One Heck Of A Ride

185 duiker. Its coat was a dull light brown with a dark brown mask and white underparts. As with all brocket deer its antlers were only spikes. Miguel said I’d taken a “muy grande biracho,” and I must have. Its antlers later were officially scored at 15- 8/16 SCI, easily making it a gold-medal trophy. We had been moving so slowly and quietly I doubt that buck knew we were anywhere near him. The next day’s hunt was much easier on me. Miguel and I drove out to where he’d been seeing axis deer and I shot a buck with good antlers. That evening, I was assigned a cat specialist, a man named Luciano Antonio Machado, to hunt a puma. I’d hunted North America’s mountain lions and know how difficult they can be to hunt, even with the best houndsman and the most experienced packs of hounds. I’d also heard horror stories from other hunters about put-and-take “hunts” in South America after they had been tricked into shooting canned pumas. When Luciano said we wouldn’t need dogs or horses, but would walk around at night with a light until we found one, I suspected I was being set up for a snipe hunt. When we eventually spotted a pair of eyes about forty yards away that were glowing in the beam of the guide’s spotlight, I could see the entire cat standing broadside in my scope, watching us curiously. I held the crosshairs on her shoulder and fired immediately, and the puma leaped up and fell Author and a great Brown Brocket Deer kicking. She had stopped moving when I ran up to her to see if I could find any marks left by a collar or a chain on her neck or feet. I also inspected the pads of her feet to see if they were stained from standing in urine and feces in a cage. She was a mature cat, but slightly smaller than a North American mountain lion and, although she had huge teeth, her head seemed small for her long, slender body. All of her teeth were intact, which can’t be said for big cats that try to chew their way out of steel cages. As far as I could tell, this was a free-ranging wild animal. We also saw a large number of strange-looking long-tailed rodents about the size of rabbits that night, and I decided I wanted a pair for my trophy I Discover Argentina’s Great Hunting Author and Guide with two female and one good male Viscachas room. Luciano called them “viscachas.” (I later learned they were a type of chinchilla.) I shot five of them to ensure I had mountable skins for a male and a female. (Irvin Barnhart, recipient of the 1993 Weatherby Conservation and Hunting Award, had warned me that his guide had urged him to shoot a large number of viscachas but neglected to tell him he would be charged a trophy fee for each of these small animals he shot.) The next day, Miguel and I hunted a thicket in the back part of the ranch, not far from where I’d shot my brocket deer, for an Asian water buffalo. When we found a herd of six staring at