Hunting Horns..Kelly Wallace’s Great Montana Adventure.
One of our favorite pastimes in the winter (when we didn’t have much to do), was horn hunting. Elk and deer shed their antlers, and tromping through the woods one would be lucky to find a small rack…really lucky to find a large one! Kelly liked to hunt for horns. He would take a bunch to Wayne Rose at the taxidermy shop in Darby, and Wayne would give him $7.00 a pound for them. Kelly didn’t do it for the money, he did it because he liked finding the treasure.
He and Wayne were good friends, and Wayne sold the horns he got from local horn hunters. Kel just didn’t want to find them and leave them. My friend Len Wallace used to harvest the elk antler velvet on his Rye Creek Ranch..a very profitable business until the F&G shut him down due to the diseases carried to the wild population by infected animals. Seems the Japanese use the velvet for aphrodisiac properties. Horn hunting has always been something kids could do to earn a little pocket money, and many families have made it this way, when nothing else brought in money.
So many trips! We would hike up in the Sapphires or the Bear Tooth Mountains looking for horns. I would watch him pick his way through windfalls, searching. It is a vivid picture…Kel walking the Forest Service roads with horns sticking out of his backpack. He was always quiet when looking…like his mind was a thousand miles away…he loved to go out on the fresh snow to enjoy the quiet. We would walk for a mile before he would talk, and that was ok, I just liked to go with him.
(I don’t know when the metamorphosis of Kelly Wallace began, but in those days he was not too interested in any kind of a living. He liked being a mountain bum…!).
Kel's Horn Hunting
One time, I got a call from Alex Wemple saying that they had taken Kel to the hospital in Missoula, but that he only had a broken leg and a broken collarbone. Scratched from head to toe and hypothermic…but ‘he was ok’.
Kel had gone out alone horn hunting. He had been side-hilling trying to get down to a pile of windfalls when he slipped and fell down the side of the mountain, about 120 ft. He knew immediately his leg was broken, and he had no way of getting back up the side of the mountain. So, he laid down and got covered with his gear and branches. It was only the grace of God and the fact that Alex and his brother were cutting in the area that saved his life.
As he lay there (he would tell me later) he saw some of the most incredible things he had ever seen! Eagles soaring up and down, blue sky and clouds. He saw deer coming to feed and the wind gently moving the branches. He had laid there for 6 hours and it was dusk when he was discovered by “accident”.
It was while in that heap, that Kel decided that if he got out he would do something with his life besides tramp the hills of Montana. He never actually gave that up however, but he did make something of himself. He became a pilot, a very successful business man, and an avid conservationist. All because he hunted horns alone that day.
I am standing in his sister Connie’s den, looking at the rack on the wall and the HUGE mounted cougar…(another story). I still remember that skinny kid with the horns sticking out of the backpack, and that quiet kid who wanted to be a mountain man. So now Kel…what do we do with the horns you piled into the corner of the shed on the Boulder?
When the kids say there is nothing to do….take them on a horn-hunting expedition…never know what may come of it!
Creekwalker
(Thank you Creek for sharing that nice story about your friend’s journey through life. R.I.P. Kel)
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