What the hunt holds

Reflections on elk season 2025

By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff

“It isn’t feeling very elk-y out here today,” my dad whispered.

We stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the trail, rifles in the crooks of our arms and the majority of our routes behind us, leading us to our predetermined meeting place: a section of semi-open timber my family calls Jack Pine Flats.

I nodded in agreement. It was opening day of rifle season for our tags, and every step on bone-dry leaves and pine cones threatened to give us away. That, and the way the filtered sun and fluctuating temperature kept whipping up wind gusts against the mountain’s face, made the task of remaining unheard and unsmelled rather difficult.

While game trails and typical bedding sights showed ample sign from previous days, I could feel my dad and I becoming resigned to the fact that the elk of Hope had probably heard us coming and retreated into the furthest reaches of the canyon. We’d already walked our respective routes; eaten our customary mid-morning snack while seated on the same log; and now had just a short distance to the dry fork of the creek, which served as a typical bail-off point when a hunt had reached its natural, harvestless end.

“I’ll stay here while you take a peek around this patch of vine maple,” my dad whispered, motioning a black-and-red-checked wool arm down the trail. “We’ll head down after that.”

I gave the affirmative nod, adjusted my pack and turned trailward. Just two steps in, we heard the crash: four or five head, just behind the vine maple screen, making a break for the creek crossing. 

I ran, the hunt having reached the fever pitch where noise and scent no longer play a factor, and searched the brush frantically for any shooting window filled with ungulate hide.

Finally, the crashing sounds having faded behind a curtain of oceanspray and thickening timber, I stood still. My breathing was labored, but steady. I had to be ready to shoot at a bull in hot pursuit of his herd, after all. But, upon further inspection, this herd’s male appeared to have been among them, leaving his fresh track in the mud of the crossing.

Things had gone from not “feeling very elk-y” to being very elk-y very fast — a lesson which, despite how many times you learn it, does not become any less surprising.

My elk season took on a very different look the following day. The leaves and pine cones once so eager to give us away were now saturated by hours of rain. My husband, Alex, and I pressed them further into the soft decay of the forest with each step, any noise produced by our walking drowned out by the pitter-patter of the steady downpour.

Perfect elk-stalking conditions — or they would have been, if not for our companion: our 2-year-old son, Liam.

We knew what we were getting ourselves into, taking a chatterbox toddler on a “hunt.” The hunt wasn’t the point, despite the rifles and knives and dragging rope. With toddlers, accomplishing anything real is so rarely the point.

Still, I made a futile effort to introduce key concepts to him.

“We are looking for elk,” I whispered to him, crouched in the middle of a logging road while we stared eye-to-eye. “We have to be quiet so that they don’t hear us coming.”

“OK, Mama,” he’d reply, then pressed a finger to his lips.

We’d take a few steps before his sweet voice would ring out over the rain: “Mama, elkies go? Where elkies?”

We did manage to stalk a whitetail deer at a distance along the road’s switchbacks, and Liam walked under his own power the whole way. I’d rank it easily in my top three favorite hunts of all time.

As it turned out, this rifle season wasn’t very elk-y for my family, but it did mark a major milestone for the Kieberts as a sixth-generation Bonner County hunter got his feet wet — only figuratively. Good boots are non-negotiable, even if whispering is.

Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey is a fifth-generation Bonner County hunter and editor emeritus of the Reader. She has contributed a column about elk hunting every October since 2017.