There is something about the still hour before dawn’s birth on an October morning during elk season. It is a quiet hour where the only sound you hear is the popping of kindling from the wall tent’s wood stove. You lie there on your cot and wait for the warmth to wash over you, testing the rising temperature by snaking a forearm out of your sleeping bag every few minutes. Finally, you stand and start the morning.

This morning is like that. My friend and I are hunting in the Sierra Madre, in a beautiful swatch of country that is heavily laced with aspen trees and choked with oakbrush. This is the only place in Wyoming that has oakbrush and aspen stands of its type and as a result, the hunting is fine.

We are in the Little Snake roadless area, a reach of country almost 10,000 acres in size and big enough to provide excellent hunting. It hugs the Huston Park Wilderness area and touches the Colorado border. It is a good place to be on an October morning in a warming wall tent. I drove my old pickup truck up the rough four-wheel drive road—a route specifically designated for such travel—and set up this camp in exactly the same place I had set up camp the year before. It’s starting to feel like home.

I get the coffee going and as I’m feeding the fire with another chunk of kindling, I hear something faint and far-off. It is distinct enough, though, for me to step out of the tent in my long underwear and stand there in that cold October morning, breath steaming into the dawn, ears cocked. And there it is again. A bull elk bugling. I have heard that when cow elk aren’t bred the first go-round in September, they sometimes come into a second estrus, sparking a second rut. Perhaps that is what this is. And there it is again—that sound that makes every hunter’s neck tingle with goose bumps. It is like nothing else on earth.

We hurry now, eager and moving, putting off breakfast for a breakfast bar and gulping our coffee in big painful swallows. Rifles loaded. Packs ready. Cow call around my neck. Go.

We climb in the darkness, trying to not crunch aspen leaves too much, leaving the pickup truck and the wall tent behind, working fast. Sweating and breathing. The elk talk back and forth now and within minutes, we are in the herd. A bull bugles from one side of us, in the timber. In the darkness to the other side, his rival answers. We can hear cow speak to their calves. Somehow, the wind has honored us. We are amidst a whole herd of elk and they have not smelled us. How does this happen? The gods have smiled.

As dawn rises, we hear elk crunching behind us. We have parked ourselves at the edge of a tiny park stretching only a few hundred yards long and only 30 yards wide. Out steps a cow and we do not even blink. She is only about 15 feet away from my hunting partner, who has his rifle propped up in front of his face and is barely breathing. She stares right at us and then decides we are okay and moves out into the meadow, starting to graze. We hear another crunch and there is a spike, a legal elk. He stares hard too and still we don’t move. I can hardly breathe. The spike inhales sharply, we can hear wind over nostril, and then moves out into the meadow. My whisper is barely audible: “Shoooooot.”

Carefully, moving almost imperceptibly, my friend raises his rifle and pulls the trigger.

By noon, we are back down at camp and the elk quarters are cooling in the shade of the big aspens nearby. We laugh and drink a beer pulled from the cooler in the back of the truck and we think about how lucky we are to be able to walk out of our camp and into a hunting territory that is unchanged by human hands except for a jeep road and a wide place to camp. A hunting ground that is nearly as pristine as it was when mountain men walked the land. A roadless area that provides recreation for the every day person. We will be back. As long as the land stays this way. It will if we have enough foresight, as sportsmen, to save this land for the next generation, to keep it as it is: no improvement necessary.

Tom Reed is the Wyoming/Montana field organizer for Trout Unlimited as well as the author of Great Wyoming Bear Stories.