My late dad was a Western cowboy trapped in a Midwestern farmer’s body. He had worked on a cattle outfit out of Belle Fourche, S.D., as a younger man, and he longed to leave the soybeans and feeder pigs of our little Missouri farm for the big sky and the open range.
When I moved to Montana, the first thing we did together was hatch plans for him to come elk hunting. We hunted a few general seasons for public-land bulls before we reckoned cow tags had shorter odds of both drawing and filling. He drew them, all right, but had trouble with the filling part. Finally,
