The Story
A bull elk crosses a meadow in the Canadian Rockies with his tongue flicking out of his mouth, close behind a cow who keeps walking. It is the rut, and he has a harem to hold.
His rack climbs well above his ears, bare of velvet, and a dark shaggy mane hangs from his neck to his chest, darker than his tan flanks. Antlers grow on bulls, very occasionally on cows, and a mature bull's generally run to six points a side. The other mark worth learning is the elk's buff rump patch, set against a brown body.
His aggression and herding drive are running very high, and he moves like it. He runs up on the cows, tongue working. They mostly drop their heads and go on grazing. None of them seems to share his sense of urgency.
Timing explains the hurry. The elk rut generally runs from early September to mid-October, and elk breed in late September and early October. A bull gathers anywhere from 3 or 4 cows to as many as 20 to 25, and in the rut he can weigh up to 1,100 pounds. Prime breeding bulls are eight to nine years old, in a species that lives 10 to 13 years in the wild.
At one point he turns on the ground itself, urinating and scraping his antlers through the dirt like a harrow. Bull antlers can grow up to an inch a day under velvet in spring and summer, and a mature bull's can weigh up to 40 pounds.
Elk are called the noisiest of all deer, and a rut bull's bugle is a guttural groan that climbs to a high whistle, made to advertise his status and draw cows. Behind this one, conifers run down to the grass, a forest broken by meadow, which is where elk do best.
