by Bobby Minchew
I’m 53 years old. To some that may sound young, to some that may sound ancient, but I feel every year in my bones and my joints. Four years of Marine Corps infantry, thirty years of law enforcement, and three years of fighting cancer will make a man age quickly. But, I had a goal. I wanted to kill a big bull elk with archery gear, and I was not going to stop until I did. I hoped it would happen at an age before I was forced to roll my wheelchair into a brush blind looking over a water hole, but I had no doubt that I would get it done!
My name is Bobby Minchew. My friends call me “Chew”. I grew up in the 1980s hunting rabbits and squirrels with a .22 rifle and a 20 gauge single shot. My dad was a coon hunter, and other than the cat squirrels and cottontails around my East Montgomery County neighborhood, hunting raccoons with hounds was my only time in the woods.
I left home at seventeen years old, when the Marine Corps recruiter picked me up and dropped me off at the airport. Four years, twelve countries, and two overseas deployments later, I was back in Texas. The hunting itch had been there the whole time I was gone, and now it was time to scratch it. My uncle got me on his deer lease in San Jacinto County and I got a few deer with my rifle over the next few years. But, I had just enough exposure to bowhunting to quickly know that I was destined to archery hunt.
Fast forward a few decades, and I had several whitetail deer, a blackbuck antelope, dozens of hogs, and a few other exotics on my bowhunting resume. I even bagged a few critters with a recurve bow.
My long quest for an archery elk started in 2015. I was driving to work on an August morning when my friend Curt called and asked if I wanted to go on an elk hunt. I told him I couldn’t do it because I needed more time to save up the money. He said, “No problem…it’s free. My wife and I can’t go, and two spots are already paid for.” I told him it would be a while before I could pay him back (this was a very expensive hunt in a great area), and he told me not to worry about it. The hunt was paid for, and he didn’t want it to go to waste.
I started calling some hunting buddies to find a willing travel partner. A lot of people say they want to go hunting, but when you call them with a plan and a deadline, they’re always unavailable. That wasn’t the case with my good friend Randy. A game plan quickly developed with only a few phone calls and texts. We soon found ourselves on a guided private land hunt surrounded by the beautiful Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Randy shot a monster bull, and I missed two close calls at giant elk. I knew right then that I was going to keep coming back until I got a bull with my bow. Little did I know my hardheaded attitude was going to cost me a lot of money and take up the next several years of my life!
My next trip was in 2016 with an outfitter based in Las Vegas, New Mexico. My buddy Kevin and I were disappointed in the hunt after five days of the guide putting us in newly placed pop-up blinds at fence crossings. We were there to catch elk leaving the property at daylight. They had been feeding in planted fields all night and would head for the hills as the sun came up. We only saw a few young elk at a distance that obviously avoided our exposed blinds. We felt ripped off, but I was determined to keep trying. “Chew Luck” strikes again.
I skipped 2017 due to lack of funds and other personal issues. My next hunt was in 2018 with an outfitter located about thirty minutes south of Chama, New Mexico. Our group of four guys (all friends from a popular Texas bowhunting forum, TexasBowhunter.com) traveled from the Houston and Dallas areas to get our first bull elks. I saw a black bear on my first sit (no bear tag) and then experienced a series of disappointing hunts in which all the elk we heard or saw were on other properties that we couldn’t access. Having a guide who liked to smoke a strawberry vape pen in the woods was not the hunting experience that I had saved all year for, to say the least! “Chew Luck” strikes again.
I had to put elk hunting on the backburner while I finished out my law enforcement career, moved out of the Houston area to Centerville, Texas, and started homesteading and raising various critters. By this point, I had five children and eleven grandchildren! Priorities change … but I still felt the need to head back to the elk woods.
Fast forward to late 2022, I started hearing that hunters were having success on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, in New Mexico. I made a few phone calls and spoke to some people with firsthand experience and decided to give it another try. Maybe the fourth trip would be the lucky charm! The reservation sounded promising. My research showed that they managed their elk population successfully and were well-known for producing solid bulls. I talked to my buddy, Curt (the friend who sent me on the first elk hunt that started this quest), to see if he was interested. Curt was all in! It was game time again.
The process for getting a tag up until 2023 was a little different than other places. The tags were first come, first served via phone calls to the office on a specified day in March. So we hatched a plan to have me and my people at work, and Curt and all of his people at work start calling on “D-Day” at 8 am to try and get through and secure two tags for us. Sounds like a plan, right? Nope. My typical “Chew Luck” reared its ugly head. The Jicarilla Game Commission changed up the elk tag process and instituted a regular lottery draw due to the overwhelming popularity of their hunts. Back to Plan B, crossing our fingers for the luck of the draw.
Curt and I sent in our application fees and waited impatiently for a few months. Then, in March, I got a message from a bowhunting acquaintance who had put in for the draw with his father—and they had been drawn! I was happy for them, but at the same time somewhat disappointed that my phone hadn’t rang. I checked my battery. Full. Bad signal? Nope, five bars. Voicemail alert? Notta. Checked the signal again. LTE was good. Mobile data was turned on. Nothing! I shrugged my shoulders and started considering other options. About two hours later, the phone rang and I had a call from a strange area code. I picked up my bottom lip which had been dragging the ground all day and answered. It was a real live Apache Indian telling me that Curt and I had been drawn! Heck yeah! Curt and I whooped it up on the phone and were counting the days until we left for northern New Mexico.
Then reality set in. Write a big check and hope it doesn’t bounce. Get the bow and other gear ready. Shoot a thousand arrows. Lose 50 pounds (after 3 months I only had 56 to go!). Take off work (new job after retirement). Save more money for guide fees, travel, rent house, and food. The list was endless.
Curt and I chose to hunt “two on one” with the guide, Ryan. That means we hunted together and took turns instead of each having a separate guide. Curt insisted that I get the first shot. That’s just how he is. I argued for about five seconds. We got to the VRBO a day early and met up with two other hunters (the father/son team mentioned earlier). We started hunting on a Tuesday morning. We woke up early, met the guide in town, and climbed into his truck with all of our gear.
Ryan is a full-blood Apache who lives and works as a police officer on the Jicarilla Reservation. He came highly recommended as an archery hunting guide. We were in good hands with Ryan! We were driving to one of his honey holes when he suddenly stopped the truck and pointed out a bull up on the hill with a couple of cows. This was not the place he wanted to hunt, but as the Apaches say, “Hunt where the elk are!” We drove past the elk as if we didn’t see them. We parked on the back side of the hill and got our gear together.
The reservation is a beautiful place. Clear skies, no noise or air pollution, hills everywhere (we Texans call them mountains), sand-colored rocks and boulders, steep ravines and cuts that were created by eons of flowing water and raging winds. Low trees and brush dotted the terrain. It made you wonder how all of the elk, mule deer, and other fauna could survive out there, but they are surviving and thriving just fine. The weather was beautiful with morning lows in the 40s and afternoon highs in the 70s. The wind was there, but not brutal. It tends to change directions throughout the day, but our guide could read it like a book.
Ryan hit the bugle call and we heard multiple bulls answer him. It was on! Ryan set a good pace, despite Curt and I huffing and puffing behind him like a steam engine from an old western show. We hung in and kept up until
we got fairly close to about three bulls bugling and acting like fools while surrounded by cows and calves. Every time we would try to sneak up close, the cows would spook and lead the whole disorganized mob over the hill, through a valley, and up another hill. I caught glimpses of a shooter bull and a young, illegal bull (they must be a minimum of 5×5). We were about thirty minutes in, and I’d already had more elk action than the last three hunts combined! The chase was on.
Take the above paragraph and repeat it about four or five times. That’s what we did non-stop for what seemed like weeks (but was actually only about 90 minutes). The guide would walk/run, Curt and I would plod/shuffle, and then the cows would spook. I was about to call a time out and have a Little Debbie and Gatorade break. If you haven’t hunted at high elevation after living at sea level most of your life, it can best be described as breathing through a straw.
I finally caught my breath as we saw a big set of antlers at about 80 yards, but he seemed to be walking away (again). I had an arrow nocked and was trying to control my breathing so I didn’t alert every elk in the region that I was on blood pressure and cholesterol meds. Ryan squatted down next to me and started raking some brush with a shed elk antler. I told myself he was using that an excuse to catch his breath. He was giving it hell when I looked up and saw the bull’s rack getting CLOSER! Ryan was looking down when I whispered, “Here he comes.”
The bull went from eighty yards to about forty yards in a heartbeat and was coming straight at us. He was confident, angry, and vocal, and was not going to tolerate a newcomer getting close to his harem of cows. Without speaking to Ryan, I came to full draw when the bull was at about thirty-five yards. I held the string back for some time as he kept coming, a little more slowly towards the end. He eventually walked to exactly twenty-five yards and stopped, facing us head-on. He knew that something wasn’t right as he stared intently at the slender, calm Apache and the out-of-place old man. I knew from my previous hunting experience that he was about to spin and run.
I can tell you this, with all conviction, I was solid as a rock! No shaking, no breathing hard, no sight pin moving all over the place. I had come too far, waited too long, and spent way too much hard-earned money to blow this shot. I had been shooting a plastic coffee can lid out to fifty yards at home, and this twenty-five yard shot was NOT going to kick my butt. I was in the zone, as they say. Autopilot kicked in as the green glowing sight pin on the Mathews V3X 33 settled on the base of the bull’s neck. For about half a second I thought, “Should I take this frontal shot?” Most would say it’s a very low percentage shot. But I was feeling no doubt. My mental mantra when shooting is, “Take a breath, squeeze the tennis ball between my shoulders and let the shot go off, which is a back tension shot that allows me to trip the release without moving my trigger finger.”
It worked! The arrow disappeared right where it was supposed to go. I mean the whole arrow. No partial penetration. No fletching visible. It was gone. The big bull of my dreams for the last eight years whirled and ran back down the trail away from us. I closed my eyes and listened to a cacophony of elk running away, crashing through trees, stumbling on rocks, and then silence. The guide looked at me like, “What just happened?” Little did I know that Curt was filming from about ten yards behind me with his iPhone. We examined the video of the shot several times. It wasn’t perfectly clear due to the distance, but all agreed it was good. I was feeling over the top with relief, joy, anxiety, you name it. An hour and a half after getting out of the truck, I had drilled a big bull.
All three of us high-fived. We talked some more about how the shot looked great. Then, I told them about “Chew Luck” and how I was cautiously optimistic but didn’t want to go all in. Ryan decided to wait about 30 minutes to take up the track. We lasted all of eight minutes! Ryan carefully walked up to look at where the bull (now nicknamed Maximus) was standing at the time of the shot. I watched him look around for a bit, turn and give us two big thumbs up and a great big smile! We quietly walked up to him and there it was … blood, glorious blood. And I don’t mean a few big fat drops of blood on the ground. I mean a virtual lung/heart/vitals spray of blood all over the place. I still wasn’t sure what happened with the arrow, but I knew that majestic beast was not going far!
We trailed about thirty yards across the ridge in the direction he ran seeing copious amounts of blood everywhere. Then, the path took a sharp right turn, straight downhill into the depths of the Grand Canyon (not really, just a steep rock gully). Ryan was a little ahead of Curt and I, and we were looking at all the blood on the brush and trees. I glanced up and Ryan had stopped walking and had his hand up. My heart stopped. Did he see the bull? Was it alive? Was he holding us back, so we didn’t spook him? Nope. He wanted a high five! But wait! Didn’t he grasp the concept of Chew Luck? Getting cancer while bowfishing, falling out of a tree stand two weeks before an elk hunt, breaking a leg at my birthday party, and all the other evidence of a bad luck dude? Surely he jests? But he was not playing with me. I took a few more steps and saw Maximus the Monster lying there. No exit hole. No bloody side. No big red puddles. Just a dead elk in all his natural glory, the way God created him.
I must say that I was brought to tears by the experience. I didn’t mean to cry. Didn’t want to cry. Didn’t want to thank the Lord out loud in front of those two stellar men. But I did. One elk and the mystical flight of an arrow made this former infantry Marine and 30-year law enforcement officer cry some ugly tears.
After the shock wore off, it was time to get to work. Ryan knew he couldn’t get his truck to where we were, so he called his two brothers who are also elk hunters and guides. They agreed to come help us pack out the elk. When they arrived, the knives were pulled out and we did the gutless quartering method on the ground. We started by skinning him on one side, folding out the cape, and then proceeded to quarter/backstrap/tenderloin him. Then we rolled him over and repeated the process. The meat was placed into bags and strapped to multiple pack frames.
After finishing the field butchering process, Ryan said, “I’ve got to see where that arrow went.” He got a bone saw and cut out several ribs to access the chest cavity. He gently put his hand inside the elk and said, “Wow. There’s the fletching.” He took his knife, made a few cuts, and pulled out the entire heart—with my arrow through it and fully intact. I had made a perfect shot. The heart and lungs were destroyed. The broadhead was perfectly centered inside the bull with the nock end near the front of the chest cavity and the broadhead barely puncturing the stomach area. Later, we took it back to town just like that, so the other guides could see it. “Chew Luck” had been conquered!
I hiked out the cape/horns/head which weighed approximately as much as a 1975 AMC Gremlin. Seventeen long hours later, we made it to the truck. Or maybe it was seventeen minutes. Not sure. We got the elk back to the meat locker in Dulce and we finished cutting him up, tagging all the parts, and putting them in the cooler. My work was done. It was celebration time! Curt was just as happy as I was, and I loved him for that. What a great, selfless guy to hunt with. My eight year quest was over. I had taken a 306 1/8” bull with my bow. Well, technically it was with my son’s bow since my limb blew up right before the hunt. Did you think Chew Luck was a minor issue?
The rest of the week was a blast as Ryan the Super Guide led Curt to a monster 317” bull. I was there to witness the shot and help with the blood trailing. I must say it was just as fun and exciting to hunt and find Curt’s bull as it was for mine. My quest was over. I’m now pondering the next adventure. Archery caribou? Black bear? Pronghorn? Stay tuned.
