One Heck Of A Ride

162 I f you were to ask the first hundred people you encountered at an American hunters’ convention to tell you what and where Macedonia is, it’s probably safe to say few would knowthat it is a small, formerly socialist countryon the northern border of Greece. You would be especially hard-pressed to find someone who actually has hunted there. With a land mass of about 1,000 square miles, the Republic of Macedonia is about the same size as Rhode Island, but with 2.2 million citizens it has more than twice as many people per square mile than the most densely populated U.S. state (which also happens to be Rhode Island with about 1 million). It might surprise some hunters to know big game animals can be hunted there. GuideAnton Tonchev of Hunt Europe greeted me when I arrived in Skopje, the capital city of the former Yugoslavian state, in October 2006 to hunt a Balkan chamois and Eurasian wild boar. Serjio Dimitrijevic of Safari International Hunting, a European booking agency, had donated the hunt to Ovis and I was the high bidder when it was auctioned at the organization’s annual convention earlier that year. I had not expected to find that Skopje was a bustling city with modern buildings. Anton, who asked that I call him “Tony,” said Skopje had a long history of rebuilding itself after catastrophic earthquakes. The most recent major quake was in 1963, he said, when a twenty-second tremor destroyed 80% of the city, killing 1,070 people, injuring nearly 4,000, and leaving nearly one third of the city’s 500,000 residents homeless. From Skopje we drove about forty miles Chapter 19 Macedonia’s Balkan Chamois Mount Bistra in Macedonia’s Mavrovo National Park where author hunted his Balkan chamois southwest to a hotel in a village named Bistra on Macedonia’s western border with Albania. We would be hunting my chamois on Mount Bistra in 180,000-acre Mavrovo National Park, the country’s largest park. After breakfast at the hotel, we met a gamekeeper at the park’s gate and drove about two-thirds of the way up the 7,100-foot mountain, parked and hiked for an hour and a half. The early morning fog kept moving in and out as we climbed. Visibility was less than twenty to thirty yards most of the time, and we were constantly drenched by mist and sudden bursts of rain. When it finally cleared, Tony, the gamekeeper and I simultaneously spotted two chamois feeding above some steep cliffs slightly below our level.