Jenny Sawyer assumed the worst when she pulled into the driveway of her parents’ Christmas tree farm in the Cashiers area and spied a large shadowy mass in the beam of her headlights.

“I freaked out. I was like, ‘Great, on my watch, the reindeer got out,’” said Sawyer, who was farm-sitting while her parents were on a three-week vacation. “Then I realized it was a lot bigger than the reindeer. I thought it was a huge llama or something. It didn’t have any horns and it was right at dusk.”

As the animal turned to run, Sawyer noticed a peculiar pale marking covered its rump.

The next day, she told her co-workers at Mountain Party Tents and Events in Cashiers about the animal. Someone said it sounded like an elk. The only problem is that elk haven’t lived here since the 1800s. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park released a herd of elk in Cataloochee Valley in Haywood County, but what would one be doing out here? Sawyer searched the Internet for pictures of elk and found their signature marking is a pale spot on their rump — camel-toned, Sawyer calls it. Meanwhile, she kept good watch over the field at her parents’ Tom Sawyer Christmas Tree farm.

“I finally got binoculars out and saw she has a tag and collar and I was like, ‘OK this thing belongs to somebody,’” Sawyer said.

One of the workers at the tree farm, Tony Woodard, told her to call the park. It was a phone call the park rangers had been waiting more than two years to get.

“She said ‘Are you missing one of your elk?’ We said ‘Yes we are,’” recounted Kim DeLozier, a park biologist who coordinates the elk project.

The park had been tracking the stray elk on and off since she first wandered away from the herd two and half years ago. They wanted the elk back, but she was elusive and meandering in her movements.

A few of the elk are equipped with GPS collars, pinpointing their exact coordinates at any time. But those were too expensive to put on all 50 elk that were released, so most just got radio collars — including this elk.

The radio collar emits a signal that is picked up with a handheld receiver on the ground or from air. The rangers did fly-overs to track the elk’s signal, but they could only approximate her location. By the time they got to where they thought she was on the ground, she had moved.

“We spent a lot of time tracking her,” DeLozier said.

Basically, the elk left Cataloochee Valley and circled the ridge above Maggie Valley and Waynesville along the Blue Ridge Parkway corridor. She crossed U.S. 23-74 in the Balsam area and loitered for a while at the Balsam Mountain Preserve, a Jackson County eco-development with just a handful of homes on 4,000 acres and very little human presence.

Some of the more industrious elk are prone to what DeLozier calls “exploratory movements,” but eventually wander back to the park. This elk kept on going.

“She was working that ridgeline and was getting farther and farther away,” said DeLozier.

So the rangers got serious about bringing her home. Elk are largely creatures of habit, drinking at the same creek in the same spot at the same time of day each day. If rangers could establish her pattern, they could lie in wait for her, shoot her with a tranquilizer and bring her back to Cataloochee.

By now, she was on a ridge above Cullowhee and appeared to be loitering again, according to a combination of radio tracking and an occassional phone call from someone who spotted her. This elk had been imported in a batch of 25 from an isolated elk preserve in Canada where humans are uncommon.

“She was very wary and hard to pinpoint,” DeLozier said. “She made a meandering type of travel. I think she was looking for other elk.”

When a rare sighting came in, rangers went door to door in that area asking people if they had seen her, too, and if so, where and when. They set up infrared cameras on trees in the woods, also hoping to establish her pattern of activity.

But they couldn’t, and she soon moved on further, up N.C. 107 into the Lake Glenville area.

In mid-February they got the call from Sawyer. The Sawyers kept a pair of female reindeer as an added attraction for their choose-and-cut Christmas tree business. DeLozier believes the reindeer could have inspired the elk to take up temporary residence on the farm. Tracks indicated she was visiting the edge of the fenced pen where the reindeer lived.

Sawyer kept the rangers informed of all her elk sightings.

“In the early mornings and at night, the dogs would run out there and I would get a spotlight and could see her eyes in the woods. One morning, I was putting on makeup in my parents’ bathroom and looked out and saw there was a hump in the middle of the field that isn’t supposed to be there,” Sawyer said.

DeLozier and other rangers set out alfalfa and salt baits and camped out behind camouflage blinds. Their tranquilizer dart gun was equipped with a night-vision scope.

The rangers made six trips to the farm over a two-week period before they got the elk in early March. While elk are generally social animals by nature, this elk has largely kept to herself on the periphery of the herd since being returned to Cataloochee.

“Elk are just like people. Some of them are loners and some are very, very social. She’s apparently one of those that’s a loner,” Delozier said.