CLIENT REVIEWS
By the time October comes to the high country of Wyoming, the aspen leaves are mostly down, gold coins scattered into the dark seams of the draws, and the bulls have traded bugles for the quiet work of wintering. That is precisely when I want to be there. After seven years of preference points and porch-step daydreams, Dad and I finally buy our plane tickets and pack our gear for the hunt of a lifetime. We pull onto a beaten-down road with only two paths, one for each side of the car's tires. The sun barely beams over the horizon onto the muted gold grass strip lining the middle of our path. We park outside our hunting area, where the rifle season opens in mid-October and runs through late November in many units, with some areas extending hunts into December. I have checked and re-checked the regs and hunt-area tables; we are here within the legal rifle window, and we have planned our route with the Wyoming Game & Fish hunt planner, the OnX hunting app and have the elk regulations handy so there is no doubt about dates, type restrictions, or access (Wyoming Game & Fish Department, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c).
I have been shooting since I was eight; today, at age 20, I am ranked 11th in the world for competitive shooting. That matters here not as a boast but as a promise: I owe the elk a clean, ethical shot or no shot at all. Years ago, in 2018, I took a ten-point mule deer in this state; that buck taught me that the mountains have a way of sifting ego from intention. What I "want" now is a giant bull, but that only counts if I earn him on fair terms.
Fair chance is my line in the snow. I carry the spirit of Jim Posewitz: ethical hunting is about maintaining balance, so that we sometimes succeed while animals generally escape, and about voluntarily limiting technology when it would tilt the field toward certainty rather than challenge (Posewitz, 1994). Boone and Crockett's statement says the same thing in a more robust form: the pursuit must not give the hunter an improper advantage over a free-ranging animal (Boone and Crockett Club, n.d.). That is why I practice. Although I have hit 4-inch targets at 1000 yards, I would limit myself based on how confident I feel in the moment and not let my ego take over. Currently, I am confident out to 600 yards with my 7mm PRC rifle. I use technology to aid my hunt, but not in a way that makes it unfair to the animal. I have a Kestrel Ballistics calculator, which is primarily helpful in adjusting my windage at long distances. However, it also calculates other factors, such as temperature, elevation, barometric pressure, and even humidity. I would argue that using a Kestrel actually aids in the fairness of hunting the animal. It does not make the shot any easier because you still have to understand all the measurements and be able to adjust your scope independently. Understanding a Kestrel is another way to prepare for the hunt and add a level of difficulty. Instead of just taking a shot off a whim, you have to calculate and know your firearm like the back of your hand. Other, more common hunting aids I use are a tripod, a rangefinder, and a dope card for elevation.
OUR STORY
We climb before dawn, a white breath of frost lifting off the sage. Dad's pace is slower than mine now, but he is still just as sharp as I am. The wind pooling in saddles, sun warming a south-facing bench first, elk stepping out of dark timber to feed into the gray. We work up-ridge with the breeze in our faces, pausing at opportunities to glass the next basin clean. This part looks like waiting. It is not. It is the mental hunt, the old predator brain plugging into an ecosystem that does not care who we are. If you ask me why this matters when there are easier ways to get meat, part of the answer echoes arguments in A Hunter's Heart—that hunting can be an honest confrontation with predation, a reciprocal dance that shaped both hunters and prey (Petersen, 1996). I’m not romanticizing killing. I’m accepting and embodying the fact that in wild systems, life rides on the back of death, and when we choose to be participants rather than spectators, we feel that reality presses on our decisions (Dizard & Stange, 2022; Kowalsky, 2010).
By ten, we have turned up tracks after last night's skim of snow, four cows and a bull angling across an open valley. We back out and circle long to keep the wind from giving away our position. There is an easy way to shortcut this: a little more motor, a little less mountain. That is the road too many take, as essayists in Petersen's collection warn, when gadgets become "skill-crutches" that smother woodsmanship (Petersen, 1996). Instead, Dad reminds me of the promise we made at the trailhead: earn your angles with boot leather (Posewitz, 1994).
At the next knob, the country opens. On the far side of a broken meadow, an elk's rump flashes between firs, then the whole animal steps out. He is heavy in the shoulder and ivory-tipped, not a once-in-a-lifetime giant, but a bull worthy of anyone's story. I range the far meadow lip: 342. The wind is a right-to-left trickle, steady enough to read on the grass heads. I have spent more hours than I can count learning what a trigger feels like at the edge of a perfect break; the burden of that training is restraint. As Posewitz would put it, ethics live inside the moment before the shot; the standard is simple: if I cannot keep it lethal, I do not touch the safety (Posewitz, 1994).
The Finale
However, ethics are not just about the trigger pull. They are about everything we have done to arrive here: no vehicles off-road, no calling in a way that "games the game," no pushing animals toward waiting guns, no trespass, no leaning on a technology that would turn "the hunt" into just a simple story (Boone and Crockett Club, n.d.; Posewitz, 1994). Ethics are about humility in the language we use, naming what we do as killing, and then doing it clean or not at all. Moreover, they are concerned with care after the shot: honoring the animal with a fast dress-out and a full pack-out, with meat first and antlers last—an ethic echoed in discussions of authenticity, ritual, and meaning across both philosophy and sociocultural history (Dizard & Stange, 2022; Kowalsky, 2010).
The reticle settles. I build bone-to-bone position: bipod bit into dirt, left hand wrapped over the top of the barrel, right foot flat. Two breaths in and a half breath out, then that quiet place where the world narrows to a shoulder the size of a paperback. The shot breaks into the wind; the bull takes it tight behind the crease of the shoulder blade and hammers forward, then tips within twenty yards. If there is such a thing as a good death, this is where you try to earn it. The first thing I do is touch him, palm on warm hide, and try, awkwardly and inadequately, to say thank you. I am reminded that thoughtful hunters do not celebrate the death; they honor the life, and they carry the paradox of gratitude and grief long after the pack-out (Kowalsky, 2010; Petersen, 1996).
We get to work. Wyoming keeps generous season structures because residents and nonresidents can hunt elk across many hunt areas, but only when people obey the rules: punch tags immediately, follow type limitations (antlered vs. antlerless), and heed access notes. We quarter and hang the hinds in the shade, then start the first loads toward the truck. We will return twice more before dark, and again tomorrow if necessary. Success is not what fits in a photo; it is the sum of the sweat between kill site and cooler (Posewitz, 1994).
I said at the beginning that I wanted a giant bull, and I meant it. However, the deeper I get into hunting's literature and lived practice, the more I think a "successful" hunt is one where the means, not just the end, stand up to scrutiny. Dizard and Stange's cultural history reminds us that hunting has always carried contested meanings—encompassing subsistence, ritual, status, and reciprocity with the land. Navigating those meanings today demands a transparent ethic (Dizard & Stange, 2022). In A Hunter's Heart, contributors argue that honest hunters measure success by process over product; they resist turning hunting into mere consumption and insist on restraint when no one is watching (Petersen, 1996). Posewitz gives that restraint a name and a code, fair chase, which I tried to live by in this story (Posewitz, 1994). I am braiding those strands into the way I hunt with my dad.
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