One Heck Of A Ride

48 More Antlered Game National Park Service, Vail and Vickers, and the plaintiff agreed on immediate removal of cattle and a gradual elimination of deer and elk over the next twenty-five years. The Park Service and other opponents of leaving large, non-native mammals on the island claimed the births of deer and elk attracted bald and golden eagles that threatened Santa Rosa Island foxes, a subspecies of gray fox about the size of a housecat. They also claimed the elk and deer threatened at least eight endangered species of plants on the island. In 2006, Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter from California added a provision to a Department of Defense bill to allow disabled veterans to hunt elk on Santa Rosa past 2011. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law, but the next Congress at the urging of California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein repealed it. As a result, federal law required that all deer or elk be removed from the island by December 31, 2011. I had wanted to hunt Santa Rosa Island for a long time and had decided I shouldn’t wait much longer when I booked my hunt there. As far as I knew, its elk and deer weren’t in danger of total eradication for another thirteen years, but I didn’t know what the Park Service, the Nature Conservancy, and a host of anti-hunting “conservation” groups were doing behind the scenes to speed up the process. So, in March 1998, a short charter flight from Santa Barbara Airport took me across the Santa Barbara Channel to an airstrip on the island, where I met for the first time the other hunter who would be hunting with guide Bill Figge and me that week. Our hunting lodge was the historic two- story home of the Vail and Vickers families. It was nicely decorated, the food was great, and the staff was top notch. We hunted by driving the island’s roads, stopping often to glass into the canyons and brushy draws. The first thing I noticed was that there was no shortage of island foxes, belying the National Park Service press releases that claimed these animals were rare and threatened. We saw those little foxes nearly everywhere we went and every time we stopped to glass. When we eventually found a mature bull elk in a wallow in a deep canyon, we left our vehicle and went after it. From about two hundred yards out, I used a boulder as a rifle rest and killed the bull with my first shot. Its six-by-six antlers measured 285 3/8 SCI. Roosevelt elk was found in a wallow on Santa Rosa Island and stalked to within 200 yards for the shot. California 1998 Almost immediately after I fired, Figge spotted another bull on top of a high point and the other hunter wasted no time in shooting it. It also had six-by-six antlers, but they were much larger than my bull’s. (Figge said it was the largest ever taken on the island.) The problem was the guy already had taken his bull and Figge hadn’t given the guy permission to shoot another elk. There was a lot of tension while we loaded our bulls and drove them to the ranch’s modern butchering room for skinning, cutting up, and freezing, but it eventually subsided. I found it interesting that the antlers on the other hunter’s bull were more like a typical Rocky Mountain elk’s antlers. They were wide, with long