One Heck Of A Ride

52 More Antlered Game hoof. We tried to pull the thing out with a leather shoelace wrapped around the end of the stick, but everything was wet and the shoelace kept sliding off. It took at least an hour before the stick popped out and blood spurted out. After hesitating a bit, that poor horse took four or five steps and began using that hoof again. Before we realized his problem, he had limped and avoided putting his full weight on it. The willows, high brush and deadfalls on our route made going uphill a nightmare. The stuff would bend, but not break. Even a machete wouldn’t have helped because there was just too much of it to cut. Our second or third day of hunting, we made three different stalks on grizzly bears that moved off before we could get into range. I flubbed the only chance I might have had for a shot when I couldn’t move fast enough. We found caribou by glassing across canyons but none was shootable until we finally found five bulls so far away that all we could see was the mass on the ends of their antlers. We sat there for a while, watching them, before I looked down at a bench below us and saw two bulls feeding. With the spotting scope we could see one of them had at least five long points with kickers on the tops of his antlers. (We didn’t count his tines, especially his back points, but I’m certain he was larger than the bull I eventually shot, a legal bull with five tines and a back point on each side.) The guide and I began a stalk that took us to within eighty-five yards of the bulls. As I was preparing to shoot, the guide pointed to the bull feeding on the left side of the opening below us, and I knocked the animal off his feet with my .340 Weatherby. I have never measured that bull’s antlers, but he was a good representative of the mountain caribou race. His cape was thick and his full mane made a beautiful shoulder mount. After fourteen days on horseback, Dale flew me back to the lodge where they baked me a fine cake to celebrate my seventy-third birthday. I began the trip home the next day. It had been a great but tough hunt and I took a lot of great memories back to Lompoc with me. A year or two later, I was surprised to see Dale walk into my shop. Over lunch, he said that he and Sandra had sold half of their concession to Blair and Rebecca Miller, but he still operated his flying service. He had bought a place in Arizona so he could compete in roping contests in the winter. The Millers changed the name of the This representative mountain caribou made a beautiful mount, British Columbia, 2012 Packing out mountain caribou bull.