One Heck Of A Ride

16 crowded. (A duplicate of this impressive room, complete with its wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor fireplace, all of its dioramas, and most of the trophies that were on display in the original room at McElroy’s home can be seen at the International Wildlife Museum at SCI’s world headquarters in Tucson.) I was even more impressed when I attended my first SCI convention in Nevada. Hundreds of outfitters, booking agents, gun makers and engravers, wildlife artists, book sellers, and taxidermists from all over the world were there. It was nothing like the club’s conventions today where the booths of two thousand exhibitors occupy a million square feet of floor space, but I felt like a kid seeing a Toys‘R’Us store for the first time. I’ve not missed an SCI convention since that first one in 1979. They are just too much fun. As I got to know the Arizona chapter’s members I learned a couple of them indeed were extremely wealthy, but most were hard- working small business owners like me. There were contractors in the various building trades, a gunsmith, a taxidermist, an accountant, a retired fighter pilot, lawyers with small practices, and owners of local restaurants. Nearly everyone had hunted in Africa or had serious plans to hunt down there. I was surprised to learn I was not the only hunter who after crossing a mountain felt compelled to cross the next one and the next one, just to see what was there. As I had, others said they also sometimes experienced a sense of deja vu, a feeling that they had hunted a certain place even though they were seeing it for the first time. My involvement with the Arizona chapter soon led to my founding SCI’s California Central Coast Chapter in July 1984 and serving as its founding president. Ten years later, the chapter had a problem and I served another term as president and helped resolve it. This led to the international organization appointing me its Region 3 representative, director-at-large, and a member of its Trophy Records Committee (first as African and then South American sub-chair), as well as my attending its board meetings in Reno, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., Tucson, and Jackson Hole — all because Bud Dyer and I met a hunter named Jimmy Standley in an airport en route to Montana. In an article for one of Safari Magazine’s annual awards issue that I wrote in Xining, China, after taking my blue sheep and a Tibetan gazelle, I said I would not have traveled to the Tibetan Plateau if SCI did not have its World Hunting Awards. Without its various Slams and Inner Circles I would not have known what the two animals were. If there had been no impetus for me to return to South Africa to collect the white rhino that completed my Big Five, I would not have been part of the conservation movement that has helped save that species from extinction. I also would not have bounced around in a plywood box towed by a snow machine above the Arctic Circle, nor would I have hunted the world’s largest brown bears on both sides of the Bering Sea. When I realized I had reached the awards program’s Second Pinnacle of Achievement and was well on my way to the Third Pinnacle, which requires a hunter to achieve all of the program’s Inner Circles, I began to more closely study the club’s awards magazines and plan my hunting trips around the various awards. In my article, I wrote that I would like to eventually reach the Fourth Pinnacle: “This takes a lot of effort, both physically and financially. It also helps keep my mind active and my body fit, which is something special to work toward and look forward to.” I eventually reached that Fourth Pinnacle, and more. Chasing SCI’s awards took me to new and strange lands where I met some of the world’s best guides and people. I lived in primitive local conditions, ate strange and interesting foods, and expanded my knowledge of many different My Introduction