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HE WAS THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BUCK we had on the farm that year, maybe any year, and I knew just where he lived. Or, at least, I thought I did. There’s a marshy creek that runs down the west side of the property, and that creekbottom transitions to a 100-yard-wide stretch of hardwoods that border a hayfield. The buck lived in the creekbottom and patrolled the hardwoods for does as they made their way up into the field. I knew this because my hunting buddy Josh Dahlke and I had the whole area rigged with cellular trail cameras and we’d been monitoring the buck since August. Most of the photos we had of him came from a camera we’d set over a scrape in the timber, within 20 yards of…
WHEN I WAS 21, my goal was to kill a bighorn sheep solo. In preparation, I took off most of the fall to hunt, and I went in a week before the season to scout British Columbia’s East Kootenay mountains. Just before opening day, I spotted sheep on the back side of a giant peak, and one of them was really nice. I decided to stay up on the mountain all night and shoot the ram in the first hour of opening morning. It was T-shirt weather all day, but then a sudden winter storm blew in and dumped feet of snow. I was forced to hike back down the mountain to my tent. I woke up at three in the morning and hiked through knee-deep snow back to the…
WE MADE A DEAL: one Jolly Rancher for every mile. After bushwhacking for 30 minutes, my daughter and I sat on a steep cliff face for the second time that morning, waiting for my husband to find a barely marked trail. We agreed to amend the deal: Now it was one Jolly Rancher for every half mile. Hours later, I couldn’t argue with the bargain. Limber and whitebark pines, dead and fallen from wind and age, crisscrossed everywhere we tried walking. Hiking started to feel more and more like a chore. The trail on the map made it look as if we would climb only about 500 feet before crossing a saddle, but maps of Wyoming backcountry trails are only so accurate, and maps of Wind River Indian Reservation trails…
LOOKING OUT over the rolling steppe surrounding the Khentii Mountains of northeast Mongolia, it’s easy to understand how its people once conquered the world. This is ideal horse country. Unspoiled land, covered with grass and forage, rolls smoothly from one horizon to the next. There’s nothing to cause a rider to check the headlong charge of his steed. In the mountains above the steppe, which are not very tall or severe, lives one of the three subspecies of the argali sheep. The Hangay argali is the middle child: smaller than the Altai argali of westernmost Mongolia, larger than the Gobi argali that lives in the Gobi Desert that defines much of the country’s southern border with China. All are easy to recognize with their distinctive double-curling horns. My hunting party…
“IT’S ALL BURNED UP,” Chad Hewitt shouts over the Beaver’s roar, briefly lifting one hand off the flight controls to wave across a blackened expanse. “Everything’s gone.” I try yelling a question from the second-row seat, but my voice is lost in the drone of the single propeller. My hunting partner, Steven Kurian, doesn’t hear me either. As we approach the pond where we plan to start our 50-mile float hunt, the traveling dot on my phone screen grazes waypoints with names like “open pit” and “bulk tailings storage.” A platinum-blond grizzly observes our low passage over the tundra. Hewitt banks, sails over a few more ridges, and circles a verdant confluence of creeks before splashing down. As we glide to the bank, he leaps from the cockpit to the…
I’VE HAD FOUR shot opportunities on goats in my life, and none of them has gone especially well. First there was the aoudad in West Texas, where I missed a 450-yard shot before connecting on a closer follow-up. (Aoudad are known as Barbary sheep, but they’re genetically closer to goats.) Next there was the bull tahr in New Zealand, where I made a good shot but watched the goat scamper across an unscalable (for a human) crevasse. We had to retrieve him with a helicopter. Then there was the mountain goat in Alaska, which I also hit well (multiple times) before it tipped off a massive cliff, never to be seen again. And lastly, there was the feral goat on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. I took a bad rangefinder reading by…
