"Meet me back at camp," I said. "I'll have dinner ready when you get there." As the sun set slowly behind the mountain and the foliage became incandescent, my thoughts wavered between reality and imagination. He'd found the elk and began to quarter it. But how could he quarter it in the dark? He'd have to hang a flashlight in a tree. It's easier when you have two people. We still have to run home to get the horses to pack the elk off the mountain. I glanced at the time. Quarter after nine. A shape appeared in the darkness. Ross was trudging into camp.

"I couldn't find the elk," he began his tale. "I saw it several times, but it kept running."

My husband told me that at first he spotted the bull elk standing alone, one step outside the cover of the trees surrounding Sagebrush Meadow. It turned broadside; giving him what he thought was a clean shot. He drew his bow. The arrow sailed. In the second that it took the arrow to burrow in the elk's body it had turned away from him. He thought he'd made a clean kill. He ate a candy bar while he waited until it was time to start trailing.

After searching for two hours, he realized that the animal was mortally wounded, but missing. By this time he'd traveled down the trail into Pencil Meadows lunging over a section completely void of color containing deadfall--what we call the dark forest--and just to the edge of a tree lined pasture. The darkness permeated the foliage making tracking an impossible task.

"I didn't sleep a wink last night," he told me as the smell of sausage drifted. The dawn littered through the dirt-spotted windows of our camp trailer. We ate breakfast intermittent with dressing. We gobbled scrambled eggs while putting on our pants; nibbled venison sausage in between sleeves; and chugged orange juice while stuffing our packs.

Returning to the point where Ross had last found evidence of his elk, we found the blazing-orange tape he'd tied to a limb. My husband began moving slowly, examining the ground, probing every leaf for indication of the wounded beast. "Blood," he said. "He went this way." We traced the elk by his tracks for another 30 yards, but then the footprints disappeared. "Hair," Ross said as he tugged at a limb.

Stopping only for a short lunch, we continued this scrutiny toward Table Meadows, about three tedious miles from where he'd started the day. Elk travel anywhere and through just about anything. When an elk is hurt like this one, he tries to rub his wound against newly grown trees, which helps in the pursuit. The last spot he'd wiped left a broken branch prickled with crimson. At last we discovered the elk, down amidst the broken limbs. He'd bedded in a miniscule grove of freshly sprouted evergreens.

Ross said grim-faced, "Let's get him quartered and go gather the horses." I rested on a rock, stroked the elk's soft, grizzled fur with my hand, and sighed. "You should always feel bad when you kill an animal. Because if you don't, you're just a killer, not a hunter," he told me as soft tears flowed down my cheek.

In the midst of the Wind River Mountains, there's a man who will strive to do anything to retrieve a wounded animal. He's a hunter, yes, and sometimes he's the one who causes the pain. However, he also has a heart, which sometimes breaks.