At the time Russell encountered them, the Crow Indians were predominantly located on reservation lands in south central Montana and northern Wyoming, to the west and east of the Little Bighorn River. Earlier in the century, members of the tribe had ranged farther north and had clashed with the neighboring Blackfeet. As with the latter tribe, Russell carefully studied the Crow as a people, collecting some artifacts that he would occasionally use in his work. In this painting, two men on a winter hunt lie in wait on a hillside, their tack-studded rifles at the ready, as several elk in a small draw below them emerge into a clearing. Both of the men wear thick blanket coats and have mittens to protect them from the bitter cold. The man who is signaling for the other to be motionless cradles in his mittened hand two long sticks that will be used to prop his rifle and steady his aim. Being an early painting, the work shows that Russell had a little trouble rendering a convincing transition from the point where the men are to the area where the animals unsuspectingly move. His attempt to use the fallen log at the right as a transition element from foreground to middle ground was not very successful. Brian W. Dippie, author of the Amon Carter Museum’s publication Looking at Russell (1987), asserts that Russell derived the subject of this early painting from a Remington illustration published in Harper’s Weekly on January 11, 1890, which showed two similarly dressed figures hunting elk in a wintry landscape. Dippie rightly notes that “acknowledging Remington’s influence does not demean Russell’s achievement; it does put it into perspective. . . . He was an artist, in short, and had to learn the tricks of the artist’s craft.” Even if he looked to Remington for compositional ideas, Russell still had to struggle with the application of proper distance and depth to his works.