One Heck Of A Ride

183 Kamchatka Brown Bear I was interested in seeing how my reindeer differed from the caribou I’ve taken. Besides having a slightly smaller body, the only difference I could see was this bull’s coat was dark, almost black. (This was early September and, according to the SCI record book, the summer coat of the Eurasian reindeer is a dark brown that changes to pale grey in winter.) His gold medal antlers still were in velvet. Five days later, I completed my hunt by taking a Koryak snow sheep, one of several subspecies of Asian thinhorn sheep with categories in Safari Club International’s record book. They are more compact and smaller than our Dall and Stone sheep, but have similar horns. We had been hunting them by spotting them on ridges and mountains from long distances, then flying to the backsides of their mountains and going off on foot, hoping to work around or over the mountain and end up above the sheep. It was an exciting way to hunt, but it did not work every time. All too often, a herd would be running before we got around the mountain. Other times, the sheep simply disappeared and we would have to look for another herd. Luck was with me, and everything came together the third time the guide and I stalked a suitable ram. As it turned out, the ram I shot was more than just suitable. Its horns were later officially scored Author’s gold-medal Koryak snow sheep. at 150 1/8 SCI, easily qualifying as a gold medal animal. We spent a lot of time in a helicopter on this hunt, but Russian laws are different from those in the States. In the U.S. and most of Canada, it is illegal to hunt from the air or within twenty-four hours of flying. In Russia, no such laws apply. Guides regularly use choppers for glassing and looking for game just as professional hunters in Africa use Land Rovers and Land Cruisers. My last day in camp was spent fishing, of course. I cannot remember when the fishing was better anywhere. It was good to know that every fish we caught that day and all the game we shot would be served at an orphanage. I had no trouble traveling with the heads, hides and capes of my animals until I reached Los Angeles. By then, my reindeer’s velvet-covered antlers were very “ripe.” When no one would get on the LAX airbus to Santa Maria with them, I wound up paying their fare to make up for the bus company’s loss. When the skull of my Kamchatka bear was measured after I returned to Lompoc, the official score was 26 6/16 SCI points, just one-eighth of an inch larger than the brown bear I’d shot in Alaska twenty-one years earlier. I had this bear mounted in a standing life-size mount, and placed it across from my life-size Alaska brown bear mount in my trophy room in Lompoc. Wolly Mammoth tusks carving from Russia.