Ep. 4: The Story of Stubby McNubbins and How to Dog Elk
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Hunters and anglers rely on Seafoam to keep their engines running the way it should the entire season. Pick up a can of Seafoam today at your local auto parts store or visit seafoamworks.com to learn more. As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance.

You are in the elk woods. There's elk around, they're calling, you're calling. Yet when you call, that bull just rounded up his cows and went the other direction. That ever happened to you? Probably has. You might be thinking to yourself, well, what was I doing wrong? And how do I regularly bugle in one of those bulls that decides to take his cows away from me? This week, I want to cover some advanced bugling trickery.

Elk season is upon us and therefore I will divulge the info quite reluctantly because this is one of my best kept elk hunting secrets. And I'm not really sure anybody has gone into this tactic in this kind of detail. What we're going to talk about is dogging a bull. In that scenario where the bull runs away, you've actually done nothing wrong. In fact, you've done everything right.

Now, an elk moving away might mean something, but I'm going to tell you what that means and the deadliest tactics to employ to what I like to call bulldogging that animal. I want to tell you a story of a little bull. Not even a little bull. A bull. A bull that I like to call Stubby McNubbins. Now, this bull has tricked many hunters.

He had a six point antler on one side, then a five point on the other with this big old drop tine. It dropped down past his face. And it wasn't just the antlers that made him stubby McNubbins. It was the way he walked. He just walked with authority. He was the meanest bull in this particular area. And I had had many encounters with him over the years. Now, while guiding one year, I was sitting on an area glassing.

And sure enough, I turn up Mr. Stubby McNubbins. I rarely name elk or anything that I'm hunting, but this one I've had a history with. So I make a play. The plan is get downwind. The wind happens to be going down. It's near evening. I get in and he has a harem of cows with him. It's a pretty good size herd. I would say 50 plus elk. And Stubby is the ring leader.

I'm like, how am I going to get this bull to come in? There are other bulls here, but man, nothing compares to little stubby. So play is get downwind, creep in as close as possible to the herd, let out a bugle. I'm hoping that I'll be within his cows. He'll think, dang, I'm the boss. No, not in my house. Come in for a fight. Arrow him. Sweet. Done. Little stubby had a different plan.

Old Stubby wanted to see how well our lungs worked and how athletic we could get. Because when I bugled, Stubby bugled back, rounded up his cows, and took them the other direction. I looked at my hunter and said, we're going to go. He's like, okay. I think he was probably already tired by this point. But when I say we're going to go, I mean, we're going. This is Stubby we're talking about here. I have a history with this bull, right?

He starts pushing his cows up the hill. The cows are making all kinds of racket. There's enough of them where it almost seems mass confusion, but he is leading the charge. He's pushing these elk up the mountain away from us. We are about, I would say two thirds of the way from the bottom. And I know for a fact, he's going to push them all the way to the top.

As he starts working the elk, it's nearly impossible to lose this herd because you can hear not only him bugling pretty much every time I bugle, but the cow is just going off. He's definitely trying to rein them in and push them in the direction he wants. We move as fast as we can chasing after these elk. I'm bugling as I'm further away. I'm bugling like a smaller bull. As I get closer, bugling meaner and meaner.

the sound starts to disappear and that i know means that they dipped over the top of the ridge i look at my hunter and i'm like we need to get to the top now we we pretty much gave it everything we had as soon as we got to the ridge we're practically running to the top where they went over when we got to the top out of breath i set up the cow decoy

I had a Montana decoy and I had the stakes in it. It was all ready to go at this point. I was, I was got it out as we were moving fast. I get just over the rise of the top, drop down a little bit, set up the decoy kind of in the open, let out a call. I hear stubby and then I see antler tips. He is coming in and he's coming in hard, stomping his way up.

Well, my thought is there's a little bit of small conifers right behind us. And I'm thinking, okay, I whisper to my hunter, dude, when he gets behind these trees, you'll draw. He's coming on a straight line. He's going to be right in our laps. The decoys up and we're kind of hiding behind the decoy. As stubby stomping his way up here, that decoy falls over. I didn't have a stakes very good. The ground was hard. The decoy just falls forward slowly.

right onto the ground. But old Stubby's so dang fired up, he gives zero Fs and keeps coming. Yet, I think the act of the decoy falling over and now just feeling exposed, I just whisper, don't move. My hunter is shaking so hard. I'm like, wait till he crossed. There's one little pine. He has 10 more steps. He's going to go right behind this little pine. He can draw and he's going to have a 10-yard broadside shot. Stubby is ours.

The hunter is shaking and just, I think, essentially freaks out. Does a really big motion to draw. Stubby stops, wheels around, starts to run. I hit the bugle. He stops at 30 yards. I call it 30 yards. Let's the arrow go. Whack. Hits the damn tree right behind him. The bull runs off. I bugle again. 55 yards. The hunter draws back.

Then stands up, stubby sees him, and that's that. Runs off. O'Reilly Auto Parts are in the business of keeping your car on the road. I love O'Reilly. In fact, the other day, I'm not kidding you, the other day, I went into an O'Reilly Auto Parts looking for a part. I needed a different thing that wasn't really in there, you know, only like tangentially related to what they carry.

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Go to fishingbooker.com today. That's fishingbooker.com. The key to this entire setup working is first understanding elk behavior, and then I'm going to kind of define the tactic. So here's the trouble that people have. When they bugle at a bull, and then the bull gathers up his cows and runs away, they think, oh, I must have done something wrong. He didn't like the way I sounded.

A lot of elk calling is not how well you bugle, but how you use the type of call for the scenario. Because all elk sound different. And I have heard real elk that just sound like the worst callers in the world. Heck, I believe that I am a better caller than most elk out there. And maybe that's the problem sometimes. But you got to look at it like this. As a human, when we call, we assume that they think that we are humans and we did something wrong. You really have to look at it through the elk's eyes.

When an elk rounds up his cows, it probably means the exact opposite of what you're thinking. If the wind is good and there's no reason for him to round him up, he's actually reacting to you like you are a real elk, which is what you want. That's the whole part of calling deception is a bull thinking that you are a real elk because that's what elk do when they encounter each other. A bull like Stubby McNubbins is a herd bull. That's his herd.

He can't just run in and fight every single elk that approaches him. A lot of times he gets those elk on the move and then hopefully pushes those elk away from the elk that's trying to come after him. Now, why would he do that? There's a lot of reasons he would do that.

But the primary reason is he just doesn't want to have to deal with that bull on those terms. He wants to feel that bull out. He wants to win a vocal battle before having to exert physical energy. And he can do that by just talking with that bull as he's moving those cows away and letting those cows know, look, this is my herd. That guy doesn't mean anything. We're just going to keep it like this.

But there are ways that you can call and ways that you can react to the way he's pushing those elk away like a real elk would, which would incite him to turn around and challenge you. I would classify the tactic of bulldogging as this. It's where you persist on a bull to the point where he has no other option but to turn around and fight. And that's what you want. So how do you get to that point?

It's in the technique and the tactics of calling. It takes two things. It takes the right setup and I would say the most important, some physical stamina. The reason that I would stay in shape for elk hunting is because of this tactic, because it is so successful that if you can pull it off, you pull it off regularly. So let's set up the scenario. The end game where most bulls turn around and fight is what you're reaching for.

That happens as you gain the dominant position over that bull, which sees himself as a dominant bull. Where does that happen? When you actually gain elevation over the elk. So what I like to do is I like to push the elk uphill,

And I would say seven out of 10 times, I can get that bull. If I've kept up, it's probably more like nine out of 10 times. I can get that bull to turn around and come in once he's crested the top and I am above him within 200 yards. Now you think, well, I could never catch up to elk.

But it isn't that. He's moving that whole herd of elk. Those cows don't really give a rat's ass. They don't want to be pushed around. Half those cows are going to be feeding. They're going to be stopping. I've even seen cows get over the top and lay down because he's just maintaining that herd and trying to assert his dominance in a group of elk that is mostly matriarchal, except for during the rut. Like he's running the roost right now, but those cows really know that they run the ship 90% of the year.

So even though he's pushing them away, a lot of those cows are dawdling, they're doing their thing. He's not really trying to make them run away from you. He's just trying to say, "Look, I'm in charge right now.

And so it gives you the opportunity to get into that bull's head through the calling and also gives you the opportunity with the right amount of physical exertion to catch up and give yourself that scenario where he drops over the ridge and you're now on the top, which is where he's probably going to turn around and chase you. So in order for the setup to work, you need a downhill wind and you want to start calling below the bull.

A lot of times you'll find that if you're below an elk calling and he is a dominant elk, he will actually call a lot back to you, but he won't actually come into you most of the time. There's the occasional time they do. But when you get that dominant bull on the move and then get above him, it pisses him off.

So I'm going to go through the calling techniques to get that bull to that pissed off point. So it's going to work when you get to the top, you put in all that energy hiking, chasing after him. You want to make sure you do the right sequence to get him to turn around more often than not. So it starts out like this. Let's say the scenario is you call, he calls, you call, he calls, you're below him. The wind's going downhill. You've got the right setup. You're going to want him to push those elk uphill.

those cows uphill because they don't really like to go uphill. It's physically exhausting. He's going to be running around a lot and he knows that's what's going to put him in a bad mental state when you get to the top. When I start out at a further distance, I like to sound small from a distance and sound big as I get closer. There's a reason for that.

It's a mental game in his head. As he's pushing those elk, you want him to constantly scream back, "I'm the boss. I'm the boss." But as you get closer, you want him to doubt what's happening. You want to now tell the elk, the cows around him that you're the boss. You're the boss.

So you want him to get brazen from a distance and then be bold as you get closer. So let's say it like this. The elk start moving, call. I'm doing more simple drawn out bugles, not a lot of emphasis into it to start. I'll let him build up. My first aggressive bugle is gonna be as he's clearly moving in the direction I want. I'll start the chuckling sequence. ♪♪

Your hope is, and it will probably happen, is that bull starts chuckling back. Now, this scenario works when the elk are kind of in a frenzy. You'll hear a lot of cow calling. You'll hear that bull bugling. And that's how you're going to be able to stay on these elk and follow them. As I get closer, I'm going to start throwing cow calls in the bull's distance through my bugle tube and bugles away from the bull.

The reason is, is I want him to believe that there are cows. Like, let's say we're getting toward the top third of the hill. I want him to think, okay, there's still cows back there and the bulls behind. I want him to believe that the bull's further away than I actually am. Because what that's going to do is that's going to slow him down. He's going to try to keep a certain distance from me. But if he thinks the bull's further away, that allows me time to catch up. Also, if he thinks there's cows where I'm at,

That might give him the idea of, okay, I still have things to round up. Now the play really comes in when you get to the top. Once you get over the top, he's lost whatever elk might have been behind. This is the point where I now throw out cow calls at the top, but switch the roles. I throw the cow calls back behind me. So he thinks the cows are further away.

My first bugle over the top is going to be the meanest, hardest bugle I can do. I'm talking a type of bugle that when you blow through the bugle tube, it's like someone kicked you in the nuts. If you don't have nuts, it's like you're kicking someone else in the nuts. The reason is, is because you want him to believe that now this bull is between him and his cows. He has the upper hand by being above him and he is pissed and claiming that herd.

Any bull in his right mind that doesn't want to lose his cows is now going to turn around and try to push you off or fight this other intruder off.

You're at the top of the hill and you're just going to go. It doesn't even matter what really the call sounds like at the top as long as it sounds pissed. Like elk feel that feeling. So I'm going to throw the cow calls back behind me and then I'm just going to let out just something, throw in some voice inflections and just sound angry. I mean, by this point, the real bull's throat might be cracking. He's going to sound weird. It's okay. It doesn't matter. Just sound angry. Okay.

At that point, that bull below you should not like that. And you'll know he'll turn around and he'll either come straight in or he'll let out a similar bugle, start raking and then come in. That is your setup where you're going to get that bull. If you've made it to that point, congratulations, my friend, you just dogged that elk.

Now, bugling, chasing elk, that right there is what gets the blood pumping. That is the epitome of September elk hunting. But it doesn't always go down like that. So next week, I want to talk about those times where those elk are not making a peat.

I'm going to tell you the secret to calling in a bull that doesn't want to respond on those weeks where it sounds like nothing's in the woods and nothing's happening. As always, thanks for listening. I appreciate it.

Feel free to give us a good rating if you like it. That'll keep us going. Drop a good comment. Also, you can always reach out via social media, Instagram, what have you, or email me here, remy at themeateater.com. Love to hear from you. Hopefully, I hear some awesome success stories of things that went right for you this fall. So next week, catch you then.

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