One Heck Of A Ride

56 A Grand Slam of North American Sheep Chapter 5 I grew up reading articles in Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield magazines about the wonders of sheep hunting, and dreaming about the wild places the authors saw and the rams they shot. One day, just once, I promised myself, a bush plane or a mountain horse would carry me to such a place and I would shoot a 40-inch ram such as Jack O’Connor, Warren Page, Elmer Keith and other notable writers always did. I also dreamed of hunting four types of North America’s wild sheep for what hunters at the time were calling a “Grand Slam.” As it turned out, although I was fortunate to have taken that Slam and successfully hunted wild sheep in wild places on four continents, that 40-inch North American ram always eluded me. I did come close with a 38½-inch Stone sheep from northern British Columbia, however. White Sheep And Legendary Alaskans My first sheep hunt was in 1983, when I hunted with pioneer master guide and Alaska legend Lee Holen for a Dall ram. Lee met Bob George (a fellow Californian from Bakersfield and the president of the RainbowBread Company) and me at the airport in Anchorage. After we collected our rifles and baggage, he shuttled us in his SuperCub to our staging area, a restaurant on an old dirt road that he used for a landing strip, and introduced us to Jim Frazier, our guide. After lunch, while Lee, Jim and Bob visited with the waitress, I walked outside to get a closer look at a wheel that was turning in the river across the road and helped myself to one of the salmon the wheel had caught and put it aboard the plane for that evening’s dinner. (Everyone enjoyed the fresh fish.) Lee then shuttled us to his camp near the top of a mountain. On my flight there, Lee said he and Jim had seen several good rams in the area near his cabin during the past week. It was late afternoon by the time Lee and his single- passenger SuperCub got Bob, Jim and me, and all of our gear to the “cabin.” (Actually, it was little more than a big plywood box.) Alaskan and federal laws forbid hunting from airplanes or hunting the same day a hunter has been airborne, so Jim, Bob and I spent what Legendary Alaskan outfitter Lee Holen with horns of author’s Dall sheep. Wheel built by Native Americans is used to capture live salmon