Bow Hunters’ Quest: Stalking an Elk and a Record CARRIZO PLAIN, Calif. — From the islands off southern Alaska to the Sonora Desert of Mexico, Rick Duggan had slain 28 big-game species with a custom-made traditional wooden recurve bow. Under a sheath of camouflage fleece, he carried a quiver of five carbon arrows tipped with three blades and fletched with turkey feathers. He aimed for the lungs. He could expect accuracy from distances no greater than 35 yards.“It was a personal goal of mine just to try to harvest all 28 species,” Mr. Duggan said. “Now 29.”For years, 28 North American creatures — including the cougar, the musk ox and the grizzly bear — represented the list of targets recognized by the Pope and Young Club, the conservation organization and arbiter of bow-hunting records. Last summer, the club announced its first new category since 1993, the tule elk, a subspecies of Roosevelt elk found in a range tracing the San Andreas Fault through the Central Valley of California between Los Angeles and San Francisco.So from August to December, elite hunters have descended on the tule range here in pursuit of a trophy elk. In the Owens Valley Region, home to one of the most well-established tule elk populations in the state, the number of applications to hunt early in the season nearly doubled to 566 in 2008 from 317 in 2007, said Joe Hobbs, the elk and pronghorn coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Game.“That’s a pretty big jump,” Mr. Hobbs said. The number of applications to hunt later in the season, after the mating rituals in which male elk typically scar or break one another’s antlers, decreased by about 50 percent.