The Fair Chase Chronicles

The

Fair Chase

Chronicles

WALT PROTHERO

Copyright © 2022 Walt Prothero

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 978-1-63985-099-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63985-101-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-63985-100-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to John Wamback, Namibian professional hunter, who died of Covid in July of 2021.

I’ll always remember those safari camps in the Namib, Kalahari, Caprivi, and Cuneneland.

Dedicated to Nikki and Rick Lovell for half a century of friendship and tolerance.

Contents

Prologue

Expeditions

Hunter, Look in the Mirror

Ethical Chase?

The Tenth Commandment

What is Fair Chase?

Is It Twilight?

The Death of If

Too Old?

Hunting, Sport and Semantics in the 21st Century

The Accidental Hunter

Rogues

Man-eaters and Naked Ladies

The Peccary Party

A Wise Man…

Rite of Passage

Saga of the One-Eyed Bull

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Less is More

Little Things

Joe Everyman

Turkish Delight

No Respect

In the Land of Vlad

Don’t Look

Osama’s Luck

Argali Angst

The Longest Sheep Hunt - Part I: Addiction

The Longest Sheep Hunt - Part II: The Trek

The Longest Sheep Hunt - Part III: Pursuit

A Mongolian Jaunt

Black Cats, Broken Mirrors and Sixes

The Super World Slam Caper

That Ol’ Man

Stories of Asia and Europe

Four-of-a-Kind Bruins

The Horned Grail

The Dirty Dozen

Timberline Campfires

Pure Adrenaline

Gold-Grade Mountain Guides

Prologue

We hunters often see the term fair chase, most often in the form of fair chase hunting, in magazine advertisements for high fence hunting in South Africa and elsewhere, we hear it in hunting videos purchased at conventions, are bombarded with it in seminars and hunting books. Every modern hunter has heard it, but few agree on its meaning.

The term fair chase isn’t an absolute, it’s a matter of degree. No specific and comfortable definition exists. This hunt, say a boar hunt in Anatolia by moonlight, might be more fair chase than another hunt, like a pronghorn antelope hunt in Wyoming, or the other way around. (If you must have a concrete, concise definition, Wikipedia does as good a job as anyone and better than most.) So I’m not trying to define fair chase in this tome. Instead, I’ve written a variety of hunting narratives, essays and stories with varying degrees of fair chase and it’s up to you to decide; it’s not even important that you do. You can simply read the hunting tale for the enjoyment.

We can say, however, that some hunts are definitely not fair-chase, in my and many other opinions. I’m thinking specifically of those hunts where the game animal is restrained by high fences. Nearly any high fence hunt is not fair chase, because ultimately, the animal can’t escape. The hunt conclusion and kill are a given, and that is not hunting, another term that should be defined (Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting defines it very well, though not simply). Hunting must always contain an element of doubt, not a surety of kill. High fences that restrain game animals eliminate the chance that the animal can escape. Without that doubt, you have a trip to the market.

High fence hunting is becoming more common at least partly because wild lands and game are becoming more and more scarce (some texts aver 70% of large mammals in Africa have disappeared within the last half century; the figures are nearly as dismal elsewhere on the planet). Much of European hunting occurs behind escape-proof fences, and nearly all hunting within the Republic of South Africa is behind high fences though the area fenced is often tremendous, giving the illusion of fair-chase. Texas contains exotic species from other continents on high-fence ranches including sheep from the Middle-East, goat and antelope from India and Africa and other beasts. High fence deer and elk hunts are common on private lands throughout the U.S; indeed, the animals are bred on the game farm, inoculated and fed antibiotics and hormones, handled in corrals, and the hunter often selects the trophy beforehand by computer. I’ve heard the argument that a standard cattle fence in Texas isn’t high-fence, and that’s true if the game animal isn’t hindered by that fence, a deer or elk, for example. But a diminutive Middle-East moufloniform sheep is hindered and is effectively restrained by that fence, so the fence is high enough.

Probably the second great danger to fair-chase hunting is the over-use of technology. Humans evolved to create new tools and weapons, and it started on the savanna of East Africa 1.5 million years ago when Homo erectus (Homo sapiens’ direct ancestor), the first hominid to make serious wood and stone tools, evolved into eating meat and hunting game, and it hasn’t slowed. When modern man began the Agricultural Revolution in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys and what is now the eastern Balkans 11,000 years ago, he gradually gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Growing crops and raising livestock increased the security of existence; humans no longer had to wander far and wide to find berries and gourds in the territory of an aggressive neighboring tribe, or risk drownings, snake bite and becoming hors for lions or leopards, or stomped into strawberry goo by a buffalo that resented having a spear stuck into it. Modern man post-Agricultural Revolution seldom must feed himself from hunting, so hunting evolved into sport.

Humans couldn’t give up technology, therefore they restrained themselves in its application when hunting became a "sport’ (for lack of a better term). The word most likely comes from the Spanish deporte, meaning to be in port. When a sailor is de porte, he is free to eat, drink, gamble, whore—sport.

As weapons became more sophisticated (bow, crossbow, gunpowder), man had to impose more and more restrictions on himself in the form of limited hunting seasons, bag limits, game laws, and today to rid himself of the technological gadgetry that reduces the chance of the game to practice its evolved wiles that allow for escape. Without those self-imposed technological restraints, the game hasn’t a chance. Increased technology in whatever form reduces the chance the game has of escape because it makes the hunter and prey too unequal. What modern hunting humans must do in today’s hunting climate is to reduce technology to the bare minimum to maintain any semblance of fair chase. I’ve seen too many hunters loaded with so much technology, including tech that baffles me, they mimic a grunt in Afghanistan. This is perhaps the toughest thing hunters must do to keep hunting as fair chase as it is, because we’re technological beasts. I started hunting with a binocular, belt knife and rifle half a century ago. I added a riflescope in that time because my boyhood heroes like Russell Annabel, Ted Trueblood and Jack O’Conner used them. I couldn’t discard them and go back, either, but I refuse to use any more technology than I started with. I want to struggle for the animal trophy, to strive, and to doubt. Every true hunter battles most the beast’s absence and scarcity, and these give we hunters the struggle of fair chase hunting. Reduce that struggle, reduce the game’s absence and scarcity, reduce the doubt of a successful kill, and you reduce the degree of fair chase.

In today’s morphing hunting world, restraint is the most powerful weapon in preserving fair chase. Without that restraint in the overuse of technology, hunting is most endangered from within hunter ranks. Anti-hunting sentiments are merely expressions of what we hunters would see if we looked in the mirror.

Non-hunter sentiments are complicated. First, we hunters must face those non-hunting citizens sitting on the fence, who have made no decision on whether or not hunting should exist in the 21st century. They are the hunters’ single most important hope, because there are millions of them and ultimately, those millions will decide if hunting will continue in the 21st century.

I’ve taught in the university for decades, and I’m familiar with passive anti-hunters, the second category, and many of my colleagues are; they dislike the idea of killing game for enjoyment, the disappearance of game animals around the world though largely sport hunting plays little or no part in that, but they are not rabid about it. Many of my best friends are passive anti-hunters and have ogled the several hundred game trophies in my house and still bend an elbow with me. Indeed, I’ve had civil and enjoyable hunting conversations with them over a single-malt Scotch whiskey.

Then there’s the anti-hunting activist. They are absolutely certain about something where certainty is impossible. These are the people picketing and vandalizing hunters’ homes, that intimidate those entering various hunter conventions (such as the Safari Club International’s last convention in Reno). Several years ago, those activists protesting the pending auction of a black rhinoceros hunting tag in Dallas (including some of the press that made it into a media spectacle) entertained no doubts about their righteousness. No matter that the individual bull rhino targeted by wildlife biologists and that the wealthy and successfully bidding sportsman would bag was long past its prime, would die of natural causes soon anyway, had killed several other very endangered rhinos in its senile rages (it would have been destroyed by biologists even without the auction), and that funds generated from the auction would funnel into black rhinoceros conservation in Namibia. The Namibian game biologists and Dallas Safari Club honchos hoped for a million dollar bid; what they got was a third that. What the activists had accomplished in their self-righteous zeal and intimidation was far less funds going to highly endangered black rhinoceros research and conservation. None of the activists had any idea of the ramifications of the auction, or of their threatening protests, nor wanted to know.

The brutal surety of anti-hunting activism in the guise of tender concern for all species, is a form of barbarism similar to Hitler’s certainty of Arian superiority and fed by a virulent form of ignorance. I have no patience with the anti-hunting activist or any other fool so sure in his own sanctity that he (and perhaps more often she; use of the third person he here refers to the human species itself, not to gender) can’t listen to the other side of any argument. That conviction means that the activist is incapable of learning (A wise man changes his mind many times, a fool never). Fortunately, in more than four decades of university teaching, I have taught very, very few such bigots, which gives me hope in our future leaders. They will, with any luck, govern with that same classroom rationality.

*****

The first chapters of this book contain the more overt fair chase or ethics essays. Later narrative essays or stories are tales of the hunt, but deal with the metaphor of fair chase. The fair chase theme is always present, but the narratives are entertainment enough, I hope.

Those hunters that aren’t so philosophically inclined, will find hunting action in all stories or essays, but the hunting story itself is strongest later in the book. In these stories, one need not concern himself with the metaphor behind the death of a trophy buck or ram, unless he’s so inclined. There’s nothing wrong with reading a story simply for entertainment. I do it all the time.

For those that skip around when reading an apt book, my favorite stories are: Rite of Passage, Saga of the One-Eyed Bull (this was published first in Field & Stream and later in the anthology The Best of Field & Stream—100 Years of Great Writing), Joe Everyman, and Hunter, Look in the Mirror."

Many of the stories or essays in this book have appeared in magazines, especially Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Sports Afield, Wild Sheep and others. I was an editor and appeared on the masthead of all of those mentioned except GSJ.

Expeditions

More than half a century ago Jack O’Connor bemoaned the passing of extended pack hunts into wild North America. The modern sportsman of the mid-twentieth century no longer owned the commitment, time, or will to bivouac in sodden wall tents in wilderness for two months merely to collect a ram, goat or grizzly. They wouldn’t leave the old salt mine, the wife or civilized comforts that long, it seemed.

Modern nimrods haven’t improved, and big wilderness continues to vaporize, further morphing expedition-type hunts into historical curiosities. Why make that kind of commitment when you can Cessna to a hunt camp in 40 minutes, stalk a ram the guides had pegged just for you, hook a mess of grayling, wing back to civilization and catch the first Series game at the sports bar in days? If you’re like the modern shooters I know, you wouldn’t. The goal these days is tacking another head on the wall in the least possible time. The total experience—ogling John Huston sunsets, slogging snow drifts, finger-and-toeing scree, enduring blisters and soggy boots day after day—is to be avoided. That’s modern hunt philosophy and outfitters know it. Namibian outfitter John Wamback told me that he did whatever the client wanted, period, so he shielded clients from mosquitos, dust, physical exertion meaning hiking, and any unpleasantness. Wamback was one of the more fair-chase professional hunters, too, and later specialized in back-packing safaris for those few nimrods that desired them.

I don’t mean to editorialize here or point fingers. Heck, I admit it, I’ve booked hunts merely because they fit a three-day gap in my schedule. But in the decades, in 300 North American hunts, in more than a dozen real (meaning wild and unfenced) African safaris and at least that many shebangs in Europe, and in two dozen shikars in Asia, I got lucky and made a handful of those historical curiosities I mentioned, the hunt expedition.

*****

Mongolia, 2007: Speak of accidents. We’d journeyed to the Gobi Desert the previous December in temps that seldom climbed above twenty below zero and sand gales that would pluck a capercaillie, just to score an argali. Perhaps because the outfitter failed to secure a tag, a typo on the gun permit and other oddities that remain murky, we didn’t, though we bagged a stunning Gobi ibex. But when you fail at argali sheep, everything else is mere consolation. Baasanhu Jantzen felt badly enough about it to offer us the argali hunt again the next spring, he’d even throw in an Altai ibex, and after agreeing on price, I left my pet .300 Winchester magnum with him to avoid the hassle of getting it back into the States.

It’s May, and we catch the morning flight out of Seoul and make Ulan Bator in afternoon. Baasanhu and famed guide Zorig grab our gear, this time Delta Airlines doesn’t lose it in ‘Frisco, and sardine it into the Russian Uaz jeep. Zorig’s wife Erdensetsag, Erka for short, hunkers buried in gear enough for five people to last 3000 kilometers of cross-country argosy into the most remote geography in Central Asia.

We’re so pumped we aim straight out of Ulan Bator, leave Mongolia’s few miles of decaying pavement and not-so-arguably the dirtiest coal-fouled atmosphere on the planet behind, and take a compass heading southwest toward the Hanghai Mountains. Zorig (rural nomads own only one name) drives like he’s leading the Baja 500 on the odd dirt road but mostly roadless gravel desert. I chomp and bloody my lip when he caroms a gully. I envy his kidney belt, too. We make Luya’s ger (the Mongol yurt) camp in the night, and we stagger from that jeep beating. In the dawn we’re glassing from a Gobi scarp. No one wastes time. Cheri eyeballs eight rams trotting out of the eastern gravel wastes as they lope across the drainage that’s become the so-called official east boundary between Gobi and Hanghai argali terrain. They disappear into on-end geography. We trek from scarp to crag and glass, and after two hours, Cheri ogles them again. She doesn’t come on these expeditions to be ornamental; she’s owns game eyes with the best.

To shorten a long story, we blow the stalk, find the rams again, stalk and fail again, I miss a gimme shot because of unholy overconfidence, and in late afternoon eventually catch them. I slap the big ram on the gravel and fully relax for the first time since December. I don’t even care about that ibex that’s still on the docket, I’m so high—if I score the ibex, fine, and if not, also fine. For those into stats, the ram tapes 50 x 19 inches, and might be the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen. Chinese wine with argali stew that evening top off what is one of those handful of glorious days afield I’ll remember ’til I die. Hold on, though, this is just the first day.

We’re in no hurry and it’s my habit to take a day off after scoring one of those trophies of your life, and just absorb. Two dawns later we jeep westerly cross-country again and lunch at Orog Lake, a verdant oasis in the gravel wastes. White gers pock the emerald grass like so many magnum hail stones, and sheep, camels and horses graze the green. The Uaz then probes west toward the south Altai, loses its way until a wandering nomad draws us a map in the sand, and drops onto another endless gravel plain. Our eye sockets are ghostly white against grey dust-layered faces when we remove sunglasses, and surreal five-inch dust devils whirl about inside the jeep. In the afternoon we consult another nomad and his sand map at a ger encampment in a trailless canyon choked with winter overflow ice. I don’t care if we’re lost, those argali horns are tucked in back and I chuckle each time I think of them. No road maps, GPS, road signs and very few dirt roads exist in these wastes, but the nomad points us in the right direction. The Mongol trail leads into the Edren scarps and Zorig says that very big ibex wander the geography because no western hunter has been there and nomads don’t care about big horns, only meat. As we descend a bluffed canyon into setting sun, we spy a village far out on the gravel plain.

There we sleep, Basaan says, and Erka grins. We find a dirt road and motor to a decrepit adobe USAID midwifery. Here the nomads have babies.

Before the guys unload the gear, Erka shoves into Cheri’s and my room with steaming supper cooked on a Coleman. The building owns no toilets so we’re pointed to the overflowing village outhouse. We use an alley like everyone else. A woman tells us with glee that a nomad died of bubonic plague in our room last summer. We flee next dawn, and I pray what I hope are voracious bedbug bites aren’t from plague-toting fleas.

We’re still aiming southwest toward the south Altai Range and grand ibex. We spot foxes and jolt down the creek bed of another bouldered canyon and onto gravel desert and gasp at a long mountain reclining on the plain.

"Eej Khairkhan," Zorig tells us. I ask the meaning, but he feigns ignorance. Khairkhan has a sense of the sacred to it, and the term is used to avoid its real name. The gods anger if anyone speaks the real name.

The Sacred Mountain, Baasan lies. Women pilgrimage and circle the mountain to get pregnant. Later, I learn that part of the story is true.

We motor into another canyon and across overflow ice that if it collapses would plunge us eight feet to the creek bed below. We survive the ice, thank the Red Gods, and lunch with a nomad family. I’m always awed by Mongol hospitality; though poor as Gobi gravel, they share whatever they have without expectation of payment. It’s the nomad way. After sipping fermented mare’s milk, I slip them a twenty out of guilt and slightly alcoholic good will, and they discuss it with baffled curiosity. They’ve never seen one. We’re off after lunch and the jeep grinds up-canyon always southwest, and three hours later onto an alpine plateau with 15-foot snow drifts on the lee of the 11,000 foot ridges of the south Altai Mountains.

Zorig sighs audibly when we spy two gers between distant snowfields. Apparently, the nomads erected them for us by previous agreement. The jeep isn’t big enough to tote a ger, either. We stow gear and again Erka serves another of those short-notice wonder dinners. Cheri and I get one ger, and the guys the other. We scope ibex that evening, and in sand-hazy distance gaze into Chinese Mongolia.

Great 60-inch argali and ancient ibex skulls litter the high plateau. Dzug, a years-long drought followed by an extended 60-below zero cold, Zorig explains. The Dzug wiped out the argali for good, since they no longer exist in that geography.

We’re glassing next sunup. There! Cheri says. Standing in the sun across the gorge. She’s found King Kong again. The ibex would measure 45 inches or more. He beds while the other billies feed. He’s a Methuselah.

We make a three-hour stalk and late that afternoon, I drop him with a single shot at 290 meters. The billy owns 14 annular horn rings and four teeth and wouldn’t have survived the year. You like to get them like that. It doesn’t beat the argali, but it gives elation enough for anyone, and I punch a fist into the cerulean Mongol sky as we grunt the meat and trophy out of the gorge.

We take a day off and hike the scarps next day, glass ibex and a lynx, sup on ibex so tough you have to swallow chunks whole, and that Chinese wine, and revel in the unhurried hunting. No one is pushed on an extended expedition, and we all have time to enjoy the pace. We do little the following day, either, but savor the geography and camaraderie. The time to relax is an added benefit to an expedition. Those undergraduate compositions I haven’t graded or the neighbor’s barking dog haven’t crossed my mind since I stepped off the plane in Ulan.

Days later we work the jeep northwest through bouldered trailless canyons and around tremendous snowfields and finally down onto the Altai foothills. We glass from dramatic sandstone phalluses and spot gazelle, too, but none we can stalk, and then we motor out onto the western Gobi, not even dirt roads now, and north toward the town of Altay and maybe a flight back to the capital. The plane doesn’t show up that day or the one after in spite of the official schedule scrawled on a small blackboard, no surprise in Mongolia, but we’ve still got time so we motor back into the Gobi, score a magnum black-tailed goitered gazelle, exchange ibex blood Baasan collected in plastic pop bottles for camel’s milk chilled in a spring, and sleep in very decrepit roadhouses on the dirt highway back east to Ulan. Then it’s north toward the Siberian border, and in a week I score a Mongolian roe buck with a 14-inch beam.

After 3000 kilometers of dirt, part of me longs for crisp white sheets and a scalding bath, but the other part doesn’t want to end what I know will become one of the grandest expeditions of my life. I’ll miss the sweat streaks in the dust on our faces, the filthy hair, and Zorig’s snoring in the next ger.

TANZANIA, 1993: It didn’t start well. Delta Airlines left the big hard case and my .375 and 7mm/08 back in Salt Lake City or New York, the KLM officials explained. It never got onto the KLM flight to Amsterdam. We hung around Arusha baggage claim until long after everyone had left, though, hoping against hopes.

After a night in a hotel adapted from a colonial coffee shamba, we began a month shauri in East Africa. We climbed into a circa 1970 polychrome VW van and aimed toward a colonial hotel on the rim of Ngoro Ngoro Crater. Thirteen hours of washboard and potholed roads hub-deep in dust battered us into quivering lumps, and we staggered into the cinder block rondavel that became our home. No better place to view the Big Five and scores of other beasts exists in Africa, and we spent the best part of a week photographing them. Then we caromed across the 4WD trails that pass for roads to Olduvai Gorge, home of Leakey’s earliest hominid fossils and the cradle of modern human evolution. We inadvertently began to follow Hemingway’s expedition that produced his book Green Hills of Africa across the high plateau and through native shambas scattered across the verdant green before the van dropped down the Rift Escarpment on a red-dirt trail to the dry-dusty lowlands and Lake Manyara. We photographed hippo, wildebeest and crocodile where Hemingway hunted rhino, too.

By the time we made Arusha again, dust-coated and weary, my guns had turned up, to my immense relief. Next day we bush-planed west over wildebeest herds flattened with altitude and buffalo bedded in the mopane scrub to Inyonga village, and from there we motored into the tangled savannas five hours to the safari camp on the Msima River. The camp tents scattered between gun barrel straight palms and dreadlocks papyrus beside marabou storks and snowy-white egrets hunting the green of the bog seemed out of an old Stuart Granger flick.

Next dawn we’re hunting antelope and anything else we can score for cat baits. I really made the safari to bag a hairy lion, with leopard, buffalo, lesser kudu, fringe-eared oryx, roan and other antelope as gravy. Though I’d bagged buff in Botswana and elsewhere, they’re always adrenaline-pumping hunting and I have three on my license. We score two topi antelope for cat baits and impala for camp meat that first day, but find only old lion spoor. We spot scores of common and bohor reedbuck, a dozen warthogs, and cow roan antelope. We revel in the hunting, no hurry in those early days of the safari, hunting whatever might turn up. We just know we’ll score a lion.

Days turn into weeks, and we hear no lions roaring in the night, see no fresh lion spoor, spot no vultures dropping to kills. We put a grand roan antelope in the salt, bag two good buffalo, a trophy topi, Defassa waterbuck, and we’ve got male leopards working baits. But through it all, no lions. The early unhurried hunting turns a little desperate.

After six afternoons and evenings in a blind, we bag a grand Spots in the last light. The skinners, trackers and camp staff chant and carry me on shoulders in camp that night. All cats are a big deal. In later weeks, we bag more antelope of various species, but can’t find Simba.

And then it’s days journeying east to South Maasailand and the Maasai Steppe.

You’ll get a lion there, PH Larry Richards assures. I’ve become tense, but it’s the best of tension when it’s hunting something you want so badly it wakes you in the night and causes headaches you can only cure with a double Scotch.

That first night in the Maasailand camp with the initials EH carved ten feet up a fever tree that we like to believe belonged to Ernest Hemingway (his safari in Green Hills of Africa happened very near this place), lions roaring and grunting in the predawn wake us not far up the stream that’s the only water within 30 kilometers. We don’t score them the next dawn, or the next, but another evening a Maasai runner trots into camp and tells us the big pride is hunting buffalo in the Two-Mile Thicket, and that surely they made a kill and we’ll find them there in the dawn.

The Land Cruiser grinds out of camp in the predawn black, passes the Maasai village and slips down the sandy track as black fades to gray.

Just before sunup Gabreli, the head tracker, hisses, "Simba!" Vultures hunch in the big acacia trees, and we know lions are on a buffalo kill. To shorten a long and adrenalin-pumping story, I shoot, score a hit I’m sure is fatal but nobody else is, and we track the hairy lion into thorn scrub so thick we have to belly through it, all the while expecting the charge no one will be able to do anything about, and find a quarter ton of cat stone dead with 300 grains of copper and lead through the heart. The hairy lion is a famed cattle killer, and the local Maasai assure us it has mauled herders, and that night they and we throw a grand and ecstatic ngoma with antediluvian chanting and dancing and spears glinting in the firelight and the hissing lanterns, I’m carried on shoulders again, this time to the simis—a native dagger—slapping buffalo hide shields to a rhythm that touches a genetic memory, and the grand dry-bloody lion skull rests on the dining table as we sup on kudu chops and quaff too much Lion Lager and I never felt finer, ever.

Everything else in anticlimax, but anticlimax I wouldn’t miss for anything. I collect my other buff after it gets up again from looking as dead as anything can and I blast it again so close it sprays my chukkas with gore. The government game scout asks us to deal with two buffalo that are killing Maasai cattle at a distant waterhole, and we do. I score a grand battler of a lesser kudu, a very good fringe-eared oryx, Grant’s gazelle, and what everyone believes is a world record East African greater kudu. I consult Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, and find that except for the Msima terrain, we’ve largely traced the country he’d hunted. Perhaps that EH on the camp fever tree is genuine.

In spite of an atrocious Texan outfitter we’ll call S & S that I am told has been sued out of the business, the camp staff—trackers, skinners, cooks and others—couldn’t have been grander. You can’t experience the country and the hunting and the people in any other way than taking time, and an expedition is the way to do it.

*****

Lucky me—I’ve made other extended hunting expeditions. In the decade from 1981 to 1990, I, and then later we when Cheri joined up, made annual five to nine-week expeditions into true Arctic wilderness 300 miles from the nearest pavement and hospital. The drill: Arctic bush pilots Roger Dowding or Joe Firmin flew us to the upper Sheenjek or Coleen River drainages, landed the Cessna 185 or 206 on a river bar or dry lake bed, and then Cheri and I would trek into and out of the sheep scarps for weeks at a time, and then eventually float-hunt out, either to the bush village of Fort Yukon or a river bar on the Porcupine River many weeks later, where we’d meet up with the bush pilots again and they’d fly us to my log cabin up the Yukon River. Neither of us were in any hurry to travel out to our second house at Harding Lake near Fairbanks for more civilized comforts, like pizza, phones, and hot showers.

All this in those golden years before the cell phone, and we didn’t carry radios because of the weight, I told myself, but really because we cherished the true solitude that even the presence of a radio would destroy. We relied totally on ourselves, lived off the land and the meat we’d bag and what little canned and dehydrated grub we could sardine into the 185. On any given year we could bag Dall sheep, moose, caribou, grizzly, and we had the best ptarmigan shooting ever, and as many 2 lb. grayling as we cared to hook on smoke-colored dry flies. We both plan to scatter our ashes in that magic place—we think of it as our Nirvana. I wrote about it in one of my books, The Dangerous Game, and in Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and other magazines, and I’m now putting together a book devoted solely to those wine and roses years.

And a bit farther back into history, I solo expeditioned