One Heck Of A Ride

167 Asia coldest weather, thanks to their using thick pads of yak felt for insulation on their walls, floor and ceilings. There were no windows and only one door, but they were roomy and comfortable. The wooden ribs, door and bed frames in ours were hand-painted in matching colors and intricate designs. It was heated by a cast-iron stove in the exact center below a flap on the ceiling that could be opened or closed to adjust the temperature. Each morning we were there, a woman would enter our yurt, start a fire in our stove and leave. A short while later, she would return with our breakfasts and coffee. Mongolian food was different – mostly mutton or lamb, accompanied by different types of vegetables canned in North Vietnam and a thin, thin and crispy flat bread made by pouring batter over the hot lid of our stove. Other hunters I knew had complained about the food in their Mongolian hunting camps, but we must have been lucky. I thought the food we were served was tasty and good. Our local guide was a man in his late seventies or early eighties who had trouble climbing the hills where we hunted. There weren’t many elk in the area, but we finally found a small group and I shot one. As far as I could see there is very little difference between the Rocky Mountain elk I’ve hunted in Colorado and elsewhere and my Mongolian bull, except the Mongolian variety seemed to be a bit redder in color. Even his rump patch had a reddish tinge instead of being straw- colored. While I waited for Bud to find his bull, I continued to hunt elk and eventually located a bull with antlers much larger than the five-by-five bull I’d shot. He was feeding on a hillside about a mile away, and the interpreter, local guide and I went huffing up the mountain after him. The guide had wanted to carry my rifle, and when he handed it to me when we were in range of the bull, I couldn’t see the bull in my scope! The guide had been carrying the rifle with the scope under his arm and it had fogged up. By the time it was clear, the elk was gone. After Bud killed his elk, we packed our gear and headed south to the Gobi Desert to hunt argali and ibex. I had expected the Gobi to be arid with steep canyons and extremely rugged mountains, like the deserts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada, but it wasn’t. The Gobi’s mountains were low and gentle, and I saw no deep canyons. It was the first week of November now and everything was covered with snow, including the roads, and we had trouble finding our camp. When the driver finally figured out where we were, he found a two-track trail and drove straight to a row of yurts below a mountain. Bud and his crew went in one direction and my group went in another the next morning. We both hunted by driving through wide valleys and glassing far-off hills, then making long stalks on foot. Our guides (mine was a man named Basanhu Jantzen) knew where the sheep were, but although we saw several rams, we didn’t find one I wanted until the fourth day. He was feeding with six ewes and lambs on an open hillside where some of the snow cover had melted. The local guide, who was blind in one eye, was watching the ram with a long, straight telescope when he said something in Mongolian. “He said that’s a nice ram, but the end of one of his horns is broken off” the interpreter said. I’d been watching the ram with my binocular, and could see the ram’s horns had heavy bases. “I’ll take him,” I said as I loaded my rifle and slung my pack on my back. The interpreter and the driver stayed with the vehicle while the two guides and I worked our way to within two hundred yards of the herd by using ridges and depressions to hide our stalk. When we were within range, I sat on my rump with my elbows against my knees and shot the ram. When the ram spun around and started to