One Heck Of A Ride

63 North American Sheep were making the stalk. Ken said it was the only goat I was allowed to take on that reservation. To this day, I have not taken a mountain goat billy. A Desert Bighorn From Sonora It was December 2005 and I’d arrived in Tucson early for my desert bighorn sheep hunt so I could visit with my friends Janet Hofmeister and Ken Smith for a fewdays. On the pre-arranged day, they drove me to the border crossing at Lukeville where outfitter Carlos Gonzales-Hermosillo was waiting to take me into Mexico. I found it interesting and strange that I was talking with Marty at our home on my cellphone when service suddenly ended the instant I crossed intoMexico. The U.S. side of the invisible line that separates the two countries had good reception; there was none at all on the Mexican side. The country we hunted looked nothing like what I would call sheep habitat. The low, dry and rocky hills were thinly covered with thorny brush, mesquite and ironwood trees and a few saguaros and organ-pipe cacti. We were within twenty miles or so from the Gulf of California, and, although we didn’t see the water, we sometimes saw seagulls in the air. It took me a while before I could quickly locate the gray-colored sheep the guides found. Eventually, though, I started looking for straw- color rumps instead of entire animals the same drab-gray color as the rocky hillsides around them. When I did this, they became much easier to see. Carlos and his guides did a lot of driving and long-range glassing with spotting scopes, and we made a couple of classic stalks (including one when a big ram simply vanished in front of us) without my firing a shot. After two weeks of hard hunting, I asked Carlos if I could extend the hunt a few more days and he said I could. It was another three days before we finally found a legal ram bedded on a huge boulder with several ewes nearby. The rocky hillside had little cover and our only option was to make a slow, direct stalk on the little herd. When we were 150 yards off, I found a good rest for my rifle and shot the ram in his bed. He never moved. It had been twenty-two years since I shot my first wild sheep, a Dall ram, with Lee Holen and Jim Frazier, and the desert bighorn I killed that day on that rocky hill in Sonora, Mexico, completed my Grand Slam of North American Sheep. California bighorn ram was third in author’s Grand Slam quest Camping in between moose and sheep country Lynn Castle out litter and guide from Wood River Lodge and Myself.