One Heck Of A Ride

177 of a dry river in the middle of a desert. Shaggy ponies were staked out in their own area away from our living and eating areas. The weather still was good, with mostly blue skies and daytime temperatures above freezing. That was about to change, though. I spent my first day riding a pony, following two local guides and an interpreter. As the hours passed and we rode higher on the mountain, the winds grew to near-gale force and the temperature plummeted to 20ºF below zero. Late in the morning we glassed a herd of nine rams, including two that had long, curling horns. The two guides and I left our horses with the interpreter and took off on foot to try to get closer. My rangefinder said it was 454 yards to the sheep – more than a quarter mile – when we ran out of cover. The best ram in the bunch definitely was a keeper, but there was nothing I could use to rest my rifle on and with such heavy wind I didn’t want to risk wounding him, so we watched the herd feed higher on the mountain until the ram was far out of range. I had admired the long horns The Great Marco Polo Sheep Kyrgyzstan, author and hunting for Ibex on mounted heads taken by other hunters, but these were the first Marco Polo argalis I’d ever seen on the hoof. They were magnificent animals, with bodies almost as large as the ponies we’d been riding, and they had spectacularly long, thin horns. The herd’s largest ram was dark brown and had a white ruff that ran from his neck down to his brisket. His legs and rump also were white. The No. 2 guide left us and tried to circle the mountain and push the rams back to us, but the tactic failed. The sheep left the mountain and were crossing the next valley the last time I saw them. Although I had seen photos hunters had taken showing dozens of Marco Polo argali skulls and horns from sheep killed by wolves, snow leopards and killer storms scattered across the countryside, we found only a few heads. I made it a point to look for them as we rode, but there simply was too much snow. The next day the wind was so strong the sheep were staying in sheltered areas where we could not see them, and we returned to camp without seeing a single ram after spending more than a dozen miserable hours on our ponies. The wind eased a bit by the third morning, and we glassed up a herd of forty to fifty sheep right away. This time the guides staked the horses in an area with little snow where they could reach grass and all four of us left on foot. The stalk took us across two valleys and over a steep ridge and up another. The elevation was somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000 feet, and the snow was so deep it was difficult to move around. (Earlier that day, one of the ponies sank into a Kyrgyzstan, my guide Solomas and his horse