One Heck Of A Ride

168 move off, I shot him again and he went down. I was sick when we walked to him and saw the tips of both horns were missing. My first shot had taken off the last few inches of its one good horn. (We found the missing tip when we returned to look for it the next day. Later, after the horns without their tips were measured at 187 5/8 inches for the SCI record book, the taxidermist mounted the head using the tip I’d shot off and another tip I picked up on the hunt.) After taking my argali, we switched to hunting a Gobi ibex from the same camp. These goat- like animals lived in rougher country, and there weren’t many of them where we were hunting. By late afternoon of the next day, we were driving up the bottom of a shallow canyon when the driver, interpreter and I saw a white animal with dark spots and a long, fat tail. “Snow leopard!” I said and grabbed my binocular. It was moving slowly up the slope about 175 yards away. “Shoot it!” the interpreter said. “No way.” I wasn’t sure if these big cats could be legally hunted in Mongolia, but I did know they were protected by CITES (the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) and Author’s Gobi argali where it fell. One horn tip had been broken off, the other was struck by author’s bullet. His taxidermist replaced both tips after the ram was officially measured for the SCI record books the U.S. Endangered Species Act. I was awed by the big cat’s beauty but it was too far to photograph it by the time I thought of my camera. A half mile later, we spotted three ibex billys on the skyline about 150 yards away, and one of the billys had heavy, scimitar-shaped horns. After an hour’s stalk, I killed him with my first shot. Asia Guide Basanhu and author with Gobi ibex taken after an hour-long stalk That night, when Bud grinned and offered me a bowl of fermented mare’s milk, I took a big gulp. It had a horrible taste, but I refused to let him have his fun and managed to swallow two or three more gulps before handing the bowl back to him. (Thirteen years later, when hunting Marco Polo argali in Kyrgyzstan, I got very sick when I tried to drink fermented goat’s milk. I was trying to be “macho” and it took four different antibiotics for me to recover.) Bud had wounded a ram near a remote graveyard early that morning but it got away when its blood trail ended. They couldn’t find it when they searched for it the next morning, and he returned to camp with a different ram that he killed on another mountain. Meanwhile, I hunted the plains away from the hills and shot a Hillier goitered gazelle whose horns still rank No. 1 in the SCI book at this writing, nearly thirty years later. I’d shot that gazelle as it was running flat out away from me, and we couldn’t find the bullet hole at first. A closer inspection showed my bullet had struck the back of its neck and exited its