No Pain, No Gain
The night before I rode in (with five other hunters, a photographer, and three guides led by the outfitter, Duane Neal), I had dinner with writer Jim Harrison and his wife, Linda, at their house in the Paradise Valley. Their dining-room window framed the snow-rimmed Absarokas, which looked beautiful and formidable, prompting Jim to ask why, as a card-carrying geezer, I wanted to spend eight days in them looking for elk.

The obvious answer-because I wished to shoot one-wouldn't suffice. Although elk hunting is physically challenging under any circumstances, there are easier ways to go about it. I replied, "I seem to have a need to suffer," which might have been inculcated by my education in Roman Catholic schools, where I was taught that my sin-stained soul would be denied the joys of heaven if I failed to cleanse it through one form of self-flagellation or another. In other words, no pain, no gain.

This lesson was later reinforced by three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, an institution fully capable of transforming even a dedicated ¿¿hedonist into a masochist.

I don't think Jim and Linda completely bought this argument, and upon reflection, I don't either. It has an element of truth but doesn't fully explain why a 65-year-old was going to subject himself to hardships that much younger men would find trying. There are other reasons, which I will get into in due course.

But suffering first. Elk hunting provides enough of it to gratify almost anyone with a martyr complex, but not as much as sheep hunting, which, if it weren't voluntary, would be classified as inhumane punishment. I had survived such a hunt in 2003 in Alaska's Brooks Range. Its rigors made me feel as if I had completed Navy SEALs boot camp. This achievement gave me a certain hubris. A wilderness elk hunt, I thought, would be a pleasant experience by comparison, a kind of trail ride with guns.