One Heck Of A Ride

152 World Record Tur them for us with the brains from his chamois that evening. It was supposed to be a French delicacy, but I had trouble swallowing that stuff. I really didn’t care for that meal. On our fifth day in that camp, Nikolai, the interpreter, and I finally hunted the mountain where Al had shot his tur. Before we left, we packed gear and food, intending to spend the night on the mountain. About 10:00 AM, the interpreter decided to stay on the peak while Nikolai and I dropped off the backside to check out some of its deep canyons. We hadn’t gone far before a heavy fog began drifting in and out, making glassing difficult, when Nikolai suddenly said, “Tur!” and pointed to a steep slope below us. I had to wait a minute or so for the fog to clear, but I found the animal the instant it did. One quick look with my binocular showed its horns were at least as heavy as those on Al’s billy, perhaps heavier. For some reason, I happened to move my binocular to a bench about 800 yards below us and saw a tur with better horns than Nikolai’s. It definitely was larger than anything we’d seen. It The Western Caucasus Mountains from our camp took a while and a lot of hand signals to get my guide to look at this billy, but he had a big grin on his face when he finally saw it. The only way we could get closer was to slip and slide down our side of the steep canyon as quietly as we could. When we were perhaps 200 yards straight across the canyon to the animal, I found a boulder All Three of us went up and over this 400 face and descended - Nikolui, Anatoli and Author. Hunting the Western Tur and used it and my backpack to steady my rifle for the shot. Meanwhile, Nikolai was watching the billy in his binocular and getting more excited by the second. “Shoot! Shoot!” he kept saying. I waited until I felt comfortable and then held the vertical crosshair on the billy’s front leg and the horizontal wire slightly below the top of its back and gently applied pressure to the trigger. I was concentrating so much on making the perfect shot that I was surprised when my .300Weatherby fired and the tur charged a short distance downhill before dropping dead and sliding another thirty feet or so.