OutdoorNebraska

December 2019 • Nebraskaland 49 through December. In the fall, the elk frequented the yard around his son, Mike's, home, which sits less than a mile from Sehi's old home and "wrecked" a fair share of the trees and shrubs they planted there as he rubbed his antlers on them in the fall. One night, while Mike was asleep, the bull let out a bugle while standing outside his bedroom window. "He said it sounded like he had his head in the window," Funk said. Others heard the bull bugle in the fall. Sehi only heard it once, but his son has a video of that occasion, captured while they were deer hunting. During the past 6 or 8 years, Funk thinks the bull spent more time in a shelterbelt on his family's ground on the next section west of Sehi's where they had a food plot and a small patch of alfalfa. In April, he was driving through that shelterbelt on a four-wheeler, checking damage to fields following last spring's flooding and also looking for shed deer antlers, when he spotted something odd poking up from behind a cedar tree in a shelterbelt. "I drove by that and I thought, 'You know that looked funny,'" Funk said. "I thought it almost looked like the horn of that elk, so I turned around and went back and sure enough there he was. "It looked like he naturally just went and laid down behind that cedar tree and nature took its course." The elk had been dead for some time, and coyotes and other scavengers had picked the carcass nearly clean. He was probably buried in snow when rabbit hunters had gone through there a few months earlier. After having Jonathan Andreasen, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission Conservation Officer, inspect the carcass and confirm the bull died of natural causes, Funk was able to keep the skull. The bull was far from its prime. It had broken off its left antler near the base early in the growing stage, and the points on its right beam weren't as strong. But it still sported impressive mass, with bases topping 10 inches. Ron's brother, Jim, found one of the antlers the bull shed in the spring of 2018. A neighbor, Dave Sehi, found the match 2 miles to the south. Fred Buhlmann found another set of antlers shed in 2009 in his corn field east of Bartlett. One of that pair found its way into the head of his combine. Everyone in the neighborhood is going to miss seeing the elk. "I already do," Sehi said. "Everybody asks me about him, too," he said. "Everybody wanted to see him. They were always watching for him. Even the school bus driver would make a point to go down a different road just to see if they could catch a glimpse of him." Funk last spotted the bull in December of 2018, when his son got a photo of him with a smaller bull in a corn field behind his house. They hope that other elk will make the neighborhood his home and "we can keep the tradition going," Funk said. There has been no sign of him yet, but when there is, you can bet the residents of this rural community will let everyone else know. N

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