One Heck Of A Ride

160 “Shoot it,” Klemens whispered as he touched my shoulder and pointed at the animal. I already had the crosshairs on the billy and an instant later I had Austria’s top prize for hunters, a great alpine ibex. Although Count Bucher’s place was an “estate,” I saw no fences in three days of hunting there. From Vienna, I flew to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where I was met by a chain-smoking guide who drove me to a lodge where it seemed everyone in the place was puffing on cigarettes, even when they were eating. I had scheduled three days for this leg of the hunt, and ordinarily this would have been enough to find and collect the Balkan chamois I wanted. Unfortunately, although we saw six or eight good billys during the hunt, I shot over the back of the only chamois that presented a decent shot. I cannot explain why I didn’t take this hunt seriously. We had been watching a group of chamois, including several billys, for at least twenty minutes before I decided which one I wanted to take. I had a steady rest on a berm for the rifle and the range was only about Three Countries For Ibex Lodge in Romania 200 yards. I simply didn’t concentrate enough on just one animal. I must have been distracted by the number of chamois in my scope. The final leg of my three-country hunt tookme to Romania for a Carpathian chamois, the largest of the ten chamois subspecies with categories in the SCI record book. Our “camp” was a lodge outside Bucharest near Nucsoara and my guide was a man named Eitulescua Eugen. One of America’s best-known international hunters, Donald G. Cox from Detroit, also was hunting from the lodge while I was there and I spent some time talking with him about mutual friends. Cox had earned every award a big game hunter can receive, including the Weatherby, Ovis, Conklin and SCI Hunting Hall of Fame awards. As my guide and I were preparing to head up the mountain at daybreak the first morning, we were told Cox had left earlier for a cabin at the top of the mountain, so we hunted another canyon. We’d been climbing The mountains on the Chamios hunt in Romania