My proud hunter... and his giant elk

Dan was giving me crap last night for not posting about his Elk. :) I know how rude of me to not get right on that. So here's a few pictures and a story of the giant beast that has been slain at the hands of my daring hubby.

So the story as Dan tells it... :) ... They had been hiking up and down sheer cliffs for days and not seeing anything worth shooting or at least anything he could get a shot at. The group split up to look. Dan and his dad were hiking this crazy mountain alone, sliding down on their butts down these steep slopes and climbing back up again. Dan looks over and there coming out of the trees is a mammoth Elk! Dan says "Dad there's a buck!" His dad says "You mean a bull right?" Dan said "Yeah whatever." So they watch this bull go down a hill then they BOOK it over to this better area to get a better shot if it decides to come back up out of the valley where they think it will. So Dan pulls out his old indian trick shooting sticks (aka 2 sticks tied together with a string since he forgot his real shooting sticks.) And sure enough the Elk came out and wandered up the side a bit and pauses right in between two trees and stands up all the way and looks around and BAM! Dan takes a 430 yard shot and hit the beast right in the heart (apparently exploding the heart). The Elk- with no heart at this point- takes off running straight up the steep mountain for a hundred yards or so. Dan gets one more shot off that goes through it's neck but the thing was still kinda limping away into some trees. So Dan and his dad book after it so they don't somehow lose it and soon find it dead on the ground and HUGE!

The horns score something like 360 (I have no idea what this means only that it's really big) He's getting a full mount! Yeah for those of you who remember the dear that used to live at our old house in the loft, this one will be like 5 times as big!! It's gonna live at Dan's work because you'd have to start the neck on the wall at almost the ground so the antlers didn't touch the ceiling. (OK not quite that big but the face would be lower than eye level.) And he dropped off 240 pounds of meat at the butcher! There are no words for how I feel about having that much elk meat headed my way (but I can tell you if there were words, they wouldn't be super happy ones :)

Anyways- so the story was much embellished on my part- well actually not that embellished. So here's some pictures.

I have some cute pictures of the kids standing in between the antlers but I haven't uploaded those yet so I'll post those when I do...