One Heck Of A Ride

60 North American Sheep Guide John Beattie and author with Stone sheep with horns that came close to the magical forty-inch mark. British Columbia, 1992 had to be flown in) was beautiful and their cabins and guides and the food they served were first class. I was shocked when I learned Lynn was killed in a plane crash in the early 1990s. I still remember him sternly warning me that even if a grizzly bear got into our cabin or tent, I couldn’t shoot it. Stone Sheep In British Columbia In August 1992, I traveled to Fort St. Johns in British Columbia where Don Beattie, who flew me to Pink Mountain, met me. (During our flight to the village, Don sorted through his mail and tossed everything he did not like out the plane’s window into “never-never land.”) After we landed, I met his wife, grandson and brother at Don’s cabin. At daybreak, John (Don’s grandson) and I loaded a packhorse and saddled horses for the two-day ride to Don’s Stone sheep hunting area. Although Pink Mountain is the only place where British Columbia’s free-ranging plains bison still roam, our trail took us through forested areas and we saw none. Our destination was a meadow where the Beatties had built three comfortable log cabins. I slept in one, while John and his wife slept in another. The third served as our kitchen and dining area. John was a good hunter, and he found me what he said was a 40-inch ram our second day of hunting. We made a classic stalk and got into range as the animal was moving uphill away from us. Instead of waiting for it to turn broadside, I hurried the shot and didn’t concentrate on leading the moving target. It was a clean miss. It was the only good ram we saw for the next eight days until we found two large rams feeding in an open meadow nearly a half-mile away. Unfortunately, we ran out of cover before we could get into a decent shooting range. The two rams didn’t know we were there as we crawled to the edge of a bluff overlooking the deep valley where they were feeding. I decided to shoot from where we were. Neither John nor I had a rangefinder, but we estimated it was 600 yards slightly downhill to the sheep. I was shooting my .300 Weatherby with 180-grain Nosler Partitions, and decided I needed to aim two feet over the top of the ram’s back to hit it. After getting set up, I placed the crosshairs about the width of its body above the ram and slightly in front of its foreleg to compensate for mild wind drift, and hit the ram I’d chosen with my first shot. It didn’t put him down, so I continued shooting and hit him three more times before he dropped. When we reached the ram, John said it was the same one I’d missed earlier in the hunt. (I thought the one I missed was larger.) He had guessed its full-curl horns would go forty inches or more, but they were “only” 38 and 39 inches long and scored 156 3/8 SCI. By the time we reached the ram, we were running out of daylight and our horses were in the bottom of a canyon a long way off. Thinking we would spend the night at the kill site, I put on everything in my pack to stay warm. It didn’t help, though. The ground was frozen and we had