Last Wednesday, as we waited for the dead elk's body to stop twitching so we could check her teeth and get her age, the warden and I noticed something.

A tick.

A fully engorged female tick, in the dirt underneath where the elk had been laying. A little searching, and we soon found two others, each about two-thirds the size of a dime.

Now, tick fever, a temporary paralysis brought on by neurotoxins injected into the host animal by a feeding female tick, is still on the short list of possible causes for the affliction we see in our elk. Although, it had earlier been discounted, since the first few elk examined had been relatively free of ticks, and the tick species known to cause this disease is not normally active in the middle of winter.

Other tick species are, however. They're just not in the literature as causing tick paralysis.

So, one of the experts our outfit has been consulting wanted to check for ticks on this winter range.

And here we have some. So I scrounged up a film cannister and we probed the elk's hide, eventually collecting seven live ticks.

These spent two nights and two days in our refrigerator, me opening the cannister up every so often to make sure they had air.

And yeah, the wife knew.

So, the tick expert wanted to come out today to hunt for ticks on the range. I had advised against it, because of the mud, but promised to give them a road report after our Wednesday excursions.

The mud report was bad.

Or would have been, if I had remembered to make it. I finally remembered my promise and sent an email around ten o'clock this morning, recommending they wait a few days.

Less than an hour later, I get a call. Our vet. Out with the tick expert.

They're stuck. In mud.

Ooookay. Got comments on a water project that I absolutely have to get done by noon, since the guy needing it was coming to the house to pick them up, since everything was pushing a deadline, because I'd been so busy with dying elk.

But I'll come get you right after that.

Took the heeler sisters along, since there wouldn't be any gunfire on this trip.

They had their first drag race in almost four weeks.

The researchers were bogged in right exactly where I expected them.

My tow chain was too short to reach them, but the warden ten minutes behind me had a winch, and they were out in almost no time.

And still wanted to look for ticks. Which really did need to be done, and really did need to be done now, before the spring warmed up too much.

So, the three tick hunters, along with us and three red heelers, were squeezed into our two more rugged rigs, which navigated the main mudhole without trouble.

And a tick huntin' we went.

Now, the normal tick hunting technique is to take a soft cloth "flag", and lightly drag it across vegetation where ticks are expected to be hanging out. The warden identified and snickered over their "flags" almost immediately.

They use baby crib mattress covers.

We walked and swept a likely area next to the main artesian watering hole.

No ticks. Not a one.

And decided we might do better in the rocky country near the cow elk we harvested the seven ticks from on Wednesday.

While negotiating the few miles across country, around mud holes and snow drifts, we spotted another dead elk. A quick check of the map of known mortalities confirmed it was not mapped. So we stopped to check it out, dead maybe 4-5 days. She had obviously been shot, so we knew she was one of the more recent mercy killings that just had not yet been added to the map.

Before leaving, the warden dug a tick out of her ass. (The elk's, not the warden's.) A surprising thing, considering how long the elk had been dead, but the tick was still alive. I found another, hanging onto the very edge of the elk's hairs, reaching out for any warm body to inhabit.

In a half-hour or so, we found and extracted a dozen or so live ticks from the dead elk.

The dead, smelly elk. I swear, we looked like a bunch of scavengers tearing into a rotten carcass.

It wasn't enough ticks for a "challenge" test. (You need about 50 ticks. They seal the ticks inside an open-bottomed jar glued onto a sheep's back. If the sheep becomes paralyzed when the ticks feed, in just a couple days or so, the ticks carry the tick fever neurotoxin (a genetic thing, apparently). As confirmation, they remove the ticks, and the sheep should be up and normal within just a few hours.) But a dozen was a good start.

Certainly more effective than sweeping the range with crib mattress covers.

So it was off to Wednesday's elk, several days fresher than this one.

And she had ticks.

Lots and lots of live ticks.

And many of them were hungry, eagerly abandoning their dead host to volunteer for our sheep experiment.

We filled up one collection tube with ticks, and half of another before we decided to call it quits.

Guessing we had over 300 live ticks in our sample tubes.

No idea how many we had on us.

Especially the two of us who were downwind of the carcass. Yeah, we could stand the aroma of rotting elk a little better than the others, but it also meant all the ticks that were blown out of fingers trying to squeeze them into the small collection tubes ended up landing in our laps.

I've checked myself, twice even, and washed my clothes.

But my skin still twitches, even now.