As requested by followers on social media, The Long Line of Elk is a now a collection of some of what has been posted over the years by Steve S. Saroff. This book also contains the orgin story for what became the popular novel, Paper Targets (currently an Amazon Prime Selection, and free to download).


   photo (c) 2022 Steve S. Saroff

There was a day when I woke up
and knew I was leaving.
The absurd grit had gotten
behind my collar and into the works.
The sky was perpetually dirty,
like an industrial twilight of broken dreams.
People whom I had tried to love
and befriend
had become strange and cruel.
Nothing was right at home.
Even the coffee was bad.
So I left.
Highways became roads became trails.
And along the way there were
emerald lakes and silence.
Like this place I chanced upon.
I thought about calling you
to say that there were no more questions,
but I had lost your number,
and I wasn’t even sure
how to pronounce your name.
When I really tried to remember,
I realized that what was needed most
was to forget.
So I did.
And then the coffee, and everything else,
started to become delicious again.
- Steve S. Saroff,
    from The Long Line of Elk


Hunting alone

Hunting alone way up
in the old Rattlesnake,
forty-seven elk,
in a single file,
walked by so near
that I could smell their breath,
like the smell
of damp alfalfa just cut and
laid flat by machines.
My heavy rifle,
which I had stolen
from my angry father’s closet,
was an officer issue O3A3
without a scope.
I had been waiting,
standing quiet and still
in dense lodgepole,
for such a close shot.
This was a long time ago.
Deer were still wild, and
everyone bought $11 licenses
for both deer and elk.
I had woken at 4am,
ridden my bicycle in the dark,
then walked six miles uphill.
My plan was to do what I had done before,
shoot a small deer,
drag it down to the bike,
and then wheel it back to
my apartment by midnight.
But as the elk walked past,
first the cows, then the bulls,
I just watched and counted.
Besides being too large,
the elk were beautiful.
They were like those
rare dreams you had
where you woke up happy
with a feeling that
you would not always be lonely.
I had never seen
such large wild animals so close.
All these years later,
whenever I see elk
on the open winter slopes
of the town that
managed to trap me,
I like to think there
are a few up there related
to the one I did not kill.
- Steve S. Saroff,
from The Long Line of Elk. Available on Amazon