© Bill Stormont/CORBIS

If you’re a hunter, the answer is, Of course they do. Almost every time I get close to them. If you’re an elk, the answer is less clear. Elk may migrate up to 100 miles between traditional winter and summer ranges. The matriarchs that lead these treks navigate by a combination of visual and olfactory cues, with an uncanny ability to stay on course even in driving blizzards. And even though an elk’s fall home range may be 20 times bigger than a white‑tailed deer’s, they can seem no less intimate with its every feature.

But elk do turn up in some unlikely places now and then. Young males tend to disperse the farthest, and the most extraordinary walkabout documented featured a bull dubbed Earl. Radio-collared as a spike in Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills, he turned up three years later 1,800 miles south and east on the outskirts of Kansas City. The question is, was he lost or did he just have that old rambling jones?