By PAUL DAVIS
Outdoors Editor
VAN BUREN, Mo. -- Missouri's reintroduction of elk has done a lot of positive things for the state, and especially Carter County. Tourism, which the county relies heavily upon, has grown as people visit the region to see and hear the elk.
But not everything is rosy, especially if you ask rancher Linden Hills, who has raised cattle outside of Van Buren for 35 years.
In mid-January, eight of Hills' cows got out of the pasture they had been kept in, with no apparent reason.
"They had trampled the fence down and gotten out, and we didn't know why," Hills said of the incident.
Those loose cows ended up crossing Highway 60, forcing Hills, his wife and sons, plus several friends to search several hours for them.
Six returned home that night, and with two still roaming loose, Hills had to fix his fence to keep his remaining herd inside the pasture.
"You just can't leave a hole in a fence like that," he said.
The next afternoon, the same thing happened again, but it was much worse as 22 more cows tore through the fence and got out, raising the total on the loose to 24. Fortunately, they moved away from the highway.
That's when a phone call Hills received from a neighbor solved the mystery: it was a bull elk that was herding his animals away.
"I didn't know they'd ever do this," said Hills, who noted his group looked for the cows through the late night hours and "tracked them for over four miles."
Fortunately for Hills, after three days away from home, his herd turned up a mile away in a neighbor's field and were subsequently relocated back to their home.
"This is our first bona-fide damage call about an elk," said Missouri Department of Conservation Elk Program Coordinator Dave Hasenbeck. "The cattle hadn't been in that pasture long, and the elk made them spooky."
The bull, which has no GPS tracking collar, remains in the area, Hills said. It's being captured on trail cameras nearly every night on neighboring land, and a close inspection of the photographs reveals the shredded fabric of a hunter's ground blind tangled in its antlers.
That tangled blind material, Hasenbeck believes, could be the source of the elk's strange behavior in Hills' cattle pasture.
"It likely happened because his vision has been impacted by the blind on his head," he noted.
The bull has not returned to Hills' cattle pasture since the incident nor caused any more problems, and Hasenbeck is optimistic it will leave the area soon.
"As the days go by, it looks like the fabric is falling away and his vision is less obscured," said Hasenbeck. "The current plan is to give the bull time to move away, and we're hoping when the material is gone, he'll return to Peck Ranch."
Now Hills is hoping the Department of Conservation will help compensate him for the damage to his fence, which, he said, was "big enough to get a car through."
He's also hoping the department can prevent similar things from happening again.
"It's going to be a nuisance if it keeps up like this," he said.
Hasenbeck described the situation as "a bad scenario for everybody" and said MDC is "doing our best to work through the problem. If the elk continues to cause problems, we'll take care of it through various methods."
Asked about the fence problem, Hasenbeck said he wasn't sure how much help would be available, but was seeking a solution.
"We'll see if we can help him with his fence," Hasenbeck said. "We'll do our best to work with landowners to mitigate these issues."
Conservation Commissioner Don Bedell reiterated that notion, saying "the department will do anything it can do to help."