Kendra Chambers’ father has applied for an elk permit since Michigan’s lottery hunt began 20 years ago.

Her husband, Jim, and her brother also have applied for years, hoping to strike gold in a drawing where the odds of winning are far lower than in the average gambling game.

That’s why she found herself literally praying as she waited in the snow for a big elk to come walking out of the woods on the second day of the eight-day season. She was one of 126 people to get permits out of more than 40,000 who applied.

“To tell you the truth, after seeing how fast those elk were, I wasn’t sure I could pull this together,” said Chambers, a former nurse and a mother of three.

Jim Chambers had killed elk on hunts in Western states, but his wife hadn’t gone on those hunts “because in those days the kids were all still young, and running up and down those mountains didn’t look like much fun,” she said.

Michigan holds the lottery elk hunt to keep the herd down to about 800 in the northeast Lower Peninsula. If the herd gets much above that number, more animals stray off public land where the elk spend most of their time, and they go to nearby farms, bringing crop damage complaints.

Kendra Chambers had shot several deer since she started hunting with her cardiologist husband seven years ago, including six- and eight-point bucks last season.

“But they always kind of walked in slowly and stood there for a while so you could get a shot,” she said. “The elk didn’t give you any time. If they saw you, they’d run off so fast you couldn’t even get your scope on them.”

Chambers passed on two small bulls last week on the first day of the hunt.

“As we were riding out in the truck, a big part of my hunting was praying, ‘Lord, let me do this. You’ve got to help me, because I can’t do it alone,’ ” she said. “I was worried that I’d miss the elk because I forgot to take the safety off, or because I flinched.

“I began visualizing a successful hunt, how I took aim at it, controlled my breathing, let the safety off and fired. I was doing everything I could think of because I was scared.”

She was still scared as she waited for the elk that other hunters had radioed might be coming her way. Then she heard a branch crack loudly in the woods, guide Terry Simmons told her to get ready, and her hunting experience and instincts took over.

“We’d been waiting half an hour, and we didn’t know if it was coming our way or not,” Chambers said. “I had my gun sitting on a tripod, and then we heard a stick break and the elk came out. I got my scope on him. When I saw that big rack, I knew he was the one I wanted.”

Chambers guessed the elk was 150 yards away, but her husband measured the shot on a laser range finder at 250. She said she was concentrating so hard on aiming that she doesn’t remember squeezing the trigger and was surprised when the gun went off.

The elk ran away, and for a few minutes she was afraid she had missed, but then Simmons found hair and blood in the snow.

They tracked the elk to a nearby stand of trees, where Chambers administered the coup de grace.

“It was huge,” she said of the bull that weighed 660 pounds field-dressed and had antlers 6-by-6.

Several men were required to drag it out of the woods.

“They took pictures of me in the field, and in one of them I’m on the cell phone,” Chambers said. “I was so excited that I called the kids to tell them I got one, I got one.”