One Heck Of A Ride

163 A closer look showed one had good horns. A short stalk brought us to about 175 yards of the billy and I found a good rest and shot him with Tony’s Sako .300 Winchester Magnum. At the shot, the billy leaped forward and fell off the cliff into a deep and nearly vertical crevasse. Tony and the gamekeeper both refused to try to retrieve the animal and said I needed to shoot another one. After spending a comfortable night at a hunter’s lodge high up the mountain, Anton, the park ranger and I set out again. The ranger knew exactly where to go the next morning, but we again were hampered by fog and rain. When we finally reached the site after an hour of hiking, we sought shelter under overhanging boulders and waited for two hours before the weather began to clear. When it did, we moved down the mountain about 800 feet and found two chamois almost as soon as we started glassing the distant canyons. Our stalk took us down one canyon and up and around the mountain, but we eventually got to where we could look down on the chamois. There were four of them, and one was a female with good horns. As we were watching them we Balkan chamois taken during a break in Macedonia’s soggy weather spotted three more chamois at the edge of the forest, working their way down the canyon, and one had gold-medal horns. I was ready, with my rifle on a good rest, and I dropped him when he was 270 yards off. The ranger retrieved the animal while Tony and I worked our way down, and we met up again two canyons later. After photos and the traditional European “last bite” ceremony, the ranger packed the billy back to our vehicle, skinned it and kept the meat, and Tony and I returned to the hotel with the cape and horns. Macedonia’s Mount Bistra was more dramatic than I’d expected it would be, but then again there is no easy chamois hunt. The next day, Tony drove me to a private estate near the city of Bitola where he had arranged for me to hunt wild boar. It was high-fenced, but large enough that I never saw the fence after entering its gate. It wasn’t difficult to find where the wild boar hung out; all we had to do was to find the thickest brush around. The problem was in seeing enough of an animal in the brush to determine its sex and size. I shot two the second day we hunted the thickets, a large sow and a boar. At last light on the third day we found the trophy I’d traveled to Europe for, and I reached it before my guide. “What is it?” Tony asked as he approached me. “Another female. A small one.” He seemed crushed until he came closer and realized I was joshing him. The boar’s tusks were 10 1/2 inches long with unbroken tips and easily qualified for gold medal status in the SCI record book. Even as I write this a decade later, it still is the book’s best Eurasian Macedonia’s Balkan Chamois