05-JUL-C-4
A MOST EVENTFUL HUNTING DAY IN MY LIFE—
AND QUITE POSSIBLY MY ULTIMATE ONE!
THE EXTREME HUNT FOR “TUR” IN BABADOG,
THE GREATER CAUCUSUS
AND THE ADVENTURES THAT ALMOST ENDED THE
HUNT—
AND THE HUNTER
July 27, 2005
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE ENDEMIC MOUNTAIN
GOATS
I am here
in the Tur hunting camp, above the Babachay River, which is mainly a cascade of
tumble-smoothed rocks, two kilometers horseback (an hour) ride above a
confluence known as “Kalaj” where two canyons and their river beds unite, and
another four kilometers above “Dark” the village of thirty four families which
is the end of the road head into the “Big Caucasus” (or “Babadog”) in the Quba
region of the Azeris. “Q” in Turkic
languages is pronounced as a hard “G” as in “Gooba.” There is also a “little Caucasus Range which
is in
Along this group of rugged mountains, among the highest and roughest of mountains in the region outside the Pamirs is a legendary “goat” (that looks like a sheep) and acts like an Ibex, which is a goat, but which seems related to the Bharal or blue sheep—the one I had spotted on the ledge above Kaza in the Spiti Valley, which are the favored foodstock of the snow leopard. In the Western part of the range, there is a variety that is the Quba or Western Tur (Capra caucasus) which has smaller horns and body than its Eastern cousin, the larger heavier headed Eastern Tur (Capra cylindricornis) which the Russians name after the district in Russia that once was part of Azerbaijan, the “Dagestan Tur.”
HOW DO I GET THER FROM HERE—
AND WHAT DO I DO NEXT?
I am in pursuit of an animal I have only seen in pictures and read about in books, which was little known to the world outside the Soviet-era party apparatchiks or more recent Russian entrepreneurs who like to pursue exotic species of high mountain creatures—largely because of the extreme challenge and risk of the environment of the hunt for the Sheep, Goats, and Chamois which live in a near-vertical world. High alpine hunting is not for the faint of heart or the easily intimidated, since most moments in which even a transient lack of concentration can imperil a plunge down such shear precipices, that only a creature engineered so remarkably as these highly specialized mountain goats could survive such vertical deceleration and use the plunges to make good their escape from the few enemies that would pursue them up into their world.
I seem to
have a need for a certain amount of information to inform my world about me,
but a fair amount of that has been picked up by nonverbal clues, since I have
had to live in sustained ambiguity with little or no explanation about a few of
the details of my pre-programmed hunt. I
had arrived alone, and been picked up at airport and Hotel Elite, and carried
by an Azeri policeman and passed to a group of Azeri horseman from the
Exactly what equipment I would pack or what I would be doing was still a bit unclear, but I made sure I had plenty of film, a fresh charge in my digital camera batteries and tape recorder, and set out not knowing quite what to expect, but with a notepad I had to keep watching what I might learn. I thought I was NOT supposed to shoot a Tur, even if I encountered one, especially not just any Tur, since I was supposed to hunt for a real trophy, and collect one on TV filming, since it would be useful in the DVD and TV series that George Sevich had retained for this purpose. I also thought that the hunt was ten days which is what the travel arrangements were supposed to cover for arrival and departure. There is a Camp Manager named Bahlul here who is the distant hand of the unseen company owner named Yullat Abdulayev who controls 6100 hectares of this mountain wilderness along with a half dozen other businesses from food production, meat packing, tourism as well as the hunting company. Bahlul seemed to want me to get out and shoot any Tur available, and waved off questions I posed about Patrick the TV man and George, who were not part of his plans, since he seemed eager to mop up the final details of the Tur hunting season and there were several clients out on the mountain, the last of which (and the rate-limiting step on when they would be able to break camp and go home) was I. I had thought that I had ten days to pursue the Tur and to learn about them before an on-camera score, but that was definitely not the impression left by Bahlul despite a limited number of words that could be exchanged with mutual understanding. There was supposed to be an interpreter in camp as well as the guides, film producer and a few logistics managers, but I was handed a ski pole and riding crop and pointed downhill still unclear what I would be doing and with whom. I would be returning to camp much later—well after midnight—looking like a very changed man, not necessarily all for the better.
THIS MUST BE
THE SOFT PART:
MOUNTAIN
CLIMBING ON HORSEBACK—
RIDING OUT
TO GET TO THE SWITCHBACKS TO HIGH MEADOWS ADJACENT TO MOUNTAIN RIDGES OVER
SCREE SLOPES TO LOOK OVER AND GLASS FOR TUR
My two guides are Elchin, and
Hargani—uncle and nephew as it turns out.
Harcanyi (alternate spelling,) is one of tow sons of Bahlul whom I will
get to know, the other being Kayyam, who is a student in season at
This is an extreme hunt, and as I later learned only two days later, most hunters only have one climb up the mountain in them, so George and Patrick were already here, but had insisted that they go up only once, and make a spike camp up there to be able to hunt early and late and avoid the extreme exertion of climbing to such a height along so steep a mountain face, and, above all, the treacherous risk of more than one descent, particularly when overtired, or late in the dark or if loaded up with more than they went up the mountain with should they be so lucky
The first part was almost idyllic. I climbed a mountain by sitting on the Azeri saddle with a leather pillow strapped over it, and had to urge the horse to work harder as we cut back and forth up switchbacks. From 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM it felt a little like I was a participant in the Iowa fox hunt, but with a bit more purpose than just riding around in a circle, but to achieve a certain altitude and then picket the horses and climb discretely to the mountain ridge and peer over the top. Almost just so.
We passed large flocks of grazing sheep with vicious guard dogs and a few whistling and even yodeling shepherds. We gave them a wide berth as we kept pushing the horses which were disinclined to go up hill but would angle up as we tacked them back and forth to make out won switchbacks as we cleared timberline, and got to an almost balmy beautiful field of alpine wildflowers—golds, purple, with butterflies sipping from flowers as I took photos of the two of them together. “The hills are alive with the sound of music” was one of the themes in my mind as we finally brought up the weary horses and picketed them in a cold brisk wind about five hundred meters below the point where the grass disappeared as the trees had earlier, and a barren broken scree sloped up steeply to the top. This is where the climbing stick would be not just a good idea, but a mandated and life-saving necessity. Used like a lateral rudder, it has a pointed end which is jammed into the slope to have a fixed point for self-arrest if one begins to slip and every footfall is so insecure that each will, in fact, prove unreliable—a “scree scramble” results and one is forever pivoting around the stick as a fixed pole vault to try to plunge along the fall line to a safer more reliable footing.
Elchin and Harcanyi figured out quickly that I had the drill down rather well for the climb and a bit even for the lateral traverse, but that I might need watching for the descent, since a lot of that dancing was an uncontrolled plunge. That would get more obvious—and far worse—as the day wore on and it got dark as I got weary. When we inched our way to the top to stop just short of the ridgeline so as not to be skylined where Tur might spot us peeking over, we were in brisk biting breeze, and I was curled below the summit in edelweiss. “Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow” was a wish I had sent out to someone somewhere, probably engaged in quite dissimilar activity, but also involving horses and friends, but one reason for this extreme summer holiday was to focus on something other than that concern. Staying alive is a remarkably clear focus most of the time, and I had considered that this might shift my focus considerably.
SPOT, BUT
DON’T STALK, DISTANT TUR,
WHICH THE
GUIDES CAN SEE AND I CANNOT:
SO I WROTE
POSTCARDS FROM MOUNTAIN TOPS,
JUST OFF THE
SUMMIT SO AS NOT TO BE SPOTTED IN TURN, WITH LITTLE IDEA WHAT WAS COMING NEXT
Harcanyi was carrying my rifle, even though I had insisted that I continue to carry my backpack. I noted that the water bottle had started to empty, particularly after our bread and cheese lunch. They had announced that they had seen Tur, and even described them as “mama” or how many by scratching one rock with another—the natural ‘classroom slates” lying all around us. I looked even with my Zeiss glasses, and could see nothing. They seemed not to quite appreciate that they were dealing with Karl Zeiss’s finest optics, but maybe thought that these binoculars that I alone was the only one who had had carried among the three of us were like Russian Army surplus since they had left them on exposed slopes with the next stop over at thousand meters below if they should slip off their perch. At one point they tossed them to each other. I had even seen Harcanyi at one point beat the horse with my Zeiss binoculars! One item they did handle with reverence was the Bennelli Rifle, the new R-1 of which we were the ones to pack in two of them as gifts for the sake of the publicity that would come from the filming of the hunt with the sponsors’ equipment. In extreme irony, it turns out that they wish to charge us rent of fifty dollars US for every day we have the rifles, which are gifts to the hunting company which we brought in and which they would then also like us to pay for in rent! When later we were going to send signals to each other, Harcanyi looked at me and wanted to fire the rifle. I nodded OK, but then was worried since he seemed unaware of the gas-operated reloading feature, and also had the nervous habit of snapping the safety on and off. After shooing the R-1, like any other autoloader, the rifle reloads the chamber. I had to come over to unload the chamber to feel comfortable around someone else carrying this machine—a long way up market from their usual sixteen gauge single barrel shotguns from which they shoot hand loaded homemade wads to make signals and to scare the Tur into flight down mountain.
They had a conversation about the
plan of the hunt, which was in general made known to me. Harcanyi would stay with me, as we would go
down mountain toward an area where Tur were seen and over which we should see
if they would flush, down a very deep precipice series which would have us
arriving at the other small river that had joined the
CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE URSINE KIND:
A STARTLING
“BUMPING INTO” AS WE
RE-ENTER TREE-LINE
It was a hard struggle in the
exposed steep scree slopes to stay semi-safe on the mountain slope without
slipping off into oblivion. There was no
way one could stop and use up all that energy in trying to keep a dynamic
balance, since it was only rarely that
we could get one down hill knee locked and “use bone, not muscle” a favored
dictum of mine in one of the fundamental rules of mountaineering. I could just barely navigate, but felt the
strains on the lateral sides of my legs and the “smearing edges” of my feet
where the shear forces were severe in blistering my soles and heels. I was wearing Gore-Tex boots and the guides were
wearing knock off low-top tennis trainers made in
We did—and that is where I encountered “Episode # 1” for this unique day in which the “hills were alive with more than just the sound of music.”
I arrived with a sense of relief at the scrub tees around which were scattered grassy clumps of soil with a few hand-holds possible in woody shrubs. I found out the uneven ground did not offer much more for dependable traction footholds, and the grasses seemed to act as a lubricant over hidden rocks which slipped out just as often as the dry scree scrabble. But, I moved downhill into the sparse tree cover, swinging around the occasional bush hand hold to swivel around and face downhill again and repeat the process. It was as my back was turned at the apogee of one of these “vine-swinging brachiations” that Episode # 1 of the major memorable events of this day occurred. Harcanyi was upslope thirty meters and fifty to my left, when I turned from my back downhill position to the frontal descent mode as I searched out the next handhold.
“Whoof!” came the startled
grunt. I looked down into the surprised
face of Ursos arctos horribilis –the
interior grizzly bear quite familiar to me from the rug on my Game Room
floor. It is akin to the Coastal Brown
Bear of Alaska and
This one was about to set out to contend for the title. I stopped and stared. The bear rose up on his hind legs—a medium size boar, I noted. What I did not expect was my reaction, and then his. I pushed the button on the back of the Fuji film camera I was carrying on a lanyard and the quiet “buzz” of the lens cover retracting and the telephoto lens extending was all the sound made or time needed for the bear’s decision. With a second grunt he came bounding forward in a rolling gait in a direct charge up hill at me, covering the thirty meters in about five bounds. I stood still and triggered off two snaps before yelling. Harcanyi then yelled as well, but my yell was louder since I was closer facing the bear, and Harcanyi had decided to try an evasive maneuver. He had the new Bennelli rifle, with 30/06 Federal Vital Shok 165 grain bullets—“loaded for bear” quite adequately, whereas 35 mm was not a very intimidating load. I might have offered to swap with Harcanyi if there had been enough time, but as slowly as thing seemed to be going in those few seconds, it was over very quickly when the bear veered past me at about five meters to my left, and simply vanished in the scrub trees I had just been swinging from as handholds.
I stood there for a moment, looking at the camera. Sure enough, I had taken two exposures according to the film counter. Everyone asked me later to show them the picture, since digital photography, like the Polaroid age, had made everyone impatient for film development processing. But, I looked at where the bear had just swerved past me, and turned to Harcanyi and said with what should be rather unnecessary redundancy: “Medved!”
As I continued downslope to a chasm off the side of the scrub-covered slope, I looked down at the point where the bear had first popped out of the chasm in my descent path. There, at the bottom of the gulch was the carcass of a female Tur, with a hole in the chest where something big had been feeding on the heart/lungs. I had always considered that bears generally have had an unfortunate genetic deck dealt to him—the bulk of an herbivore and the dentition of a carnivore. At least this day, those carnivorous teeth were being exercised to their purpose, at least at this time on an herbivore and not on an omnivore!
And, that was just major Episode # 1 for today, and the day is still young in mid-afternoon—stay tuned!
CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF A SECOND KIND:
A CLOUDY FOG
ROLLS UP THE MOUNTAIN,
AND I AM
ENVELOPED WITH OPACITY,
WHILE
SUDDENLY I EXPERIENCE CLOSELY:
“A MAGNIFICENT
TUR IN MY MIST!”
It seemed to be getting later, or at least darker. We climbed up the ridge at the far side of the gulch. It is always a disappointment to me to find that as I am going downhill I find I must make up altitude by going right back up to the level from which I had come down. Even worse is to be signaled form down lower “Come on down!” Reluctantly, I work my way down, having experienced all the effort of the uphill ascent and the danger of the downhill descent to be waved off with some unintelligible “communication” and have to purchase back again that altitude I had already bought, this time at a higher price. “In sheep hunting, there is one thing you should never lose—that is your altitude” is an aphorism I had picked up hunting Dall sheep—apparently never heard around here, where conservation of energy does not appear to be a high priority.
We got to the crest of the ridge opposite the gulch where the dead Tur nanny carcass was lying, and sat at a rocky outcropping glassing the distant canyon wall on the opposite side of the river valley where we would presumably come out off the mountain slope we were clinging to on our side. In a grassy avalanche chute on the far side of the mountain, perhaps two miles away, there was a commotion as a large brown furry ball was rolling back and forth. On closer examination, it turned out to be another “Medved”—a bear, tearing up the hillside in the frustrating purpose of trying to catch some small rodents or ground squirrels, surely an energy-requiring process in negative balance, whatever its reward in the fun of pursuit. That must apply to me, clinging on this side of the mountain as well.
Further glassing revealed two male Tur on a chute downstream from the bear, each perhaps aware of each other and assigning distinct and separate real estate to each other in concessions that are subject to periodic renegotiations. We watched them for a while, at the same time Harcanyi seemed eager to get over to the further downstream patch of wooded slope as a large mass of cloud was rolling up the canyon. We scrambled just as the white fog bank rolled upslope to where we were sitting dropping visibility to the distance we could see to our feet.
We came up to the ridge we would look over into the wooded slope below had there been any visibility at all, and we could hear an occasional rock rolling off the slope. As we came close to the ridge line, there was no question as to the wind direction, since the rising bank of fog was wafted past us, damp in our faces. We came nearly to the ridge and paused. Then, I heard it. The ripping sound of grass being mowed. There must have been several Tur within a short distance from us in the opaque cloud who were taking this “white out” opportunity to feed through the grassy slope just above the trees. They may have been within fifty meters of us, and we could see as far as five.
Harcanyi went to a rocky outcrop to look back over the chasm we had crossed—to no purpose, since he might have been able to see as far as I—which was three to five meters in the rolling clouds everywhere below and around us. Perhaps he wished to be in a strategic position if the cloud cover broke. In any event, he moved to the limit of my visibility, left of ten meters where I saw him in intermittent swirls as the wind cleared only enough to make a hazy outline of him, with the Bennelli rifle held at “port arms.” He was a sentry at his post—all dressed up and no where to look.
I sat down on a rock along the spine of the ridge above the trees. I took out the water bottle for a precious sip, since I could now see it would still be a long time until I was down at the stream for a recharge of the emptying water bottle—another six hours, as it later turned out. I went into a neutral contemplative pose, and thought that this must be what it would be like to sit inside a marashmallow looking at the world passing by.
It was eerie. Without a sound. He just “appeared.” The apparition bounded into position immediately next to me on the ridge, three meters away, and came to a perfectly quiet repose as we stared at each other. He was a russet red Billy with lateral sweeping horns that were symmetric and perhaps 80 cm on each side, with thick bases. We froze together in the swirling mist—the Tur and I. We admired each other for perhaps twenty long seconds. I was tempted to move first, to pull up the camera to try to repeat the performance I had made in the bear encounter, but photographing the inside of a damp fluffy cloud would not have been a very edifying portrait, and I was burning his image on my retina, remembering this moment. This was my first “close encounter” with the Caucasus Tur. We were fellow Caucasians, and we saluted each other just by recognition of each other’s presence at the same place at the same time.
Without moving my head, I turned my eyes left, as a swirl of cloud exposed Harcanyi briefly and whistled. He looked at that moment and saw me and the Tur standing side by side, as though I had acquired a pet bird dog that had accompanied me up the slopes. There was nothing he could do, but he made a lurch as if to move toward me and toss me the rifle as previously he had tossed the precious binoculars. At that movement, the Tur, cocked the spring in his fore and hind haunches, and in a single bound, he vaulted past me toward the treeline, vanishing in the cloud before he landed on his unseen landing pad downslope. About five seconds later, I could hear a clicking sound as he toppled rocks with his hooves, but that was all the reassurance I had that I had not just seen an apparition brought on by fatigue, fog and tricks of imagination. “A Tur Trophy in My Mist.” And, the cloud swirled around me isolating me again as Harcanyi vanished in the fog. It was 7:41 PM, cloudy, wet and darkening; do you know where your kids are?
DOWNSLOPE
TOWARD
FIRST FIRING
SIGNAL SHOTS, THEN STRUGGLING JUST TO HANG ON TO THE SLOPE IN THE DARK
I had a premonition that “Episode # 3” was coming: I did not know what it would be like, but I realized I could no longer control my feet on the steep slope now lubricated with wet vegetation, and my climbing stick had broken in mid-shaft. I said aloud: “I can no longer self-arrest and the slope is steeper and more treacherous: I am an accident waiting to happen.” Harcanyi looked puzzled, since he did not understand my words. He offered, yet again, to carry my pack—but I considered that the pack would be my cushion if I rolled off supine. I kept slipping and he would jam his climbing stick into the mountain to provide a kind of stepping stick, generally just after it was needed. He looked at me, with the rifle held up, in requesting another signal shot, which I knew he wanted to shoot with the Bennelli, so I worked the bolt and loaded the chamber so he could fire. I unloaded the chamber after the autoloader fed another shell into it, and snapped the safety catch back on. A return shot sounded from the river valley below, encouragingly close. We were closing in on the rendezvous with Elchin and the horses—and water I could get from the stream. But, the dim view I could get of the steep slope as it was getting dark and it was still very cloudy was not encouraging. The slopes were still steeper, now with rock cliffs, and slippery vertical rocks with obscuring vegetation to trick, trip and lubricate each foothold. It was not encouraging.
What did seem like a benefit were the increasing number and girth of small trees which I realized were birches, which I could grasp as I fell to their level and then swing on them until I could get new footholds. I came down hard a few times skidding on my feet scrabbling for purchase before my hands grasped something to stop the slide. Harcanyi went down further ahead since he could not help me from above, and might be able to pick a safer route below which I could follow.
ONE “MOMENT
OF TRUTH”—
IN THE HUNT,
WHICH OFTEN DESIGNATES THE INSTANT OF SURVIVAL OF THE PREY, THIS TIME THE
PREDATOR
Episode # 3 happened even if the premonition did not spell it out in detail in advance. I came down to a ledge within shouting range of the river bottom. Through the dark, I could see a flickering firelight, as Elchin had set up a small campsite with the horses at the stream. My feet were precariously positioned: my left was on a small crevasse in the cliff face, and my right wedged into the base of a small birch growing out laterally in a rock cleft. I tried to move laterally, since the steep shear rock below me offered no purchase I could find in the dark. I saw a lateral branch of a substantial birch, perhaps four inches in diameter near the trunk, just outside my reach. I inched toward it, half turned to reach for it. Both feet went out from under me simultaneously, and I flung up both hands to grasp for it as I plunged forward and down.
I know that in life you have to rely on some unproven facts, trust in some unknown people, and wager survival on prior experience, and sometimes the exception surfaces that proves the rule. I had been thinking a lot about the reliability of the most precious relationship in my life with another, and how trust can be betrayed. This is reality. These were my thoughts as I reached up and eagerly grasped the birch branch with both hands as a gymnast catching the parallel bar. Rotten at the core, it snapped off in my hands, and I arced over the cliff in a “header” still holding the faithless birch branch.
I plunged head first into the dark, but was unaware of ever hitting the ground. Somewhere in my flight, I hit another birch trunk, breaking it, and my fall, with my face, knocking me out cold in the air. When I woke up lying on a small ledge, I felt amazingly refreshed, as though I had just had a restful nap. My pants were all wet, and I was aware that I could not see past my nose. I reached up and realized my nose was pushed over to the left side of my face, and my right nostril appeared to be closed off. It felt odd—I could touch the deformity and feel it misaligned, but it was numb. So, I pushed it back to what felt like center, with no more than a minor wince of discomfort. I checked to see if any extremities were hurting and as they were not, I tried to stand up. I noticed something flashy fall and realized the sunglasses I had strapped around my neck had popped from their strap and had tumbled into the dark. Harcanyi was calling from the slope below, and trying to climb up to where I was teetering on the ledge, and I could see I was only about fifty meters from the relative safety of the rocky streambed.
Harcanyi reached me, and jammed his climbing stick in the mountain side as a step for me to climb down, which I gratefully accepted wordlessly—no more waving off any offer of help with the machismo of “I’ve got this descent under control.” So, I was helped over to the horses for the last fifty meters of my descent, and collapsed on the pack saddle at the fireside. I checked my watch in the flickering flame light. It was 11:15 PM. I was thirsty, and drank the re-filled plastic Coke liter bottle three times rapidly. I had a small piece of Azeri bread, realizing I could not easily chew and breathe at the same time. “OK?” asked Elchin. “Let’s go!” I replied.
I am very glad the “Horse knows the
way.” In the dark of a nearly moonless
night under a low ceiling of cloud cover, the horses threaded the rocky stream
bed back toward hunting camp, two hours away.
I certainly would not be guiding them.
In fact, much of the time I had my eyes closed trying to imagine what we
were going through that I could remember from my earlier transit down in
daylight. The laterally placed eyes of
the big herbivores, with rod-rich peripheral night vision in shades of grey,
threaded the
When we pulled in to camp after
1:00 AM, several of the guides roused up out of bed to look at me startled by
my appearance—with raccoon eyes and a bloody divot out of the bridge of my
nose, I must have looked quite different than I did at the outset of my Hunt #1
under the somewhat confusing circumstances of the morning. The
“What problems? I came here to hunt Tur. What time do we leave in the morning?”