One Heck Of A Ride

151 World Record Tur were flown over a ski resort called Krasnaya Polyana (it hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics) to a 7,500-foot plateau in a beautiful area for a campsite. The chopper set down only long enough to dump all our gear – tents, supplies and everything else needed for a camp on that rugged plateau -- before departing as quickly as he came. To keep that huge mound of stuff from blowing away as the helicopter lifted off, we all jumped on it to hold it down. Within an hour, they had erected tents for sleeping and a wall tent with grub box for cooking and dining. As they were working, it began to rain. Most of the crew spoke only Russian, but a retired Russian scientist, Anatoli Tanochkin, who West Caucasian/Kuban tur camp in a shelteredmeadow at 7,500 feet elevation. For a scenic view, the hunters had only to look across a steep valley to a rugged, partially snow-covered mountain. Author shot the world record billy on a 10,000-foot mountain over the ridge behind the camp in 1997 spoke good English, had been hired to interpret for us. My guide, Nikolai Turianski, knew only a few words of English and we had to communicate with hand signals. Al was the first to go out to hunt a tur the next morning, and he had a wide grin when he returned that evening with a billy with good horns. I was interested in learning more about these wild goats, so I spent several minutes inspecting his. It was about the size of a big mule deer, perhaps 225-250 pounds, and had a short, blunt head and outsized hooves. Its coarse coat was a light grayish brown color, and its massive horns were much like those on a Siberian ibex -- scimitar-shaped and triangular in cross section with ridges across their fronts -- but much shorter. Our interpreter said our guides wanted the area where Al shot his tur to “rest” for a couple of days, so we hunted chamois the next day by climbing from our 7,500-foot plateau camp to another 9,000-foot mountain. Al passed up a chamois in the first couple of hours on that mountain, while Nikolai and I continued on to the summit and crossed over to see if we could locate a tur. About 3:00 PM, the rain hit, forcing us to take shelter. (Although we mostly had good weather on this hunt, it rained for an hour or more at about the same time each day. We could set our watches by it. Knowing it was coming, we would suit up and be ready when it hit.) Al and I returned to camp that evening without either of us seeing anything we wanted to take. That changed the next morning when we returned to the same area and Al shot a Caucasus chamois. Nikolai told the interpreter that the “good tur area needed more rest,” so he and I climbed around the same mountain we’d hunted the previous day, again without seeing a good billy. Al had collected some snails in the valley below our camp the next day, and he prepared From left: Nicolai Tuzlonski and his son, with author and his interpreter, Anatoli Tonochkin. The three men had to scale and descend the 400-foot cliff behind their camp when hunting author’s world record West Caucasian tur