Jacob Paintin isn’t having the best hunting season.
It started with his deep freezer breaking down, spoiling most of his game meat.
When he shot a bull elk on Halloween, he was excited to have a fresh supply to feed his family.
Or so he thought.
When he and his hunting companions, Aaron Krob and Alex Davis, started cutting into the carcass, they were hit with an overpowering rancid stench from massive infections caused by previous wounds.
“We were doing everything we could not to toss our cookies,” Paintin told Cowboy State Daily.
“It was just absolutely foul,” Krob added. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled coming from an animal.”
They hoped that at least the hindquarters would be good. But when Paintin started trying to butcher the hindquarters at home the next day, he discovered that they were riddled with lead fragments and completely spoiled.
Though he was left with no game meat, Paintin takes comfort in the fact that he ended what must have been days, if not weeks, of agony for the bull, which was suffering from at least two previous wounds.
“He didn’t die in vain,” Paintin said. “I’m trying to teach my sons good ethics. As hunters we try to do the ethical thing and make sure animals aren’t suffering.”
Small Patch Of Opportunity
Paintin, who lives in Rawlins, had some meat left over from last year’s cow elk, and he supplemented that with a mule deer buck he killed this fall.
So, he thought he was well-supplied. But then his deep freezer crashed.
Not to be discouraged, he looked forward to an elk hunt with Krob and Davis near Rawlins.
They had general elk tags and were hunting on public land. About noon on Oct. 31, Paintin decided to take a walk through a small, forested patch of public land bordering some private property.
The public land went back only a few hundred yards, so he figured it would be a quick foray. It didn’t seem that promising, but it was worth a try.
A short way in, while still comfortably inside the public-land boundary, he found some elk in the timber. Most of them fled before he could get a shot.
But a particular bull “was slow to get up, with his antlers turned toward me,” he said.
He saw that the elk had a unique rack. One side was essentially one long spike.
So, he took aim, shot, and dropped the bull.
‘Crazy, Crazy, Crazy’
Once he got up to the bull, he started to worry that something was wrong. The bull looked gaunt, with sunken eyes. And it had a visible old wound on its neck.
It wasn’t until Davis and Krob arrived to help him, and they started to gut the elk, that they realized just how horrible the bull’s condition was.
“The entire inside was full of infection,” probably from the neck wound, which might have been festering for weeks, he said.
The wound might have been caused by another hunter’s bullet, or the elk could have been gouged by another bull during a mating-season fight.
The three friends gritted their teeth and pushed through the process of gutting the elk, and they managed to pull it off without anybody vomiting.
“The smell was on my hands from gutting it for three days. It was that bad,” Krob said. “It had big, massive cysts inside the ribcage. It was crazy, crazy, crazy. That bull was definitely on his last legs.”
It was clear that the meat in the front quarters was probably inedible, Krob said, but the hunters felt obligated to at least pull it out and take it to a Wyoming Game and Fish check station.
They decided to cut the bull in half in hopes of keeping the infections from spreading to the hindquarters, which at the time seemed as if they might be salvageable, Krob said.
At the check station, game wardens agreed that at least the front quarters were too infected to eat.
Shotgun Blast?
When Paintin tried butchering the hindquarters, it was painfully clear that they were a lost cause, too.
The meat was full of lead fragments, discolored and stank, he said.
Krob wonders whether the lead was from a single projectile that had fragmented upon impact or from multiple projectiles.
“I thought maybe somebody shot it in the hindquarters with a shotgun at some point,” he said.
‘A Cool Story To Tell’
“I’m not an antler hunter; I hunt to fill my freezer,” Paintin said.
But even so, it was nice to at least get a unique set of antlers from the bull.
He’s hoping to make a European mount, meaning the cleaned skull with antlers attached.
Krob said he has some spare game meat he can give Paintin to make up for his friend’s loss.
And he, too, is glad that the bull isn’t out there, still suffering and doomed to a slow death.
“That bull was putting up a good fight for his life but probably wouldn’t have survived," he said.
And as he sees it, Paintin’s elk hunt wasn’t a total bust.
“For a first bull, that’s a cool story to tell and a cool set of antlers to hang up on the wall,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
