One Heck Of A Ride

72 Other North American Game neither. (Their closest relatives are the giraffes and okapi of Africa.) They usually are not hard to hunt because their white sides and rumps make them conspicuous in the wide-open country they prefer. The weather usually is good in September, when most states hold their hunting seasons. All of this can make hunting antelope a lot of fun. The first time I hunted antelope was, with a good friend named John (“Big John”) French. On the drive from California to Sula, Montana, Bud Dyer, Abe Luna and I stopped in Salmon, Idaho, where we went shopping in a western store and we each bought what we called “Hoss” cowboy hats because a similar hat was worn by Hoss Cartright, (a character played by Dan Blocker in the TV show “Bonanza.”) We were impressed with their wide brims and tall, flat crowns. Bud and Abe treated their hats like the expensive Stetsons they were, and they didn’t wear them on that hunt or any others, as far as I know. I wore mine constantly every day in Montana and all the way back to Lompoc, and its first blood was from the antelope I shot on the first day of that hunt. Right after that, Bud decided to really “break it in,” and stomped on it until it was flat. As you can tell from the photos in this book, that hat has gone around the world many times and has blood and dirt from two-dozen countries and six continents. It has been folded so many times to make it fit in my luggage that the felt has cracked in multiple places. I’ve patched it countless times by sewing on patches to fill all the holes and sewing it back together where it had split. In Argentina, my guides branded a big “A” on it. Its brim lost its stiffness years ago and, while it still has the band that came with it, its little feather was replaced with ostrich feathers and porcupine quills. I hesitate to call it my lucky hat, but I would not like to hunt without it. After more than forty years of hard use, it is so old, frail andwell-traveled that I now carefully carry it in my backpack and use it only for photos. From what I had read in magazines about antelope hunting, antelope were hard to approach and were always taken at great distances. It was not the case with the buck I took on this trip. It was only about a hundred yards away when it stood broadside and watched me get out of the truck with my rifle. It whirled when I shot and ran maybe 30-40 yards before collapsing. When I walked up to it, I thought it was the most striking animal I’d ever seen. Its tan coat, dark nose, black horns and white under parts and rump made it downright handsome. Its horns were not the best Wyoming had to offer, but they were mine. After hunting a week with Big John in Montana’s buttes country, Bud, Abe and I traveled across Montana with Big John and his son, Little John, to the Cramer Ranch in the state’s southeast corner. The ranch consisted of about 125,000 acres of desolate land with scattered potholes that were always full of water that attracted lots of ducks, mainly greenhead mallards. We were there for the first week of the waterfowl season and shot limits of ducks from blinds and by jump shooting. It was a great way to end a fun trip. Several years later, I hunted antelope in Wyoming and shared a tent with Bruno Scherrer, a fellow Californian and a founding member of Safari Club International’s Los Angeles chapter. He was well-known in the international hunting community while I had only recently discovered the joys of hunting far from home. Our outfitter From left: Bud, Abe, Bill