A friend of mine loved to hunt and he loved most of all to hunt alone. Just his horse, his pack horse his tent, his gun and some food was good enough for him.

What reminded me of this friend was that the October he went hunting in what is now the Bob Marshall but then was called just Big River, Montana had experienced a very hot, dry and smoky summer, much like what we are going through now.

It was October when my friend set up his camp in the wilderness and proceeded to scout for an elk or even a large buck deer to take home.

One day he had scouted a bit but it was so hot and so terribly windy he decided it better to just go back to camp and wait out at least the terrible winds. So back to camp he went and he was in the process of getting the horses tethered and ready for night when a terrible gust of wind came up and something really spooked those two horses and they took off like bats out of hell not to be seen until someone captured them some 30 miles away in the Seeley Lake area that November.

So, my friend was alone in the camp. First he thought that if he waited and his food didn’t run out, someone would come by also hunting so could help him out. He waited three days but no one came by at all.

Three days later he decided to walk out. He didn’t exactly know where he was but he figured that if he went down any drainage he would come out somewhere around the east front.

So he took off. He walked for four or five days without seeing anything at all. He ended up on the prairie still seeing nothing. Finally some six days later he heard a noise in the wind and walked up from his drainage to see a highway. He hailed down a car and they took him into Cutbank where he got some medical attention at the hospital. While there, the sheriff of Glacier County came to see him and couldn’t believe it when my friend told him how far he had walked.

“You walked right under two rail road trestles and two highway bridges and you didn’t see a thing until you got here to Cutbank?”

My friend admitted that and never did live his big October hunt down until his dying day.

Don’t get lost in the Bob!