05-JUL-C-5
“WHAT PROBLEMS? LET’S GET OUT AND HUNT!”
GETTING “BACK ON THE HORSE”—
AND FAR MORE DANGEROUSLY—
BACK ON THE STEEP SCREE SLOPES
IN PURSUIT OF HIGH MOUNTAIN TUR
July 28, 2005
The bottoms
of my feet are tender, the nails all blackened, and my face would frighten
small children if there were any nearby, but I am ready to get out into the
Hills, which must be Alive, with more than just the Sound of Music. I cannot blow my nose, which is stuffed up
not from any allergens, but from a maligned septum which may need to be looked
at, perhaps on my return to another civilization, such as
I ride out on the now familiar river bed rocky obstacle course. We pushed our horses up the first switchbacks and tried to “tack” them up the mountain to get to a high meadow for grazing, as we, again, crept to the edge and peered over. Harcanyi went out to a finger-like projecting point to scan and came back with the report that there were several Tur on the far slope, two males, but they were no doubt unreachable. I had no plan for dehydrating today, and had loaded two water bottles in my pack, having noted that drinking freely at the stream upon my somewhat dramatic arrival at it last night, and then another three liters upon return in the middle of the night at camp thanks to the horses’ night vision had not produced an urge to pee at night so I must have been several liters down from yesterday’s exertions and exposure.
On climbing the mountain's sunny side today after picketing the horses, I noted the slopes of alpine flowers were very pleasant and photogenic. I had noted butterflies and bees flitting from flower to flower, and even was able to shoot a couple of pictures of yellow color butterflies alighting on golden flowers and similar matches as I saw the variety of insects associating with a variety of floral tributes—the flowers offering bribes to continue their own fertility. It seems always so.
The immediacy of life-threatening positions on this mountain slope makes it possible to focus on something other than the problems that one brings to the field. In fact, I had more than enough “distraction” today, since Elchin pointed downslope, in the continuous scree decline as the way we would have to go to get to the far side of a canyon that might have the Tur bedded around the corner a mile or more away. Reluctantly, I began the steep descent along the dry pitch of over 70* without a single solid purchase for hand or foot, and using the ski pole as my lateral rudder, I was continuously pivoting around the fulcrum to the degree I was able at all to arrest the long slide. They would stop to confer, leaving me in a dynamic posture where it took all the muscle tension I could muster to cling to the slope. We finally slid down to a small stony ridge which we could straddle as they glassed the area below us, seeing, they reported, nothing. Just then, I saw something. I pointed up to the ridge top. There was a man walking along the ridge, stopping and waving a gun in the air.
We were being encroached by another hunter or his Jaeger. The man was poaching in on the Tur we had spotted (More correctly, Harcanyi had spotted.) His goal was to keep them moving out of the canyon away from us and over to wherever he had his hunter stationed. So, he would pause periodically and fire a shot—aimed over the arc above us. This was not only an insult, but was also threatening, so Elchin and Harcanyi yelled back, then began shooting to return the protest. The matter was resolved, then, we were no longer hunting, but were now in an aborted hunt, and had to consider survival by getting back up the same treacherous slope we had just come down, while the Tur hunt had been deliberately sabotaged by whomever it was up there spoiling our intended action.
For me, the matter was quite simple. It was not the diplomatic violation of decorum of who was encroaching on whom, nor even the recover form suicidal depression of a distraught young woman elsewhere in the world at a cost of very hurtful actions in betrayal, but staying alive and getting off that mountain going slowly and painfully up rather than abruptly too rapidly down—not a desideratum. So, over the next hour, I had to painfully re-win each tortured step of the real estate I had just come down. It was pure climbing frustration to be going up and down the same mountain almost deliberately chosen for its non-user-friendly status all to no purpose except getting back to where we were alive.
At the end of three hours of difficult climbing in high exposure hazard, I hauled myself up to the ridgeline and flopped down on my back. I have had enough of this to last the rest of the day. Harcanyi motioned to the slope, having the suggestion to go down again, since the encroaching saboteur was gone and the Tur might still be there hidden behind the canyon wall we were trying to get around, but I declined. The futility of the back and forth high risk no reward climb and descent was not going to be repeated, and I was not going to give up again any hard won altitude. Elchin had agreed and suggested that the horses be brought around as they had been the previous day to the side canyon, and that we descend toward them, hunting along the way for bedded Tur.
I sat on the slope with the alpine flowers, ironically in the edelweiss I had wished someone farewell form earlier, and since I was to wait, I pulled out a couple of postcards from my pocket and filled them in in this idyllic setting. One would never know from looking, or receiving the postcard just what I have been doing or seeing the position from which I was writing.
So, we did
what needed doing, and staggered down, once again, the steep mountain side,
flushing the birds that in
I rode into
camp while the French hunter Philippe and his wife Federica were in camp with a
friend of theirs, another Philippe, who was Belgian living in
But, most ingrained of all, the guides had a pattern of behavior, and they wanted to use this means since it had worked for them before with their principally Russian hunters. The fat cat Russian hunter would be pushed and prodded up hill, to sit in a position where the guides would scout and then try to get behind the Tur, and making noise from yelling and firing off their homemade handloads out of their shotguns, they would drive the Tur past the hunter—always on the run, and often at extremely long range—like waterfowl “pass shooting.” This was what they knew how to do, and no one would convince them of another method, which may have been sportier in fair chase—the “spot and stalk” method. On this they were adamant, since they were the ones who knew, and the hunters would follow their expertise. The game drives might work if down rarely, but here it was at the end of the season and the hills had been alive, with the ringing of gunshots of the drivers and beaters.
Where was George? That became the most contentious problem of all. George had got up there once, and had seen a herd of 150 or more Tur when the guides had pointed them out. He missed three in a row, and then shot three in a row—but not on camera—so the action footage had still to be taken, since the driven Tur do not allow for time to set up the scene as the camera would need to have it. Further, George had followed the habit of the guides, and had not drunk water, and had developed muscle cramps and weariness. So, they had made a plan to go to a water source and wait for George to make it there. After Patrick and guides had waited over two hours and George had not appeared, they climbed down with their own huntmeister Mozel, and then waited down by the stream for over six hours. By then, everyone was quite sad figuring George had had an accident and had fallen to his death. Mozel agreed to return up the mountain to try to find him. This is a steep price to pay, to return up the slope to try to retrieve what was a hunter who had not shown up in over eight hours from the plans without a signal as to what he was doing to change plans, so they thought only the worst. Mozel was not at all a happy camper when he finally found George.
George had been weary, so he decided to lie down on the mountain and take a nap. He slept for over six hours. During this time people had been waiting in several rendezvous positions and then became frantic with worry, and set out looking for him. Mozel finally found him, and brought him down to ride in on a horse as I was telling the story of my long hunts and risky descents daily as they were camped on the mountain in a spike camp to avoid the repeat climbs. George looked at my face and said “You ‘scoped’ yourself!” Not likely, having not yet touched off a shot, as they had been burning powder along the high hills.
So, I now had heard my first English words spoken in camp—what did I learn? First, the hunt is not ten days, and that I and the cameraman were going to be doing a long and leisured spot and stalk hunt, but that I was to score as soon as possible, with or without video since the guides and camp manager were eager to close up the camp. George was already overdue, and had to return—and was going to tip his way out of the camp for all the guides he owed big time for rescuing him from his nap on the mountain after he had already shot an excess number of Tur. Then I –an reluctantly conceded, the TV cameraman—would climb up the steep mountain face opposite camp and shoot the Tur they would drive on over toward me so they could clear the camp as soon as tomorrow. This is all news, and changes the plans of action I had been given to understand before coming here, that I was to spot and stalk a really trophy Tur, and not shoot the first one that came by, waiting for very good TV filming before collecting the trophy. But, it seems that the recent antics of the Tur hunt on the slopes have worn out a few of the guides, and they are eager that I, the last and eldest hunter of the season, get in there and score soon, to abbreviate their stay in the mountains and to return home to get in the hay and visit their families from which they had now been separated for an extra sixteen days—and I was the unfortunate expedited hunter at the conclusion of this saga. So, my story has now become an epilogue. We will see whether the epilogue is a climax or a denouement.