Learn About Elk

by Roland Cheek

In the beginning there was heaven and earth; and the earth was without form and void and little tow-headed boys wandered around barefoot with hands in their pockets because there was nothing upon the land to catch their imagination. And God looked upon His work and it was not yet good that no thing existed to challenge those boys. And so an autumn came to pass when eerie whistlings drifted into the valleys from distant mountainsides and the by-then lanky teenage boys threw away their toys and accepted the wapiti challenge that would make them men! And God and girls saw that it was good. If you've heard a different version of this story, that's your problem. I heard it but once—this way. And so I became an elk hunter. Then I became infatuated with all God's creatures, and eventually a believer that God's handiwork is composed of such intricacies that a quest to understand has taken the rest of my life. Learn About Elk is about that quest.The heart of “Learn About Elk” is a series of “old man and the boy” chapters scattered throughout the book about a grandpa teaching his grandson not only how to hunt elk, but why he does. The book captures a lifetime of both rewarding and humbling experiences while pursuing one of the most wily creatures God ever made. Elk took me to the dance. Not only did they take me there, they’ve kept me dancing!- Roland CheekJack McNeel is a retired regional wildlife educator for the Idaho Department of fish and Game. The review that Mr. McNeel wrote for the Coeur d’Alene Press is worth you are, were, or ever hope to be an elk hunter,"The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou" [now “Learn About Elk”] is a must read book. It should be mandatory reading for every hunter education student as well as instructor.Roland Cheek has done an incredible job in portraying both the how to and why of elk hunting. He has woven an entertaining mix of how to hunt elk with many tips from a lifetime as hunter and outfitter in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness with a similar mix of chapters about the whys and moralities of hunting.Perhaps it should be equally recommended for the nonhunters because Cheek artfully describes his own evolution as a hunter where the kill becomes progressively less important while the enjoyment of the total experience becomes increasingly stronger. He revels in the enthusiasm of kids and grandkids as they begin hunting. He describes his own continued enthusiasm even though filling his own tag becomes relatively unimportant. Few writers have ever done so masterful a job in explaining why hunters hunt while also providing an enjoyable text on how to hunt.

333 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 9, 2013

About the author

There are, I suppose, febrile savants who reject any notion that a person can acquire the writing art outside those hallowed halls of academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford or Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout.
There's dissent, of course, holding the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. My particular PhD came from God's own university of wild places and wilder things. My Culture might best be described as the Campfire kind, backed up against the inky black of star-filled nights, regaling saucer-eyed guests with tales of wilderness adventure, while horses stomped at picket lines and coyotes howled at a rising moon.
My doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about those wild places and wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt; crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield. My column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and I hosted a coast-to-coast radio show with 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then I turned my attention to books: a baker's dozen novels and wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences.
What's my point? That one can have adventure AND learn to write very well indeed (despite academic disdain for anyone outside their comfortable inner circle); well enough indeed to tell the conventional publishing world to go to hell--that I'll publish my own stuff.
More successfully.
And at greater profit