One Heck Of A Ride

159 T hirteen years passed before I returned to Europe in November 2003, this time in search of an alpine ibex, two types of chamois, and a fallow deer. I had left the booking agency BudDyer, NormEpley and I had launched, so I used Bob Kern’s The Hunting Consortium to arrange the hunt. (I had booked a trans-Caspian urial hunt in Kazakhstan the previous year with Kern but he rolled part of that hunt’s deposit onto this three- country European trip when I had to cancel because of a death in our family.) My primary quest on this trip was an alpine ibex, a stocky wild goat with thick but short horns when compared to the other ibex I’ve hunted. I flew from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, changed planes and continued on to Vienna, where Kern had booked a hotel room for me. I spent the next three days driving two hours each way from the hotel to the Count Bucher estate near the Austrian village called Miesenbach. The gamekeeper, an Austrian named Klemens Bugelnig, knew the 22,000-acre estate and its wildlife so well he could predict almost the exact time the ibex I eventually shot would arrive to feed in the field below my “high seat.” Although my primary focus on this leg of the hunt was the ibex, the first animal I took was a beautiful, high-scoring fallow deer. Klemens was showing me the estate and got very excited when we spotted the buck. “You need to shoot that deer,” he said. “You won’t find a better one here. It took only a quick glance with my binocular to convince me this was an exceptional fallow deer. The palms on its antlers were thick and wide, with great front and rear tines. Klemens and I got out of the truck as quietly Chapter 18 Three Countries for Ibex ... Chamois and Fallow Deer as we could and made a short stalk that put us within 150 yards of the deer, and it dropped in its tracks when I shot it. There was no “ground shrinkage.” As we walked up to it, its gold medal antlers seemed to be even larger and more beautiful the closer we got. Note the heavy “paddles” on the gold-medal fallow deer the author took in Austria in 2003 I was surprised when Klemens suggested we wait until the last hours of my hunt before we went after the ibex because that’s when he expected to find the ibex he wanted me to shoot feeding in a meadow. He obviously knew the estate and its game better than anyone, so I couldn’t disagree. About an hour before sundown, he and I walked to a blind at the edge of the meadow and waited for the show to begin. Just before last light, as my guide had predicted, a mature alpine ibex billy suddenly appeared.