There is no charitable organization, no PR person, no website even. This is not a Make-A-Wish story. There is no money involved.

There is only Dale and Jenni Thornton, on an old-timey third-generation family ranch in a rolling valley of Doug firs and hayfields and tall oak groves in the Coast Range. Traces of an old stagecoach road run through their property west of Yamhill.

The Thorntons are cattle ranchers, but they live to hunt, and almost by accident they have come to share that passion with hunters staring down cancer or the debilitating effects of old age.

By word of mouth, hunters who have become physically challenged come to the Thorntons, and the Thorntons let them hunt on their land and guide them at no charge if they qualify for the state's

.

It is not easy to get close to elk when you are traveling with a cane or an inhaler or nitro, even if your guides are expert trackers who know the elk herd intimately, know where the elk like to crest a ridge and drop into a sheltered ravine in a November rain.

This is a story about hunting, but it could be about any pursuit that lets you reclaim a time when you were stronger, even if just for a day or a week. It is also a story about men supporting each other through cancer in an unsentimental way, with the rough edges intact.

B

ob and Pete have been friends for over 30 years, ever since they met playing softball. It is a friendship built on insults with these recurring themes: You're stupid, you're ugly, you can't throw, you can't shoot, my elk is bigger (or younger and more tender) than your elk. A good barb from Pete draws a big smile and a retaliatory comment from Bob, who turns to a bystander, beams and winks.

Four years ago, Bob was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Three years ago, Pete was, too.

"He was jealous of me that I was getting so much attention so he decided to catch it himself," Bob says.

"We both should be dead," he adds. "We're both on free time."

A retiree from Freightliner, Bob is Bob Buckley, 68, of Aloha. His friend, Pete R., a Portlander in his early 60s, does not want his last name used because he fears public knowledge of his cancer will affect his business.

Bob has lung cancer that has spread to his brain. He has a tumor the size of a baseball on his adrenal gland. He has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema and high blood pressure to boot.

Pete has colon cancer that has spread to his liver. He has had five surgeries, including one to put radioactive beads in his liver.

They have both had so many rounds of chemo that they've lost count. They understand chemo fog.

Bob is a lifetime hunter who gradually got Pete into hunting. This is Bob's fourth year of hunting with Dale and Jenni. Pete tagged along as an observer at first, but this is his second year as an active hunter with them. In the previous years, both men have gotten their elk.

In fact, going into this season all the disabled people Dale and Jenni have guided have always gotten their elk; 12 tags have been filled. Sometimes it took eight days, though.

But this year, the quiet word before the hunt was, "Bob is not doing well."

L

ast year Jenni got attention from hunting magazines because she shot the largest ram a woman has ever shot in Oregon, in the steep wilderness of Hells Canyon. The trip to eastern Oregon, where Jenni grew up in a hunting family, was a rare time away from the ranch for them.

Dale, 52, and Jenni, 41, work side by side through the seasons, branding, haying, calving, welding gates, logging, cutting wood, hauling manure to giant steaming compost heaps. It's a do-it-yourself ranch.

As they drive the back roads of their property looking for elk with Bob, patches of brilliant autumn gold bigleaf maples shine through dark trunks of fir. When asked if they get to take vacations, other than that rare ram-hunting trip, Jenni smiles.

"

This

is our vacation," she says.

B

ob and Pete have a mantra:

"When I'm down, he's up. When he's down, I'm up."

They support each other through their medical ordeals. So far they've never both been down at the same time. Last year during the hunt, Pete was in a downturn, and Bob said, "Pete gets the first shot."

This year, Pete says firmly, "Bob gets the first shot."

With cancer and chemo, Pete says, the important thing is to force yourself to get out of bed and get moving. A former marathoner and current cyclist, Pete has been a workout fanatic his whole life and still goes to the gym and takes spin classes.

"I try not to say no to anything in the last four years," Bob says, from taco Tuesdays with the guys, to downing pitchers of beer at a bar with Pete in a way that utterly defies their medical rap sheet, to a fishing trip in Alaska they are planning for next July.

"If I'm alive," Bob says.

T

he Saturday before Thanksgiving, Bob and Pete begin their hunt. They have a weeklong window to each shoot a spike bull elk (a young one whose antlers haven't branched yet) or a cow elk.

Dale says there are about 25 elk on their property during Bob and Pete's hunt. In the winter, when the elk come down off Trask Mountain, there can be up to 90, which eat about as much of the Thorntons' pasture as 20 cows would, Dale says.

Because of this and damage to their fences, the Fish and Wildlife Department gives the Thorntons a few damage tags, some of which they've given to disabled hunters. But Bob and Pete have bought general season hunting tags for the Trask unit, as well as acquiring the disabled permits from Fish and Wildlife after a doctor's diagnosis. If they wound an animal, their disabled status allows Dale and Jenni to track the animal for them and kill it.

In guiding the disabled hunters, Dale and Jenni carefully choose which elk to cull from the herd. They don't let the hunters shoot elk cows with calves, and especially not the lead cows, because the herd is lost without that leadership. They know the lead cows from hiking their property and observing them all year. Some have acquired names: the Chocolate Cow, for one, because of her unusual coloring.

Day 1 of the hunt starts at first light and involves hours of unsuccessful searching through fog and mist. The hunters do spot one bunch through the timber, and Bob hustles out of the pickup as fast as he can, which is not fast at all. He can't get a shot off, and he is shaky afterward and reaches for his inhaler. Four years of chemo have affected his balance, he says.

After Bob and Pete leave in the afternoon, Dale and Jenni spot some elk in a field and call the men back by cellphone. Though Bob and Pete are both normally deadly shots, Jenni is worried at seeing how unsteady Bob is this year. She prays that his shot will be either a miss or a heart shot.

Bob takes a shot and feels sure he has hit a cow because he thinks he sees her stagger. But the bunch takes off, and there is no blood trail.

Just to be sure, Dale and Jenni track the bunch and search for hours through the woods. By dark, they have put in a 12-hour day for the hunters, and they return the next day to cover all the ground to make sure there is no wounded elk. It was a miss.

Day 2 dawns clear and with a hard frost, the crackling white of the fields matching the white scarves of early morning fog -- classic hunting weather.

Dale and Jenni take the hunters to a field where bull elk are grazing not far from the road. It is Pete's turn. He calmly drains the last of his coffee, steps out of the truck and follows Dale across a ditch to a good view of the bunch.

He drops the only spike bull in the bunch with a shot from 175 yards.

"Good job," Dale says quietly.

Dale guts the elk with a pocketknife and later carries the elk back to a barn with a tractor.

Jenni does most of the work skinning the elk as it hangs in the barn. Bob starts to help her, but he has to sit down. She watches him intently, worried, as he turns his face away from her observation. His face is ash white, his lips are purplish.

"You doing OK, stupid?" Pete asks. Bob breaks into a big reassuring grin and gets his inhaler out.

O

n Day 3, as Dale is preparing to sneak up on a bunch with Bob, and everyone is whispering and walking softly, a passenger in Pete's truck accidentally sets off the car alarm.

Dale and Jenni turn away so no one else can see the stunned looks on their faces, which gradually soften into smiles of good-natured disbelief.

There are no more elk sightings that day.

Day 4 is a day off, and Day 5 is a long one with no elk sightings until right before dark. If Bob doesn't get an elk on this day, there will be just one last hunting day after taking a day off on Thanksgiving.

Just before dark, Dale and Jenni spot elk. Dale helps Bob get over a fence, laboriously, and back over it once the elk take off.

They drive to near a clearing where Dale thinks the elk may be headed. Bob and Dale walk 100 yards, a long way for Bob, and they wait.

Jenni stays in the truck, and she is back to praying for either a miss or a heart shot. She has repeated her usual instructions to Bob, twice, with a special urgency: "Do not shoot unless you are 100 percent confident."

When the elk come, they jump a gate and are not exactly where Dale has expected them, but they are headed toward Bob. They are cow elk with calves, so Dale withholds the OK to shoot. Bob is growing more exhausted as he holds his shaking gun up, so he props it against a tree.

There are just about 15 minutes of legal light left when the last elk comes through. She is a "dry elk," one without a calf. She is moving too quickly for a shot, but Dale whistles and she hesitates at the unexpected sound.

This one, Dale indicates.

Bob aims a little low and a little forward because he thinks she will move.

The shot, at 60 or 70 yards, goes right through her heart.

In his lifetime of hunting, Bob has never had a heart shot before.

T

wo days later, Bob and Pete have come to pick up the elk from the Thorntons' barn to take it to the butcher.

Bob is winking and smiling and tossing insults.

"He looks like his old self again," Pete says. Dale attributes it to the fresh air all week.

The hunters pause to field this question:

When you are facing your own mortality, when you are in danger of dying from cancer, why would you want to go out and kill another creature?

"We do it for the meat, and we share the meat with our families," Bob says quietly. "And that's the reason we do it."

Jenni and Dale have talked about the elk harvest as sustainable meat that doesn't have chemicals in it and that hasn't been shipped there from somewhere else. Like the veggies from their garden, it comes from their land.

For some of the other hunters they've guided who were facing death, the meat had more of an economic urgency. "They want to make sure their freezer is full for their family before they go," Dale says.

Guiding cancer patients started in 2008 when Dale and Jenni were moving their cattle down a road, and a man driving by asked them if his friend with cancer could hunt on their land.

They guided the hunter and dressed the elk he shot. The hunt took place five months before the man died. "He was so thankful," Jenni says. "Right up to the last day he talked about how great it was getting to go on the last hunt," Dale adds.

It was clear to Dale and Jenni that they wanted to keep providing this opportunity to others.

"It's our passion now," Jenni says. "We decided that that was dear to us."

B

ob notes that his cow elk, which Dale estimates at 5 years old, is bigger than Pete's spike bull, which is a year and a half old.

"But his is old and grizzled," Pete says.

And they drive off to the butcher.

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