Her First Bull: A Father-Daughter Bowhunt in Idaho’s Backcountry
She was twelve the first time I took her on what the website described as a father daughter bowhunt into the wilderness for an adventure for hard Elk. Old enough to draw a bow, young enough to still think her father knew everything. I would hold onto that as long as I could.
Stringing the Bows
We sat on the tailgate in the half-dark of a September morning, preparing our bows by headlamp. Mine was a Hoyt I’d been shooting for eight years — the limbs scuffed, the grip worn smooth by a thousand draws. Hers was a Mathews Triax I’d bought used off a buddy from church and spent a weekend tuning at the kitchen table while she did homework across from me, asking questions I pretended were interruptions.
I watched her nock an arrow and check her peep sight, the way I’d taught her in the backyard last spring using a Block target and a case of root beer as a reward for every group under four inches. She’d burned through a lot of root beer. She was a natural — patient in a way most kids aren’t, willing to draw and hold and let down without releasing if the shot didn’t feel right. That restraint had taken me twenty years to learn. She’d picked it up in a summer.
“You nervous?” I asked.
She looked at me like the question was ridiculous. “Are you?”
I was. Terrified, actually. Not of the hunt — of wanting it to go right for her and for me.
Into the Selway
We hiked in with the guide on a trail that followed a creek bottom through timber so thick the morning light came in columns. She wore a pair of Schnee’s Beartooths her mother had insisted on — good leather, real soles, not the trail runners she’d wanted — and an LL Bean fleece pullover the color of moss. Her braid swung against her pack with every step. She walked quiet, the way I’d taught her, placing her feet on bare ground instead of sticks, and I felt a swell of pride so sharp it almost hurt.
The guide — a long time friend named Alan who had been running hunts in this country for thirty years — set an easy pace and pointed things out as they went. Mule deer beds in the grass. A pile of bear scat thick with huckleberries. The scuff marks where a bull elk had rubbed velvet off his antlers on a lodgepole pine, leaving the bark shredded and the wood underneath white as bone.
“That’s fresh,” Alan said. “Last day or two.”
She crouched beside the rub and ran her fingers over the grooves. “You can smell him,” she whispered. And you could — that sharp, musky smell of a rutting bull, the kind of scent that means September in elk country the way wood smoke means November everywhere else.
The Bugle
We heard him before we saw him. A bugle — that high, rising scream that starts in a bull elk’s chest and tears through the timber like something between a freight train and a cathedral organ. It echoed off the canyon walls and faded into silence, and then came again, closer.
Her eyes went wide. She looked at me, and I saw something pass across her face that I recognized: the moment when a hunt stops being an idea and becomes real. The animal is out there. It is close. Everything you have practiced now matters. Senses on FULL alert.
Alan pulled a cow call from his vest and let out a series of mews — soft, pleading sounds that said I’m here, come find me. The bull answered immediately, a full-throated roar from maybe two hundred yards uphill. Then the sound of branches breaking. He was coming.
“Get ready,” Alan breathed. “He’s going to come through that gap in the firs.”
She drew her bow. Twenty-eight inches of draw, forty-five pounds — enough to drive a broadhead through an elk’s ribs at thirty yards if she put it in the crease. I knelt behind her and said nothing. This was her moment. I was just here to watch.
Thirty Yards
The bull stepped into the opening like he owned every acre of it. A five-by-five, heavy-bodied, his neck swollen with rut, steam pouring from his nostrils. He was looking for the cow he’d heard, his head swinging left and right, and he was magnificent.
She settled her pin. I could see the slight tremble in her bow arm — not from the weight, but from the voltage running through every nerve in her twelve-year-old body. Then the tremble stopped. She exhaled. The string slipped off her fingers with the soft thump of a well-tuned bow, and the arrow was gone.
The bull lurched, took twenty or so heavy strides into the timber, and went down. Unbelievably lucky.
For a long moment nobody moved. The woods were silent in that stunned, held-breath way that follows a kill. Then she lowered her bow and turned around and I was already there, and she walked straight into me and pressed her face against my jacket and I held her while she shook — not crying exactly, but something close, the way the body processes something too big for a twelve-year-old to name.
“You did it,” I said into the top of her head. “Perfect shot. You did it.”
“I know,” she said, her voice muffled. Then, quieter: “He was so beautiful, Dad.”
“Yes,” I said. “He is, and he was not here by accident. That is a special bull, our father was here for you. Let’s have a quick prayer to thank him.”
The Hound at Camp
Back at camp that evening, the old blood hound was waiting. His name was Achilles — a retired bear dog with a graying muzzle and a torn ear and the kind of deep, soulful eyes that make you want to tell him your problems. He spent his days sleeping in a warm spot near the cook tent, occasionally supervising the guides with the gravity of a retired foreman.
When she came down the trail that evening — still buzzing, still replaying the shot in her head frame by frame — Achilles hauled himself up and shuffled over to her like she was the only person in camp who mattered. She dropped her bow case and her pack right in the dirt and sat down cross-legged, and Achilles put his big head in her lap and sighed the way only old dogs sigh.
She told him everything. Like it was a Hound and Daughter bowhunt instead of a father daughter bowhunt.
“Achilles, he came right through the trees and he was huge and I could hear him breathing and I put my pin right behind his shoulder just like Dad showed me and I didn’t even shake well I shook a little but then I stopped and I just let it go and it was perfect Achilles it was perfect.”
Achilles tail thumped against the ground. He didn’t need the details. He understood the important part — she was home, she was happy, and her hand was scratching that spot behind his ear.
What I’ll Remember
Years from now, I won’t remember the exact score of the bull or the yardage of the shot or which broadhead she was shooting. I’ll remember the sound of her voice telling the dog about her day. I’ll remember the way she walked that trail — careful and quiet, like she belonged in this country, because she did. I’ll remember her face by firelight, her eyes half-closed, a tin cup of hot chocolate cooling in her hands, Achilles snoring at her feet.
And I’ll remember that when I asked her what she wanted to do tomorrow — there were still three days left in camp, and mule deer tags in their pockets — she looked up at him and grinned.
“Same thing, Dad. Exactly the same thing.”
Schedule your Father Daughter bowhunt with us today, for memories you’ll never forget.
At Granite Peak Outfitters, we specialize in the kind of hunts that become family stories. Our guided archery elk hunts in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness are perfect for parents and kids who want to experience wild Idaho together — real backcountry, real adventure, real memories. Contact us to plan your family’s bowhunting trip, or visit our rates page for details.
Comments are closed