Elvis

has left the building

by Scott McMillion
Les Voorhis/ Royal Tine Images Inc.

Number Six was the

Elvis of elk, but he wasn’t
singing “Love Me Tender.”

NOV/DEC 2009 • BUGLE • 53

I
f an elk could be a rock star,
Bull Number Six might have
filled the bill.
He sported a single earring
in his left ear bearing the number
six and lived in and around
Yellowstone National Park.
“He was as close to being
Elvis as any North American
ungulate has ever been,” said
Troy Davis, a former National
Park Service biology technician
assigned to following Six around
Yellowstone National Park’s
headquarters complex during the
yearly rut.
His task? Try to keep him
from knocking the snot out
of tourists.
“Elk-sitting,” he called it.
And he did it for years, spending
thousands of hours with the
gigantic bull. Nobody knew
him better.
It wasn’t a simple job. First
of all, Six was cantankerous. On
a Sunday in 2004, he poked a
hole in a Texan and he flattened a
Park Service employee. Over the
years, he did tens of thousands
of dollars worth of damages to
vehicles, including a $7,500 attack
on a Park Service SUV. He could
pop a perfectly good radial with
his antlers. He broke windows and
demolished radiators.
That kind of behavior would
land a regular person in jail. But
like rock stars who trash hotel
rooms, those kinds of shenanigans
just added to his street cred. The
world loves a bad boy and Six was
the big boss man.
“People were seeking him
out by name,” Davis recalled. “I
had little kids coming up to me
and asking for Six.”
If Six was the Elvis of elk, he
wasn’t singing “Love Me Tender.”
His lusty songs boiled up from
the gut. He was a “hunka, hunka
burnin’ love,” a brown-eyed
handsome man.
Lonesome tonight? Not by
a long shot. Not until the Park
Service lopped his antlers off,
anyway. Then it was Heartbreak
54 • BUGLE • NOV/DEC 2009
Hotel time.
Like Elvis, he had a fan club.
Paparazzi even. And like Elvis,
he died ignobly. Elvis died on the
toilet, doped up and bloated. Six
tripped over a fence, landed on his
back and choked to death on his
own rumen.
In hindsight, both deaths
were sad, but neither was
surprising.
Six was a ladies’ man.
Every year, he returned to the
village of Mammoth Hot Springs
for the annual rut. There, he
found scores of females wafting
those irresistible pheromones,
transforming the normally sleepy
community into a cauldron of lust.
He sang to those ladies. He kept
them corralled in the corners of
the stately buildings. He wanted
them all. Girls, girls, girls.
This, in itself, is not so
unusual. Any bull elk will try to
breed every cow who will have
him. He just can’t help falling in
love, and he will try to chase the
other bulls away. But success in
this endeavor depends on size,
speed, bravado and enthusiasm.
And Six had it all. Especially size
and enthusiasm.
“He’d been the dominant
bull ever since I got here,” said P.J.
White, a supervisory biologist for
the Park Service. “He was more
ornery than the rest of them.”
Six would charge anything
that came within spitting distance
of his harem, including people and
cars. And there are a lot of both at
Mammoth, which provided the
circumstances that turned Six into
a celebrity.
First of all, Mammoth offers
acres of Kentucky bluegrass lawns,
irrigated plots that remain verdant
well into autumn. That, along
with a paucity of predators close
at hand, attracts the cows which
attract the bulls, which bugle and
fight and put on a remarkable
display, and that attracts tourists.
Who can blame them? The
elk rut is a thing to see and hear:
the bugling of the bulls, the jealous
rages, the pitched battles that
toss all that noise and dust and
slobber. In most of the world’s elk
country, you’ve got to hike far and
get lucky to find such a spectacle.
In Mammoth, you can drive right
to it. Bring a picnic. Bring the
family. In September and October,
you’ll typically find a half-dozen
mature bulls competing for two or
three harems of a few dozen cows
apiece, plus a handful of spikes
and raghorns hanging around
the periphery, waiting for an
opportunity.
“While the big guys were
preoccupied with each other,
they’d get some on the side,”
said Kerry Gunther, a bear
management specialist who spent
more than a few hours refereeing
Six’s exploits.
Six would get so worked up
that he’d chase almost anything.
He’d fight bulls and charge
people, shaking his antlers in their
face. He gored dozens of vehicles.
And people rooted him on,
sometimes stupidly so. Fools rush
in, as Elvis told us.
That’s why Davis had the
elk-sitting job. Somebody had
to keep people away from 800
pounds of testosterone-crazed
bone and muscle. Six didn’t want
to be anybody’s teddy bear. And
he had a suspicious mind.
If there were lots of bulls in
town, Six would get so worked up
he’d charge anything that came
within 100 yards, usually, but not
always, skidding to a halt shortly
before impact. Davis recalls seeing
him charge a group of elderly
visitors who couldn’t move fast
enough to get out of the way.
Thankfully, Six hit the brakes
in time.
On another occasion,
Six twice bluff-charged a man
so engrossed in a cell phone
conversation that he never even
looked up.
“He never saw it,”
Davis said.
At times, Davis had to insert
himself into the situation, goading He also leveled a park fast food joint,” Davis said.
Six into chasing him instead of an worker leaving the ranger station. Still, sedating an elk can
older person or a kid on a bicycle. Something had to be be a tricky business, especially
“Much of that time was done, the park brass decided. when you’re surrounded by noisy
borderline miserable, at least for So Gunther, the bear specialist, tourists. Dart guns aren’t that
me,” Davis wrote in a blog entry grabbed the dart gun and the accurate and you need a clean
about Six, with whom he had handsaw and went out to find Six. shot, preferably at a shoulder,
a complicated relationship. He He didn’t have to look far. from a 90 degree angle.
admired the guy, but his bugling Six’s rutting territory was small. “I finally got him while
often kept him up all night and “He spent the rut between he was mounting a cow,”
cost him friends, interfered with the Mammoth post office and the Gunther said.
his own romance. He called him
a “glorious, majestic, infuriating
pain in the ass.” He was a selfish
beast. Help me make it through
the night? It wasn’t Six’s job.
And America loved him
for it. Like Elvis, his life took on
mythic if occasionally fanciful
proportions. “Every day during
the rut, someone would come up
to me and tell me something new
about Six,” Davis wrote in his
blog. “He’d killed a man a few
years ago. He’d been shipped off
to Canada but made his
way back.”
But while Six became
notorious for his rages, his more
common mood consisted of
forbearance. While he tore up a
lot of cars, he only hit two people,
and he let them off easy. If he’d
wanted to, he could have
killed anybody.
But managing Six was easy
compared to herding people,
Davis said. “You can never predict
what people are going to do,”
especially in a place where young
men have been known to face
down a bull elk and beat their
chest like some kind of ape.
Six rocketed to true celebrity
on that day in 2004 when he nailed
two people and six vehicles. The
first assault came when a Texas
man approached within 10 feet,
snapped a flash picture in his face
and turned to walk away.
Six charged, knocking him
down and lacerating his head and
his hand.
“This animal could have
easily torn the guy to bits, but he
just knocked him to the ground,”
Davis said.

NOV/DEC 2009 • BUGLE • 55


• Infrared
“flash” won’t
spook game
• Shoots
multiple
pictures
and full-
motion video
• Time, date, temperature and
moon phase on each shot
• Easy-to-use icon style menu
• 32MB on-board memory
(expandable to 2G).
SA9-157964 - Stealth
Cam® Digital Camera
Compare at $150.00
Guide Price $11997
56 • BUGLE • NOV/DEC 2009
Moments later, Six’s legs
went soft and he went down.
Gunther and his crew covered his
eyes with a cloth, hooked him up
to an oxygen tank and monitored
his pulse while they went to work
with a handsaw, taking most of
his huge antlers, but leaving the
brow times, so he wouldn’t be
completely defenseless. (That’s
also when he got the ear tag.) The
goal was twofold: protect human
life and property, and maybe
convince Six that there were better
places to be than Mammoth Hot
Springs, the Park’s headquarters.
The second lesson didn’t
take, and that’s when Davis’ job
got even more interesting.
Six was without antlers, but
he still had all that testosterone
coursing through his veins.
“He had to learn that he
had no antlers,” Davis said. “So I
followed him around and tried to
break up fights.”
He bellowed at him. He
followed him in a car and honked
the horn. He whacked a wrench
on a garbage dumpster to distract
another large bull.
He did what it took.
So did Six. Within a couple
days, he learned to back off from
the other bulls in town. And he
learned to skulk around like a
guilty youth, waiting until the big
boys were busy, then sneaking
in. He still bugled, but he looked
ridiculous, like a hound dog,
crying all the time.
Removing the antlers
from the nation’s most famous
elk caused a bit of an uproar.
Newspapers around the country
carried the story. Then emails
and phone calls poured into
park offices, most with a similar
complaint: don’t be cruel. Officials
had to explain that the procedure
was not painful. And yes, a new
set of antlers would sprout in a
few months. Rangers had released
him, to let him love again.
And by the next year, the
fan clubs and the paparazzi were
back, thicker than ever.
“He had a huge following,”
Gunther said. “People came back
year after year.”
With more people came more
potential for problems. So the Park
Service sawed his antlers off again
in 2005.
But this time it didn’t work
as well as that first year. He
wouldn’t back down from other
bulls, and Park Service officials
were afraid he was going to
get killed by another bull. They
beefed up crowd control for
the subsequent years, and Six
continued his show.
Six stayed famous, and got
even more famous after he died on
February 8, 2008, when he made
national news yet again.
Davis wasn’t the only one
moved to write a eulogy. In it, he
said he saw the death coming.
For all his glorious displays,
for all his feisty nature, Six was
clearly a habituated animal. He
spent every fall in Mammoth and
every winter in the nearby town
of Gardiner, Montana, where
he loafed in people’s yards and
accepted handouts. Once the
rut was over, Six calmed down
and acted almost like a pet, just
hanging around town. People in
Gardiner considered him a buddy,
part of the landscape.
He once even climbed a roof
to snatch the last apples from a
tree. But it was a fence that did
him in.
“Six should have died on a
snowy ridgeline in the company
of winter cold, a mountain lion,
wolves or infirmity,” Davis wrote.
Instead, he died behind a motel.
Like many habituated
animals, Six died in an unpleasant
way. They often succumb to
disease or malnutrition. They get
run over. In Six’s case, a fence
dealt the fatal blow.
Art Eseile found the body
behind his trailer on a sunny
afternoon, with a few inches of
snow on the ground.
Six was lying on his back,
with his antlers wedged between
a couple granite boulders. He
reeked. He had yellow stuff
leaking out his nose. He had tried
to hop a 6-foot fence, tangled his
feet and did a somersault onto his
back. Unable to rise, he choked on
his own rumen, his eyes pointed
up the hill, toward Mammoth, and
all those memories.
He was 15 years old, past his
prime, but his antlers measured
3565⁄8.
“I knew it was Six right
away,” Eseile said. “You can’t
miss Six.”
People offered him hundreds
of dollars for the rack, but Eseile,
a clerk in a convenience store,
turned them down.
“Money’s nice, but I wanted
to do the right thing,” he said,
so he called his landlady, and he
called the game wardens who
came and hauled the carcass away.
The landlady, Dale Ruffatto,
is now trying to find a permanent
home for Six. A taxidermist has the
head and hide, and she’d like to
see a full body mount somewhere
in Gardiner or Mammoth, in a
public space. The Elk Foundation
is working with her, trying to
make sure that happens.
“He was part of the
wallpaper of Gardiner and
Mammoth,” Ruffatto said.
Like Elvis, he was a man of
the people, part legend and part
reality and not all of it savory.
Ruffato said she isn’t looking
for money. She just wants the story
to stay alive.
“He’s not mine to sell,” she
said. “He’s everybody’s elk.”

For more than 20 years, Scott

McMillion has covered the people and
animals of the Greater Yellowstone
area for many publications. To his
knowledge he only met elk Number
Six one time, near the main entrance
to the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel,
when Six charged to within six feet
of him. McMillion didn’t argue the
point. He hid behind a big
wooden sign.

NOV/DEC 2009 • BUGLE • 57