One Heck Of A Ride

171 Chapter 21 China’s High Mountain Blues T en years had passed when I returned to Asia in March 1997. I’d booked my hunt for Chinese blue sheep and Tibetan gazelle through Bob Kern’s The Hunting Consortium and hunted in the Qinghai Province’s Dulan County on the Tibetan Plateau of northeastern China. Lad Shunneson and I hunted out of the China Wildlife Conservation Association’s large camp with Jim and Elaine Pollard, Bob and Marge Adams, and Billy Richey. Most of us arrived in Beijing on the same flight and were greeted by an array of people, including interpreters, drivers, and a man whose only job was to watch and take care of our guns. Beijing had changed since I had last visited the city. In 1987, the road from the city to the airport was a narrow two- lane strip of pavement choked with bicycles towing trailers carrying everything from firewood and bricks to cabbages and people. It now was a modern highway with not a bicycle in sight. Shiny new cars and trucks also had replaced bicycles inside the city. In 1987, shabby brown huts and low buildings still stood next to modern hotels and high-rise office buildings. On this trip, everything I saw in China’s capital city seemed new and clean. Our group caught the first flight to Xining the next morning, and arrived there less than three hours later. After loading the seven of us and our gear, plus drivers, interpreters, the gun guy and a medical doctor (I never saw him without his white coat and surgical cap) into five vans, we left the city of 2.5 million people and drove fourteen hours to our base camp, nine yurts in a valley at 12,900 feet elevation. Although it was almost midnight when we arrived, the camp’s entire staff and their children – all dressed in traditional A doctor dressed in surgical cap, lab coat and ever- present stethoscope accompanied the hunting party into the high country and checked each hunter’s blood pressure every morning Chinese clothing – greeted and fed us before we finally got to our beds. (The doctor was a necessary part of this hunt because our primary animal was a Chinese blue sheep, also known as bahral. These mule-deer- size wild sheep are hunted at elevations higher than any other game animal, up to 17,000 feet or higher. Potentially fatal pulmonary edema is a distinct possibilty at such elevations.)