The rifle slips from the shoulder where it has remained resting all day, balanced at ready. A raised hand halts the hunting companion to the rear, then indicates a sweeping move to the left, away from the trail the elk will be intently studying. Forward progress is measured in inches now, each step weighed, measured before setting down, preventing a fallen limb below the snow cracking like a rifle shot in the extreme cold, sending the elk bolting again as it has done twice before this day. For the first time all morning, the 6-inch powder snow underfoot is soft, yielding, not crunching, not squeaking with every footfall like it has all the way up through the lower elevations. Even the slight air current has shifted to the hunter's favor, now quartering against their right cheeks.
Experience alerts every fiber of the forward hunter's being.
He knows, with a primal instinct that has passed down from generation to generation of hunters. The moment of truth has come down to this, all the tracking, all the laboring, always upward over four ridges across three beaver bogs, the negotiating of north slopes so steep progress was measured one labored breath at a time. Rifle at ready, he inches to the lip of the timbered bowl ahead, eyes raking the far slope with an intensity bringing every tree, every stump, every fallen log into razor-sharp focus. Brown hair bolting from a bed 80 yards upslope materializes into an elk racing right, powerful long jumps carrying it to the safety of a black spruce tangle just yards away. The rifle swings, the scope finding the racing elk just as its neck passes a foot-wide gap in the forest screen.