I'm from the south and grew up hunting whitetail with shotgun, bow, rifle, muzzleloader. I had taken tons of deer with a bullet I was sure would do the job on an elk when I got my first chance to come out west. I was wrong and learned well the lesson that bullet selection is everything when hunting elk. So I got my first opportunity to shoot an elk, I was by myself working my way down a steep drainage in central Idaho when I spotted several elk bedded on the opposite hill about 350 yards away. A quick scan with my scope and I picked out a legal bull. I sat down, pulled off my backpack, took out my range finder (old Simmons the size of a lunch box) it read 350. I prepared myself for the shot by getting steady on a fell tree. Took time to realize I was about to take my first elk and how hard it was going to be to pack him the three miles back to the truck solo. But they were laying near the top of the ridge so I thought if I could anchor him there at least it would minimize the climb. So I opted for a neck shot as the bull was lying quartered to me and the head and neck where my best option. So I took a deep breath and squeezed. Never saw an animal the size of an elk go from lying down to turning a backflip in a split second but as he flopped, every time a shot presented itself I sent another 190gr bullet at him. Also, every time he jumped/lunged/kicked he went another 30-50 yards further down a really steep shale slope. After sending the first four rounds I dug out some more rounds, loaded them and again started sending them as shots presented themselves. By the time he reached the bottom of the ravine and the cover of oak brush, I'd fire 9 shots! It took me the better part of an hour to get to where he ended up and to my disbelief, he was sitting, entangled in an oak brush tree still alive. At about 10 steps I ended it with the last bullet I had to the back of his skull. While skinning him I discovered that 7 of the nine shots had hit there mark. The first shot had caught him in the jaw and exited just right of the spine below where the skull meets the spine. It had cut the jugular and it literally looked like a horror movie all the way down the mountain. Four of the follow-up shots had hit lung, liver, heart. One got rump, the other gut. I felt so guilty for causing such a magnificent animal so much suffering. I changed to partitions and accubonds and never had another episode like this one. Of course, I also started taking only clean vital shots, if you aim for vitals and are off by a couple inches you still get lung or liver or heart. While this was not my only experience with hard to kill animals (I grew up on a farm and had to dispatch various horses, cows, dogs, alligators from time to time) it did fill me with the desire to always make it as quick as possible for the sake of the animal.
