One Heck Of A Ride

150 F ewAmerican hunters have heard of the tur, the Russian name for a large and stocky wild goat found only in a small area of the Caucasus Mountains on the border between Europe and Asia. For avid hunters of the world’s mountain game, however, the tur is a prized game animal that requires a hunter to be physically fit and able to shoot accurately across wide canyons in some of the world’s most beautiful and dangerous terrain, often in bad weather. Scientists recognize two species. One is Capra cylindricornis, the east Caucasian or Dagestan tur of Azerbaijan and Russia. The other is Capra caucasica, for which SCI maintains separate categories for two subspecies in Russia, the west Caucasian tur (C.c. dinniki also called Kuban tur) and the mid-Caucasian tur (C.c. caucasica). Each of these three races has distinctively unique horns, and even an average trophy is something a mountain game hunter can be proud of. As I had done when traveling to my other hunts in Russia, I spent the night in a hotel near Moscow’s Red Square on my first-ever tur hunt in August 1997. My hunting partner this time was Al Cheramie, a Louisiana Cajun who had served two terms as SCI president in the 1980s and whose family operated a fleet of ships that serviced offshore oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. We both had booked our hunts with Bob Kern’s Hunting Consortium, Ltd. A year earlier, Al and SCI past-president Doug Yajko from Colorado had unsuccessfully hunted western tur on the same portion of the mountain we would be hunting, and both ended up being blown off the mountain. Both suffered from hypothermia, lost all their gear and had to walk out. Doug told Al he would never return, but Al had decided to try it one more time. For various reasons, I had been unable to tour Chapter 17 World Record Tur ... From Russia’s Caucasus Mountains Author in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral the famed St. Basil’s Cathedral when I was in Moscow on previous trips. This time, there were no repairs, painting, or remodeling being done, and we had arrived early, so Al and I stood in a long line expecting to pay the fee and go inside. When we reached the cashier, we were told that only rubles (we had none) were accepted After flying to Sochi, a port city on the Black Sea, we spent the night in another hotel, where we met two hunters from California who had hunted tur on the same mountain where we would be hunting. Both had taken trophy turs. The horns on their largest tur were considerably heavier and longer than the horns on their other billy. The next morning Al and I were driven to a grassy area next to a river at the edge of town where we boarded an ex-military helicopter and