It doesn’t get any more natural than this.

Everything out here is organic.

You’re walking a trail that your pupils, wide as dimes, can barely make out using shards of light scraped from the night.

Your learning started 15 minutes ago, the time it took to get the gear together from the back seat and carry it through the chill across the dirt patch of road to the trailhead.

From there you trudged up the path a hundred feet, two hundred feet and then you stopped and listened. You adjusted your bow and your backpack. Checked manually for things like binoculars, knives, bull elk and cow calls, and camo gloves, the gear you’ve learned to pack while keeping the junk to a minimum.

You checked for these by feel because it’s as dark as the inside of a cedar box and your hands are cold as you wait for your eyes to adjust to the night like a cat, and for your pupils to crank open like a can of soup.

In the meantime, you listened for the distant engines of other hunters heading your way so early this morning, and also for the thin, taut bugles of bull elk wafting from timber canyons like wind-borne spiderwebs. So faint, curling, lifting, falling, but you didn’t hear any of it.

No rattle-bang of a pickup truck echoed from a mountainside after being muffled in a creek bottom before clambering from a washboard road like the pounding of a belt gun.

Not yet.

You wear three shirts but will shed one soon after you cut a sweat.

On the trail a squeaking, squealing sound stops you. It means the morning breeze has started squirreling in the poke-pole tops of snags, the ones that rub against standing green trees and the rubbing of the wood is eerie as a slate call.

But it’s natural and not unusual. There is the sound of the wind now, too, in the brushy tops of pine and fir, a wooing sound, ghoulish that ends in a hush.

It’s been a while since you heard and recognized the sounds that now come back like old pals who want to scare the bejesus out of you and later laugh about it.

You remove a shirt, roll it tight, and push it into a side pocket of your cargo pants before shuffling up the trail, gaining elevation.

A loud bump and the clatter of stones and then a wheezing huff make you freeze for a moment. A louder huff and then more stomping follows.

Deer. They bound downslope away from you, breaking limbs and brush.

You give it a rest. You’re breathing hard and so are the doe and her fawns, as they wonder about you. You wait until the deer trail off.

You’re gaining elevation and check your watch. Another half-hour to the ridge and then another 30 minutes, you surmise, to the big draw that angles downhill to the park. The vague, metallic light that falls around you is accompanied by the mewing sound of a raven somewhere in the trees. Then the wing pumping swoosh, swoosh, swoosh as the big bird trails you from overhead to get a better look. It lights on a high limb, making a bell sound. All’s OK. Just a hunter heading to the place the elk herd slid over the saddle last night, it seems to say, and another raven perched at a higher elevation mews in return. The call mimics a cow elk. The two birds do this for a minute and then you hear them push off. Their wingbeats fade down the reach to the valley where, through the trees, you see the silhouette of the neighboring mountain that you’ll use as a bearing in the daylight.

Trees squeak in the breeze like yawning hinges. A squirrel skitters up a trunk, its claws scratch the bark, and it chirps.

You’re 2 miles above the trailhead and now, intermittently stopping, you hear an engine accelerate and coast around a turn far below you. The diesel rattles and its cylinders clunk up into the sky through a mist you just now notice. The sky is lighting and you smell the barnyard whiff of livestock, but out here it’s elk. They mucked along in the elderberries hours earlier and left behind their hoof prints in the dust where they crossed the path, noticeable by starlight. In the stiff air, their scent lingers.

Browsed stems glow in the darkness like candle wax, branches and pedicles peeled, chewed and spit out.

After hiking more than an hour, you clamber up and out of the saddle, carrying in one hand your bow by the strings because it’s almost shooting light and you have folded the carrying strap into another side pocket of your pants.

As you hike higher, one step at a time, the organic noises of the night mix with crepuscular sounds, normal renderings of the morning, and the lingering whiff of elk, breeze blown, again criss-crosses your path. It swirls around.

Through the trees, miles away, you see a rural valley and the last flickering of yard lights.

You stop for a break and to breathe.

A put-put-put sound seems almost at your feet.

Then an explosion stops your heart for a brief moment. Ruffed grouse. Its blurring wings hop over a ridge and through the trees, carrying with it the bird you failed to notice before your nearness frightened it to flight, and it frightened you.

Now you are past the side hill to the benches and the open trees under a dark canopy where you stop. Wipe away the sweat. Listen.

Three miles from the trailhead, maybe more, the nearest road is the one you left.

You’ll wait here for the wind to change or for the high notes of a bugle to whinny through the trees followed by a chuckle.

Your sweat cools and dries. A shiver of cold climbs your neck.

Then.

There it is.

A bull elk squeals through the dawn from what may be a finger ridge to the west.

Then a separate call from a different approach, that one closer.

How many yards away? You measure what you think you know about sound and distance.

From a shirt pocket you lift a diaphragm call as big as a half dollar, place it on your tongue and adjust it.

You decide to move through the shadowy morning when the bulls bugle again, to mask your footfalls and to get a bearing.

Dead reckoning.

You’ll jog in their direction through the half-light as they call, and stop, kneeling in shadows when they pause their calling.

You’ll do it again, returning a mew sound with the diaphragm call you roll on your tongue like a lozenge.

When you stop, you listen.

You’re looking for ambush sites.

Your senses are jazzed.

Bartholdt is a communications manager at the University of Idaho and former Tribune reporter. He also is the author of "Sometime, Idaho," a collection of short essays, and three other books.