By Patrick Meitin

The bull appeared through brush just 32 yards away. Where there had been nothing but stunted, ground-hugging cedar, tangled pi-on and juniper, rock and drought-shocked scrub there were now shinning antlers. Huge antlers. Headgear beyond comprehension, with long impossibly curving tines, swords as long as a man's arm, rear "whale tails" forking inconceivably wide proportions.

And, the elk was close.

Hardened branches and even harder twigs that threatened to deflect any arrow shot through them prevented a bowshot. Earlier Randy Ulmer had run hard, his lungs aching with exertion. Now he knew he must be patient. He moved like the hands of a clock, side-stepping cactus, sinking to his knees, slipping an arrow from his quiver, moving in imperceptible increments, timing these moves to coincide with the bull's eyes being shielded by brush. Finally the arrow was on the bow's rest, but Ulmer had to wait seconds, minutes, a lifetime; time is difficult to discern in moments such as these.

The bull finally cleared the brush. It was a shot Randy had made hundreds, thousands of times, on 3-D courses across the nation as a world-class competitor and one of archery's all-time best tournament shooters, on several record-class bulls he had taken on past bowhunts. He knew the drill, but it was impossible to quit looking at those incredible antlers. The bow came back smoothly, the pin settling behind the great bull's shoulder....

The elk of Southwestern high desert, of dry places in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada, do not follow convention or an established script. They are far from alpine meadows, black timber, mountain crags and rushing wilderness rivers. Those, of course, are the stereotypical settings of the classic elk chase, subjects of firearms calendars and magazine covers. But not the high desert. Desert elk are different.

The high mountains overlooking lower elevations are simply too rough and abrupt to attract numbers of elk in the Southwest. Elk scatter widely here, which helps them to become unpredictable. And a good number of them for years escape from the pursuit of human and animal predators alike to grow some of the biggest wapiti antlers on the planet.

The term "desert" takes on elastic limits. Desert can be sand and waste, but it can also mean vast cedar and pi-on/juniper flats, an ocean of stunted trees as far as the eye can see, wide-open sage swales ending at sudden walls of deceivingly thick shrub. There is, of course, the occasional cactus. More than one stalking bowhunter, slipping out of his boots to silently tiptoe across crunchy litter, has discovered this the hard way.

Hunting the desert takes patience. Hunting elk takes time, but hunting them in the high desert takes more time. Randy Ulmer is no stranger to such settings. He understands the rules of the desert, patience most of all. He understood that time was all he had. On this hunt, time was his only ally.

Randy Ulmer's Nevada bull officially scores 409 7/8 inches net, non-typical. Its gross score is 416. Photo courtesy of Randy Ulmer

It was early in the season with hot days, and with an occasional bull bugling in the coolness of early morning and late evening, only a hint of the elk rut was in the air. The pair had begun to locate scattered herds of cows with small bulls sneaking around them. Ulmer was determined to make the best of his hard-won Nevada tag, looking for a bull to better a couple of bulls he had taken in the past that qualified for the Boone and Crockett Club's record book. For this reason, the top-end bulls he and Crogh had located after a week of scouting and another week of actual hunting, proved a disappointment. Crogh only had 12 days to help Ulmer scout, then had to return to Arizona and see to his own bowhunting clients. A week into the season and with only a few days left in Crogh's time, the guide glimpsed a monster bull. The light was bad, the bull a good distance away, but instincts told him it was the kind of bull Ulmer had in mind.

The pair had returned to the area where Crogh saw the big bull; Ulmer had only heard the bull bugle. It was a bugle that Ulmer would not forget, even after weeks of hard hunting. Ulmer would soon be hunting alone.

Ulmer hunted hard, daylight to dusk each day, chasing what had become his Moby Dick. After another week he heard the big bull once more, but only briefly, distantly, as it moved through thick PJ flats, retreating like a vampire from the first hint of light. It would be another week, maybe more, before Ulmer heard the bull again.

This is how it often is with the very biggest bulls. Some attribute such behavior to survival savvy, but Nevada bulls in particular are hunted only lightly, and instilling such intelligence on any wild animal comes at the risk of starry-eyed anthropomorphism. Some bulls simply have a personality that excludes them from set patterns, possessing no desire to fight or answer calls, to engage in rutting activities that waste precious energy. Like the very biggest white-tailed deer, some bulls simply march to the beat of a different drummer. It keeps them alive through coincidence only and makes them all the more unpredictable. Predictability gets you killed in the unrelentingly cruel desert.

Ulmer had no other tags or hunts to go to. He had only his Nevada tag to keep him busy, but after nearly a month of hunting, he was tired and he had begun to grow lonely. Hunting on your own, with only your own thoughts and company, can be difficult. It's easy to become disappointed with no one to talk to around the fire at night, no one to offer encouragement or support. Ulmer knew he would not give up, but he decided he needed some human contact. He traveled to the nearest town, more a spot on a map, really. You take what you can get in the outback of Nevada.

He replenished his fuel and water supply, sat in a local cafe and chatted with the old lady there while she fried an overflowing, homemade hamburger and thick fries that soaked the paper plate with grease. The contact rejuvenated Ulmer. He was ready to go again.