A HIGHLY EVENTFUL DAY IN THE ADVENTURE HUNTING OF THE
KAMCHATKA-'01: I HIKE WITH 14-YEAR-OLD SLAVA ON THE VOLCANIC
MOUNTAINSIDES AS ALAN GOES AFTER OLD RAM AND SHOTS IT AT 440 YARDS;
I THE HUNT HARD WITH SERGEI, SEEING BEAR, BEAR'S DEN, BIG CRATERS AND
SPECTACULAR COUNTRYSIDE; AT 2:00 PM HE SPOTS TWO SNOW SHEEP, AND WE
DROP DOWN TOWARD THE VALLEY WHERE WE CAN OVERLOOK THEM AS VICTOR
ARRIVES WITH WALKIE TALKIE SUPPORT. AT 3:00 PM I RECOGNIZE THAT I AM SEEING
A DOZEN SNOW SHEEP, AMONG THEM BIG RAMS, AND WE BEGIN THE TWO-HOUR STALK
BY SERGEI AND I RAPPELLING DOWN IN BELAY ROPES TO REACH THE RAMS AT 4:50 PM.
I CRAWL FORWARD AND SELECT FURTHEST STANDING RAM WHO IS BLOWN OFF THE
MOUNTAIN WITH A SINLGE CHEST SHOT, AS I PHOPTOIGRAPH EACH OF THE OTHER
(SMALLER) RAMS AS THEY RUN PAST ME. WE PSOE WITH TH E MAGNIFICENT TROPHY,
SKIN AND PREPARE AT 6;30 PM FOR THE 3 ½ HOUR RETURN CLIMB OVER THE KAMCHATKA
RANGE FOUR TIMES TO RETURN FOR CELBRATORY TOAST FOR A GREAT DAY ON THE HUNT
AUGUST 26, 2001
THE SUCCESFUL HUNTS FOR THE KAMCHATKA BIGHORN SNOWSHEEP
August 26, 2001
We awoke in the morning to a day that looked better than the evening that had preceded it. I have to keep reminding myself that it is August, since the layers of my mountaineering wool, pile and Gore-Tex with a down parka backup are deceiving as to the calendar--but a glance at the snow pack that serves as our refrigerator just outside our tent, and the GPS mark "TENT" at 55* 19.41 N and 160* 47.03 E at 1650 meters altitude can remind me that the finest summer day in Kamchatka does a rather good imitation of a winter day elsewhere in this sub-Arctic tundra. We are at least 750 meters above the nearest tree line, and in the windswept volcanic crater rims, with very imposing snow cones around us. I asked Victor what was the name of the one volcanic cone so visible and photogenically posing just next to our kitchen tent door. "How should I keep them all straight? There are over 160 volcanoes in Kamchatka, and the only ones I remember the names for are the big ones near Petropavlosk and those that are landmarks or recently active!"
We "drew match sticks" in a form of Russian Roulette after breakfast. Sergei had gone up the hillside over our camp just before breakfast and had spotted the big old ram I had seen after Sergei spotted it last night, and it was not too far distant from where it had been when I had seen it. Alan "won" the toss, to my relief, since I was looking forward to a good long and tough hunt, and would have been disappointed if I had shot the first snow sheep I had ever seen. Alan at first demurred, of much the same mind as I, saying I had seen it and he had not, but Victor insisted that there was one sheep, two guides and two hunters and we should go for it now since we could never be assured we would see another.
So, Alan set off with Victor with Sergei at a distance carrying the Motorola walkie-talkies I had carried forward from George Sevich for support of the hunt. If Sergei could follow the ram at a distance and report its movements to Victor, then that information would be useful to Victor who would be guiding Alan. There was also a conspiracy among them, since George had reported that I was a marathoning mountaineer, so not to worry about how tough the hunt should get--this is billed as a hard-core hunt for which only the most serious fair chase hunters should apply. Sergei said he would be back around noon, and that he and I would set out at that time for a serious climb, scout and hunt; I should be ready for him.
I was hardly likely to be sitting in camp while they were out, however. I enlisted Slava, Sergei's 14-year-old son, and a good fellow, to go with me, and an hour after the three hunters had gone out, we went out in another direction to scan from the hilltops to see if we could see or hear anything. I did see and hear a lot: a pair of Stellar's Sea Eagles, endemic only here in Kamchatka and seen by me the first time 15 months ago; a bunch of falcons, wolverine tracks, marmots and ground squirrels that Slava had wanted to catch with a "fishing pole" branch dangling a noose of string.
We clumped around the steep slopes for several hours admiring the vistas and returned to camp at about noon. I had settled for only a cup of tea when I looked up and saw Alan following Sergei into camp. I came out to hear the news. Victor and Alan had been alerted that the old ram had moved over two ranges and they had walked over to where Sergei had signaled it might be. Victor had spotted it standing near a cliff; a range-finder measured 440 meters away. With a single shot from a rifle rest on his pack and with enough time to compensate, Alan held over the ram, and at the sound of the shot, the animal was blown off the cliff, and fell perhaps as many as four hundred meters down the cliff. Alan never again saw it, except in the instant it was falling, and Victor insisted it was too dangerous to go down the cliff and insisted that Alan go back with Sergei when he came over. Victor reported by radio that the animal had been blown apart by the .300 Win Mag, even at that distance, and the meat and all but the cape had been torn up, but that the 15-year-old ram had heavy mass and broomed off horns that was a better trophy than Alan had expected to see, let alone bag, so his sheep hunt was over with a single shot.
MY HARD HUNT IN THE VOLCANIC MOUNTIANS
OF KAMCHATKA FOR THE
TROPHY BIGHORN SNOW SHEEP
Sergei did not even wait for a cup of tea, but was already on the move. I followed
him wearing what I thought would be good for a hard climb, since I did not want
to be overdressed for that amount of effort, and still wanted to have some comfort
by carrying the fleece jacket wrapped around my waist where it stayed securely
carried for the afternoon. I had three cameras with me, two dangling around
my neck (although each had a recent roll of film in it, I had no back-up stock
of film), but I figured each camera could back up the other in the event I would
be seeing unique sights or the hoped for encounter with a bighorn ram--but I
did not want to carry the extra weight and hassle of the telephoto lens. I did
carry an extra audiotape cassette. Off we went, almost straight up for starters,
beginning at the lookout where I had gone the night before.
When we glassed from that area we saw the big bear den I had spotted last night; but what we saw in addition, that took Sergei's swing of the glasses to find, was a brown bear ambling around the grassy middle parts of the mountain valleys, where there was fresh low grass and lots of ground squirrels to frustrate the bear by trying to dig them up. The bear looked big as a barn to me, particularly when it stood up and the hump on its back rippled as it walked. Sergei dismissed it as "normal," and said it was a female besides. I watched it for a while through the glasses, but Sergei was already on to better things. We sat on some rocks with eagle droppings on the lave rocks, but at the base were multiple bones of rodent size animals-an ossuary of the big raptors.
We climbed still higher into the never/never land above the clouds. I could not even stand in the wind gushing up over the rim of the canyon crater as I looked down from my crouch through the glasses as the clouds parted. I saw a lot of sulfur-stained igneous rock--looking like the kind of fiery chambers I had looked into when I had seen them in Costa Rican volcanoes. As Sergei glassed, I also saw some fresh tracks and a scurrying away from me as I turned around a rock. I did not see the creature, but it had just passed, and Sergei assured me it was a wolverine track I was looking at. I would have liked to have seen the University of Michigan mascot in the wild. I understand they are very vicious, however, and maybe it is just as well that the encounter was missed.
Despite the fierce wind howling up from the crater against which neither of us could stand, Sergei took his time in his 42-year-old good natured outdoorsman's way, shrugging off the inconvenience of having the hood of his wool hunting shirt blow over his head, making it impossible for him to light a cigarette. Only when he had assured himself that he saw no sheep nor even fresh sign of them being in the snow fields above us, did we move out of the wind vortex. It was 2:00 PM when we stopped at a narrow ridge along the side of a spectacular deep canyon. I took a picture of the stunning vista as Sergei held up one hand as though to simply remind me of what should already have been obvious. There were two snow sheep down in the canyon, both big rams, but one with a broken off horn, and he wanted me to be sure I saw the better of the two trophies. Right!
It took me another ten minutes to find them in the Zeiss glasses, and I saw them only when they had moved their surprisingly dark bodies out on to the snowfields--and even then I was not at all sure which was the bigger or better of the two. What I saw were two specks at about five kilometers distance. Sergei radioed on the variably effective walkie-talkies depending on which way we were oriented to the mountains relative to the camp where Victor had returned after packing out the cape and horns of Alan's ram.
We set out to follow the ridge, staying off the horizon so our silhouettes would not spook the very distant but acute vision rams. We left our perches and ran down behind the ridges as Victor came up from camp and we rendezvoused at 3:00 PM now two kilometers from the sheep and one kilometer straight up from them. We were glassing them to see which one was the big one, when I actually made the discovery--and not because I was so astute, but because I could not see the two rams and looked in the wrong place, nearly straight down at a small river course coming down from a distant waterfall, which we could even hear intermittently when the wind shifted--"What is that?" Victor snorted and Sergei smiled at me. I was looking an entire band of snow sheep, most of them rams, still clustered together about two weeks before the rut would have them battling it out among themselves for the "king of the mountain" title.
I was not quite aware of the game plan, but Victor took off with the Motorola in hand to stay up on the ridge to watch the stalk and radio any changes in a volume-reduced call to Sergei, who was uncoiling two long ropes from his pack. Without a word of explanation or even so much as a questioning look to see if I knew what to do with the rope, he tied a Bowline knot in one end and tossed it to me, and belayed me down the steep slope. I then anchored him and we took turns in the mountaineering exercise of leading each other down this steep and treacherous shale slope of roller-bearing scree. At one point it was necessary to rappel off the steep side, again done without so much as a questioning glance. We were hurrying downhill at a high rate of speed with a cascade of rocks being loosed by our progress, which caused Sergei to wince. He would try to show me both to hurry, and to be quiet--not mutually incompatible according to his view. Fortunately, there was a distant lave pinnacle that gave us some visual cover around which we should have to turn when we got down to a "shelf" several hundred meters above the stream where we had last seen the rams, and the subdued radio call, I presume, suggested to Sergei that Victor still saw them there from high up on the ridge.
The waterfall we were getting closer to may also have afforded us some sound cover from the rolling rocks we could not avoid kicking loose as we virtually skied down some parts, our descent barely in control. But, it was too late and we were too close to use the ropes as a security now, so Sergei packed the ropes in his backpack, and motioned a questioning finger at the "carabine"---"Padrone?" he asked. I nodded, yes, I had chambered a round, and had turned the tape recorder on in my pocket and turned the switch on the two cameras around my neck, even zipping up the Zeiss binoculars he urged me to leave behind, but I carried them forward anyway.
It was 4:50 PM when we achieved the "shelf" and turned around the pinnacle of lava on a crouching run forward--we were through with the descent, and now I had to make the last part of the stalk, if not alone, at least ahead of Sergei. I crawled forward at this point to a large rock, where I had just enough room to peek over the top, rifle first. What did I see?
Too many Kamchatka Bighorn Rams!
It was a magnificent sight, and I could not resist shooting a picture. The setting was unbelievable. They were standing, several were grazing, and one big one was lying, on a grassy knoll, just ahead of a cliff that fell away to the little river below, with a spread of snow-capped magnificent mountain backdrop, just to the side of the waterfall--you cannot tell me the sheep do not have an aesthetic sense of selection for their choice of habitat!
Sergei was puzzled by my holding the camera up---"Streayuch!" ("Fire") I tried to choose the target among the total of twelve sheep I saw, all but two of them rams and of those half were trophy size. But the one lying down was the master of the bunch. Sergei expressed this by folding down the fourth finger. I raised the rifle and put it on the rock for a shooting rest--and the sheep spooked. This was not for any reason of our own movement, since we were far enough away they did not hear or scent us, and we were quite a distance above them still--not the direction from which they should usually have to worry about predators arriving toward them. They were looking down in the valley and seemed confused. I left Sergei and the first rock, and slid forward on my belly to the next rock where I would be alone. The sheep milled around, and one by one they came by the gap in the grassy knoll on the other side of the lava rocks, and seemed to be coming toward me! Then, one, the furthest away, caught my eye. I recognized him. He was a magnificent trophy--he had been the one lying down at the outset, but now stood broadside to me at a later measured 315 meters. I did not have Sergei as a consultant at that moment as to distance nor target selection, but it did not seem to be necessary for a judgment at this "moment of truth." I heard the radio crackle a low-volume question from Victor muffled in Sergei's pocket twenty meters behind me. I eased off the safety and stared right at the big ram's chest just above the mid-point on 16X power in the Simmons scope on the BAR rifle, which this morning I had declined to test fire since its trip out into this mountain on the basis that there were sheep around that I would not want to alarm. I aimed deliberately at that range without compensating at all for the extra distance nor the slight downhill, and dismissed the wind as negligible. I squeezed the trigger.
There was a loud explosion--and it was not coming from my side but from the ram. The "THWACK" was so loud, that it seemed to follow and drown out the sound of the shot. The ram was tossed up into the air over backward, and I saw it drop with all four hooves curled up on top of it. Through the scope, I saw that it was almost completely still. Then, one hind leg kicked weakly, and that was enough--the ram disappeared over the side of the cliff.
I did not see it again, but I had no doubt what happened. Sergei ran forward around me toward the cliff, his wooden-stocked .308 scopeless rifle ready. I shucked the new round that had autoloaded out of the chamber, and set the rifle down, holding up both cameras as the amazing parade began. A stream of Bighorn snow sheep rams came over toward me, not really running as much as stutter-start walking, looking confused, and one even curiously peering in my direction. They came at me, 100, then fifty then, twenty meters. Without a telephoto, I was getting great close-up shots! I heard a shout from Sergei--which I later heard meant he had got a call from Victor who never saw my ram, but was watching a stream of bighorns coming by me, and watched incredulously as I was shooting pictures from inside bow and arrow range! "Sergei! Tell me what is happening--there is a big ram standing next to Glenn and he is taking pictures! Tell him to Shoot! Shoot!" This exchange was translated for me later.
"The big ram is here and very dead!" Sergei responded--again in the translation I heard much later at night during the vodka toast in celebration. Then, figuring that I might have the same impulse that Victor was having, Sergei called back toward me from completely out of sight (he had somehow gone around and skidded down the cliff side to reach the ram where it had fallen) "Nyet Streyach!" ("Don't Shoot!") I thought, "Don't worry, Sergei, at $3,500 a pop, you better believe I can hold my fire after I saw what a single shot from the .300 Win Mag did the first time, and I can attest to that by not even having a round in the chamber."
The rams had divided into two bunches. One group had come by me, posing for the photographs that I had hoped I could get up high enough to have them hanging out in front of the waterfall, then got the idea as I moved toward them, that they had better take cover from this wild man armed with a Nikon, and they moved up the river bottom. A second group of four climbed up over the shale I had just come down--but they did it noiselessly and nearly effortlessly as far as I could see, stopping to look curiously down on me. I would have taken many more pictures, but I was aware that there was a very photogenic and magnificent ram in a picturesque setting below awaiting close-up photos with the limited film stock I had in each of the cameras, so I watched them through my binoculars. I picked up the things that Sergei had shed in his forward run--like his binoculars and at the cliffside, his rifle, which he saw from looking down would not be needed at the sight of the crumpled big body below.
Now, the worry was, had I done any serious damage to his cape and horns, or had the fall injured them in any way? He was not in any kind of control in coming off the cliff, falling with the dead weight grace of a sack of potatoes, that even I had heard hit the bottom as far away as I was, he having been dead on his feet without ever knowing what had hit him. I looked down at Sergei, who had reached the massive head, turned down under the rich brown wool coat of the full body in repose. He tried to pull it up, looked it over, and smiled up at me "Bolshoi! Khorasho!" (Very big! Great!")
He certainly was. The trophy is magnificent and is made even more impressive by the setting. I hauled the big trophy ram up the grassy knoll with strong Sergei pulling the bulk of the weight. We pulled it upright with its head up over its front hooves and began to shoot photos. Sergei expected the only photos to be taken would be of the ram, and me, but I insisted the first photos be of him and the ram. I also tried to get the two of us in the pictures with a couple of the self-timers. Victor had heard about the great trophy ram on the Motorola walkie talkies I had brought, so he started down the slope we had taken two hours to cover in our stalk; he made it in an hour, although, of course, he did not have to be as careful as we had been. We shot a few more photos, until each of my cameras were out of film and found that Victor's camera had dead batteries. The sun had crossed the steep mountain behind us as we set to work skinning the animal, and I elected to keep the options open by carefully removing the intact fleece, making a full mount an option. The 190 grain Silvertip Sierra boattail bullet had hit precisely where it was aimed, at the middle of the left chest just behind the shoulder, and it had mushroomed perfectly, losing only one "petal" as the jacket of the bullet had stopped in the hide on the opposite side without going through it, as we found on skinning it. The perfect shot had been instantly lethal.
"RETURN FROM THE HUNT"
The skull and horns were lashed into the top of Sergei's bag, and the meat was stored in a nearby convenient snow cave, with a big cairn of rocks over the entrance to keep the wolves and wolverines at bay for at least a little while The tenderloins, heart, and--for some reason--the gonads, of the big ram were packed up as we were ready to set off at 6:00 PM, the single shot having been fired at 4:50 PM. In a picturesque parade I often entitle the "return from the hunt" we started off in making zig-zag switchbacks up the very steep mountainside---with the big ram's curl up top in the backpack over Sergei's head.
I shot a few of the last exposures from the flash Photo Works camera for "The Works"-one of the cameras having been saved for the ram, and one for the potential of being used similarly for a bear. It was very picturesque indeed as we climbed the slope, and each time the two of them collapsed to breathe for a while from their heavy exertion, I also stopped to see what I could preserve of the surroundings, with alpenglow tingeing the canyon walls as we headed in the direction I thought was our camp. On one of these stops while I was trying to hold on to the steep slope, I found a sheep skull and horns from a young female snow sheep--so we picked up a second set of "trophy horns" which we thought we would show off on return to camp. I thought they might have heard the shot, but we had not heard the earlier shot this morning because of the vast spaces among the canyons, so they were unaware of anything except that we were out late. Very late, it turns out.
I was having quite a few confrontations with the forces of gravity, and was losing the contests regularly. I kept thinking of the maxim Christian Elwell used--"When sheep hunting, there is one thing you should never lose---your altitude." I would try to get higher on the slopes so I would have less hard vertical work still to go, since I kept seeing what I thought were saddles in the mountaintop above me to be achieved. Once there, I figured, I would be over the top, and it would be downhill for the last stretch toward our base camp. Right!
I was following Sergei, but he was hard to keep up with despite his heavier load. I got into slopes where I would try to get a purchase on the mountainside and it would give way, and I would tumble down five or more meters--since there was little of any kind of traction that could be gained and there were few snags to hold me for any kind of soft landing below. When Sergei turned to call back, he tried to convince me to come down lower and take a less steep slope since we were not going up and over this particular mountain, it turned out, but up and over the next four mountain ranges. I had not factored in how much distance we had gone since the hunt had begun. This was a very arduous "return from the hunt."
I was carrying Sergei's rifle as well as my own when it got to be 9:00 PM. By this time I was famished and very thirsty. We had been drinking bottled water from the special Malka mineral springs to this point, but at this level of exertion, there was no more caution to be exercised, and I would stoop and lap from every mountain stream as we passed each trickling or gushing down from the top. I was hauling at about the end of my limits, at least at the rate we were trying to go, when I realized again my own maxim---"I am glad I did not wait until age 85 to start sheep hunting!" I was thoroughly wet, clear through, but if I stopped at any point for more than a moment, I would chill out from the cool air now pouring down the mountain and stirring up the breeze with which I was familiar from last night's windstorm. I was exhausted---but still---look around! Isn't this the most stunning and pristine piece of wilderness imaginable---and to think that I---and perhaps Sergei, who is pausing in his aerobic exertion efforts on this mountain---to smoke a cigarette!---are the only two humans now looking at this undisturbed wild ecosystem! I have taken one prime ram, a 13-year old trophy, out of a single group of over twelve animals, a minimal impact by man, and a totemic memory taken along with me to remind me of this wild and wonderful place and the fact that I was once almost able to take it on on its own terms!
As I was dragging up the last of what I had thought was the fifteenth "last" upslope, I saw a distant figure coming down the hill toward me. It was young Slava, who had been up on the hilltop next to camp over the snow field which was our "refrigerator." He had been watching for hours to see if he could see any one of us, and had hoped the later we were out the more hopeful a sign it would be. He had first seen Victor and had learned from him that I had scored. Then he saw his father and ran down in his borrowed hip boots to see if he could carry something for him--but there was no way he could take the back pack with the horns curling overtop with the full fleece of the trophy in it. His father sent him over to me to see if he could help me carry something. I had both my rifle and Sergei's so I gave him the bolt action .308 scopeless rifle of Sergei's, and plodded wearily into camp after 10:00 PM and stripped off the soaked shirts I had been wearing. Elena had some warm water in a bucket that Irena had heated up and she poured it over my head as I shampooed and bathed away some of the stiffness and wetness. I then got out the change of clothes I had carried, including a new virgin wool olive drab colored sweater I had brought still in the Sportsman's Guide package. It was soft and comfortable but only a little small on me so that I resolved on the spot to give it to Slava.
I went into the cook tent where Pascha came to me, and both Irena and Elena came to me as well with a respect that approached reverence when they saw the trophy unfurled from the backpack. There was the rich full fleece lying next to the cape that had come back with the head from Alan's sheep earlier this morning--the first time that Alan had seen it since the moment of the shot-after which Victor had packed it back before joining us in response to the walkie talkie message from Sergei at 2:00 PM. Since that time, no one at camp had any idea where we were or what we were doing, but they had no way of hearing the radio exchanges in Russian during the stalk or the talk after the kill. The were hoping for the best when we were very late, and had "kept their fingers crossed" until they saw Victor returning with a bit of the meat and the brief report that I had shot a sheep in a distant mountain canyon and was expected back trailing Sergei who was packing the rest of the trophy. So, they came out of the tent at the time we had arrived at dusk. They could not wait, but wanted to pose immediately with the trophies for flash photos in the dark.
THE TROPHIES
They could not believe what they were seeing when the bighorn ram skull was rolled out with the full fleece with hooves attached. I could hardly, either. To get ahead of my story by the time of the next morning's "rest day" preparation of the trophies, I will add here the measurements that were made the following day. The measurements of the big ram came the morning after I had joined in the whole base camp's rejoicing in the celebratory Vodka toasts---in which Alan, a non-drinker, even participated with all repeatedly drinking to the fine completion of a hard hunt for the noble Kamchatka Bighorn Snow Sheep Ovis nivicola:
The measurements are preliminarily made as follows: 91 centimeters is the length of one curl, which did not mean very much to me. What did mean something more is that Alan was shaking his head, saying he never expected to see such fine sheep trophies, and particularly mine, which were already the highlights of the trip. He had rough scored his and then set about making steel tape measurements of mine, and after consulting his small book of such matters, returned to say my sheep would place in the range of number 12 or 14 in the world record books, and his would be somewhere in the twenties!