One Heck Of A Ride

153 World Record Tur I was starting to stand up when Nikolai pointed at another tur. (It was squatting on its haunches like a dog, which is not uncommon for tur, our interpreter told me later.) “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” he insisted. I had no way of telling him I had just shot a big male and wasn’t going to pay another trophy fee. When I saw him point to his mouth and rub his stomach, I realized he wanted me to kill the billy for its meat, and I shot it. It was a silver medal tur that most hunters would be happy with, but my first tur made it look like a juvenile. It still was early and there was no need to spend the night, so we packed my billy’s head and as much of the meat as we could back to our camp. “Those will be the new number one!” were the first words Al said when I stepped into our tent with my tur’s horns. I indeed had killed the world-record west Caucasian/Kuban tur. At this writing nearly two decades later, its 164 4/8 SCI horns still rank number one in the SCI Record Book of Trophy Animals. To say I was elated would be a gross understatement. (What I didn’t know at the time was that Los Angeles neurologist Dr. Ronald Gabriel, one of the hunters leaving for Moscow from Sochi when Al and I arrived at the hotel, had briefly held the 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 number one spot with the big tur he’d taken a few days before we arrived. My billy bumped his tur down to number two, a position it still holds.) The next day, our sixth on the mountain, a ferocious hailstorm suddenly struck our camp with gale-force wind, icy rain, and loud thunder. I was videotaping the storm when a huge bolt of lightning hit near us and I captured the event. The storm lasted a couple of hours before it ended as quickly as it began. Nikolai and I didn’t find a chamois before this leg of my hunt ended, so Al and I packed our gear and returned to Sochi, where we spent the night in the Lazurnaya Peak Hotel, the resort for Russia’s top officials and dignitaries. We were having lunch in its dining roomwhen a black Mercedes limousine pulled up outside and a man wearing a freshly pressed white shirt and black slacks got out and walked straight to us. “How are you doing? Is everything all right? Anything I can do for you?” he asked. We thanked himfor asking and said everything was fine. Soon after he left, another black Mercedes limo arrived and another man wearing a freshly pressed white shirt and black slacks approached us and asked similar questions and got the same response. “What was that all about?” I asked Al. He also had no idea who the men were or why they were concerned about us. With a full day to spend in Moscow, Anatoli, my guide, and I went to St. Basil’s and for the first time I got to see the inside of the cathedral. I was using both video and still cameras when the Russian caretaker waved me off from filming, so I gave her a $20.00 tip and everything was good. I could video all I wanted to. (Russia. You got to love it!) While we were in Moscow, a taxidermist prepared the skins and skulls of our trophies overnight so we could take them home with us.