harassed intentionally for their antlers, Thompson said the increased presence of people during a critical time for the elk is a concern. “Something has to be done,” he said, “simply because it’s turned into an equal amount of people presence to hunting season.” The problem is that elk are easily spooked by humans. Just the sight of one tends to make them run, causing them stress. In the spring, elk are usually in poor condition as they try to recover from a long winter. Many of the females give birth at the same time. A Game and Fish committee is studying the effects of antler hunting on elk, but no decisions have been made. Thompson doesn’t think requiring antler hunters to have a license or prohibiting the practice is the answer, however. “My personal opinion, and it comes from a whole lot of experience, is (seasonal) closure to areas, as opposed to closure of activity, because closure of activity is hard to enforce,” he said. But in order to make seasonal closures effective, more enforcement would be needed, Thompson said. Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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