by Mark Henckel

Hats off to Curtis Lemmon. The 17-year-old Roundup hunter did the right and ethical thing.

Lemmon drew back his bow and shot an arrow into a six-point bull elk whose antlers were hopelessly locked with a smaller bull. The smaller bull was already dead. The six-point was terribly injured and on its way to a slow and agonizing death.

Here's the story:

Curtis' mother, Robin, was on her way to Billings one morning last week when she spotted a couple of game wardens' pickups parked near the highway and people out in nearby field in the Bull Mountains.

What she found was the aftermath of a brutal bull elk fight. Two bulls - a good six-point and a smaller five-point - had locked antlers. The battle must have been ferocious. The ground was churned up over a wide area. There was blood spattered on the ground everywhere.

The six-point bull had won the battle and, in fact, had broken the neck of the smaller bull. During the fight, both animals had broken their jaws as well. Antler points had perforated the hides of both animals, wounding them further. The whole scene was a bloody mess.

An earlier passer-by on the highway had sought to give the six-point a better chance of freeing his locked antlers, and somehow had managed to cut away the body of the dead bull, leaving only the head and part of the neck attached. But even at that, the older bull was doomed due to his injuries and the heavy weight still attached to his antlers.

The game wardens at the scene were preparing to shoot the six-point bull to put it out of its misery, but asked if anyone had a valid bowhunting license - since archery elk season was open - and would be willing to shoot and tag the animal. If not, the wardens would be left to do it.

Robin said her son had a bowhunting tag. She talked to the landowner who said having a hunter take the elk would be preferable to having the wardens shoot it. She called Curtis at high school in Roundup. He came and shot the elk, putting his tag on the animal.

"It's good that a hunter was able to harvest it," said Dennis Hagenston, warden captain for FWP in Billings, speaking of the Bull Mountains six-point.

"We don't run into situations like this very often with elk. It's pretty uncommon, but once in a while, we do run into it with deer that have antlers locked. We try to do what we can. If they're locked up, we try to get them apart. Sometimes there's no choice," he said. "It's part of our job to kill them and salvage the meat if we can't save them, but it's not the most pleasant part of our job."

Hagenston said if other hunters run into situations like this during the hunting seasons ahead, they should report it to game wardens if they're not in a position to take the animal and tag it themselves.

"We don't advise hunters to dispatch wounded animals unless they're filling a tag. We want to get a report, then we can authorize something or respond to it ourselves," Hagenston said. "Where we are able to get a hunter in on it, that's much better."

Normally, all hunters hope they can hunt long and hard, make a perfect stalk, outwit a wily buck or bull, and make a good shot in a fair-chase setting. That's the way it's always supposed to be in the hunting world. These hunting stories aren't quite like that.

But in terms of stepping up to the plate and doing the ethical thing - sacrificing their tags to put these fatally-wounded elk out of their misery, preventing a slow and painful death and making good use of the animals' meat - both hunters are worthy of applause.