05-JUL-C-7

SCORE!

SOLO HUNT UP BABADOG MOUNTAIN’S STEEP SLOPES,

SPOTTING A FAST-RUNNING GROUP OF TUR AT LONG RANGE, WITH A SINGLE SHOT FROM THE BENNELLI RIFLE

AT OVER 387 METERS, CATCHES TROPHY TUR IN FLIGHT:

PACKING OUT THE BIGGEST TUR ON THE LAST HUNT WITH THE LAST HUNTER RETURNING TO CAMP CLOSING IT

July 30, 2005

It could only happen through such a spectacular climax to complete the saga that had begun with the arduous climbs across treacherous steep scree slopes and the near calamity of the first hunt’s conclusion! This would be the last day of the last hunt by the last (and oldest) hunter for the season. No matter that it was only the fourth day of my five day hunt, nor that there were understandable extenuating circumstances involved in the prior hunts—which have been obvious from looking at me—something I did not have to do regularly thanks to the grateful paucity of mirrors in the Tur camp along the Babachay River bed.

Anything ordinary would have been an anticlimax. The guides are all eager to be out of here since they have to return to the village of “Dark” (34 inter-related families strong) to get in the hay and to see their families from which they have been separated for 16 days extended over their usual period of absence in guiding the hunts and organizing the “Tur drives” for foreign hunters.) The whole group was determined that I should score on a tur, any tur, and for that reason the hunt meister had decreed that NO TV cameraman could go along with me or any interference in this mission to get the hunter a shot at a tur. The experience might be what I am after (and there has certainly been more than enough of that, including the spectacular and high exposure setting in which it is carried out) but the Azeri have a simpler more tangible endpoint—a dead tur on the ground. That is also the signal for the tip time that each lives for here in the mountains, which gathers from the foreign well-fixed hunters more than they could earn at any other cash-producing job outside the big cities, and it is in US $50 and $100 dollar bills, not an inconsiderable reward for their very hard and high risk work here in the “Big Caucasus” =”Babadog.”

SUPERSTITIOUS UNCERTAINTY ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE TV CAMERA FILMING MAKES FOR AN EDICT

THAT INTERDICTS THE FILMING OF MY TROPHY TUR

So, I was keen that the tur hunt be climaxed with a televised kill on tape for the production of the Outdoor Life Network and DVD that Patrick Montgomery was brought here to film, but the huntmeister Bahlul was equally and irrationally convinced that their long-practiced method of hunting resulted in a dead tur for the hunter, and since it had not on the hunt yesterday, and the only difference of anything new brought into this equation was the presence of the cameraman, it must be the TV filming that had jinxed the hunt and spooked the “Sure Thing” of the bedded down Tur within fifty meters of the peak crag over which the Tur had been spotted as we set up for the filming. That the sound of random shots echoing through the valley from the “drivers” trying to get the unseen bedded down tur to run was what had spooked them and which had foiled a good “spot and stalk” hunt was not apparent to them, since this is the way that they had always done it and it had resulted in trophies to be carried out by their prior Russian apparatchik shooters. “What we have here, is a (anthropologically interesting cultural) failure to communicate—or at least convince.”

So, I was to set out, alone as the sole (and eldest) hunter, for the fourth successive day, up the steep slope of Babadog Mountain to be surrounded by six Azeri guides and drivers, with three who would later join to be accessory “drivers”---and with a little luck, also “packers.” They would do whatever they could, and the rest was up to me. With the right equipment and helpers at hand, did the Old Man have the “Right Stuff” and could he shoot straight at running tur? We would soon have to find out, since it was all coming down to this single “Moment of Truth.”

We climbed the slope to a lateral traverse along the treacherous scree, and I used the ski pole as they all use their wooden staffs, as a lateral rudder to arrest and steer them as they careen down the slope or try to steady themselves along the side. If one lost footing and had no sharp point of fixation here, the law of gravity and the abrasive friction of the unstable slope would guarantee that you would bounce many times in abrading ricochets, but the falling body would surely not stop until it made it to the Babachay River at the foot of the seventy degree slippery slope. I had proven that, even in the final stages of the descent in the dark on the first night, and would have splashed down but for an intercepting birch tree, which I broke, as it broke my fall, and my nose. I have the “raccoon eyes” and crusted-over divots in my mid-face to prove that experience was rather recent, but I am still up here climbing again—“What troubles?”

SETTING UP IN POSITION ON THE STEEP ROCKY SLOPE,

TO WAIT AS WEATHER CHANGES AND AS AZERI GUIDES

CIRCLE BEHIND THE MASSIVE MOUNTAIN=

“BABADOG”

Patrick Montgomery, the TV cameraman/elk and mountain lion guide from New Mexico, had not heard of Baku or Azerbaijan, and when he announced that George was having him come out to film a Tur hunt, he was eager to go to see a specimen he had not previously heard of either. But, mid-America friends had cautioned him "You might encounter Osama bin Laden out there in those mountains” and when he had first met the likes of Akhbar John or Gogol he thought he had. These are tough, lean, tattered and hardened men with scraggly beards and do not consider hardships as much more than a good joke played upon them which they might learn well to sidestep them to let the full weight crush the uninitiated. It turns out, as Patrick shortly discovered, that these fellows are very considerate and extremely hard working, and are quite concerned for the client’s welfare on these treacherous slopes, although they would not affront the client by trying to visibly carry them across, but would stand by. This goes beyond the “deep pockets” of the foreign client—although that was principally in the minds of most of the camp managers and interpreter—and they seemed to care what happened to the hunter, even apart from him being the source of their livelihood. They seemed amazed at my endurance in going up hill, even though I was often an incompetent Klutz about the uncontrolled downhill on the unstable surface, which varied from ball-bearing rocks to razor edge shards of broken crockery splayed out to trip the “Batteleur” into free fall. I learned a lot about the “Fall Line” here, and where it was always in relation to my center of gravity. I did not wear down on the uphill, but would often lose control since I knew it was unlikely that I might self-arrest without an ice axe, and I could envision one of the guides vaulting from some distance away to jam his stout staff into the rocky scree horizontally to provide a narrow platform for my landing if I picked up some speed and trajectory on the downhill arc. One American client was not quite so lucky, and from a narrow ledge, where we paused to commemorate, pitched off the mountain face, and was found all the way down in the Babachay River with a rock shard through his head. That is not good public relations. Perhaps that is why the TV cameraman was forbidden to accompany me today.

As I clawed and climbed my way across the scree, the same steep slope of loose talus that we had glissaded down last night in what I called the “Gran Prix du Scree,” I crossed over to an uneven clumped “vertical lawn,” and tried to “smear my way along the angled rock to grasp handfuls of the vegetation. I asked “Where?” with a universal gesture of “Quo vademus?” and the youngest of the climbers, Kayyam, son of Bahlul, gestured to a rocky outcrop overlooking the long scree slope below and above it. It hardly seemed like a verdant pasture for grazing goats, but more like a runway—if you had a mind to tilt the carrier deck 80 degrees. I determined to set up my own “jinx” with a premonition that I should make it there, and mark it immediately as TURS, for “Tur Shot.” So, pulling the GPS from the backpack, I marked TURS= 41* 01.08 N, 048* 22. 32 E.

There, now; that should do it. All we have to do now is settle back, and wait for the parade to begin. It was just 9:30 AM, since for once we had got an early start in our assault on the mountain and had scrambled up before the direct overhead sun had baked us in transit. I had made sure we had a liter and a half of water with us, since we would be high and dry after leaving the Babachay rocky river bed. I spread my camouflaged pile jacket over a few of the rocks to make a “blind” and to protect the Bennelli R-1 30/06 which would otherwise be resting on the same jagged rocks that I was. The sun came over the ridge and it was baking hot for about an hour, then a few clouds gathered. Almost immediately, the temperature dropped over twenty degrees and a light wind began to blow up from the deep chasm behind me, so I pulled the camo coat back and put it on. As I sat through the next hours, I remembered I had a couple of blank postcards in my pocket, and I pulled them out and filled in a few of them. We then pulled out the bread and cheese that constitutes the hunt lunch everywhere on these mountains (with sliced cucumbers being the one additional luxury item, occasionally with a bit of a stuffed sausage) and I drank a swallow of the water stock. The guides quite typically decline the water, since it is not seen as a manly thing to do to drink water after clambering up slope for several hours, being an indication that you might have broken a sweat at some point during the exertions.

I put the cards and pens away, and put the Zeiss binoculars in position on the rocky ledge figuring that anything that came through at some distance would need a lot of optical help in identifying the quality of the trophy. I had figured I was looking over from a quarter mile to two miles range, the latter requiring heat-seeking homing devices to find the target. I have done a fair amount of long range shooting, and, using up a lot of luck, have collected some very good trophies well beyond anyone’s idea of a ”reasonable range” should be, so I would give it a try. On second thought, I should take out the sleeve of Federal Vital Shok 165 grain 30/06 cartridges and have them available on the rocky shelf for rapid reloading of Benellis’ first autoloading gas-operated repeating rifle, since there might be a need for hailing some ordinance as far as I could see if that is as close as we would ever get to a tur or two, especially running as only they can along such semi-vertical terrain.

So, now I was hunting, two hours after setting up in the rocky ledge, holding the Bennelli rifle with a round chambered and the scope caps off. I scanned the sheer up and down horizon, with my sunglasses off (the hunter seems to be marked by that distinction as well---since not only is he the one wearing real boots as opposed to Chinese-made low-cut tennis “trainers,” but none of the guides have sunglasses.) Most have some hat as a cast-off or gift from some hunter, like a Bennelli baseball cap, but otherwise, there is little protection from the sun and sand in their eyes—a rather good epidemiologic population to study for the incidence of acquired cataracts. But, I had learned that the next oldest man on the mountain of the nine of us (one hunter plus eight guides) was forty five, a source of some jokes at his expense. I pointed out that I could identify with that, since when asked how old I was, I used their readily available “Chalk and Slate” method, and scratched one rock with another writing ’42. “Ah!” they exchanged knowing glances, “that still made Akhbar John the eldest man on that mountain at 45, with most of the others in their twenties.” “Right!” I replied, acceding my seniority position to Akhbar John.

The youngest man in the entourage is a student hoping to be an economics student at Baku eventually, Kayyam. He was chosen to accompany me, since the more senior hunters would be needed to identify Tur hiding places and try to drive them out of the blind canyons into the passes that might lead them to me. His principle reason for being with me is that he had a few words of English, if he thought about them long enough, and could respond to a question of mine, perhaps at about the delay interval in which I may have forgotten the question or realized the answer on my own, Kayyam is one of two sons of Bahlul, who is brother of Elchin with whom I had hunted the first two days. The other younger hunter with whom I had hunted in the first two days was Harcanyi, second son of Bahlul who on the first two hunts was therefore hunting with his uncle Elchin. Kayyam would be accompanying me to listen for the beaters and drivers to hear from which direction the shots might be fired in the event they had seen or were trying to spook bedded Tur into flight if they could know where we would be to have them “driven” if a “drive is legitimate as a term when they have 61,000 hectares of scree-slopes along the whole of the Big Caucasus to run through as only they can, with more blind canyons, ravines and even caves in which to take refuge than have been discovered by even the most experienced of the Azeri hunters. Kayyam was my man, and we would sit in silence for the duration of the “drive” or until nothing was seen or moved by any of us on this very big mountain.

I watched a soaring eagle, a very large raptor, with wide white wings and a brown band beneath them. There had been an earlier swift pass by a peregrine and what might have been a gyrfalcon, and I had seen scrambling away amid the rocks a few of the small lizards that must be the targets of some of the aerial surveillance of these smaller raptors. At takeoff this morning, I had gone out among the tall “Queen Anne’s Lace” or wild parsnip-looking stalked plants with clusters of small white flowers, and had seen a bumble-bee-sized hummingbird, hovering and sipping as a nectarvore. There is lot of biology here if one can look closely enough, amid the overwhelming geology on display everywhere. These are huge mountains. Babadog pushes up at 3,629 meters, and it seems all of it is precariously stacked in sedimentary layers of upthrust crumbling slices, designed to flake off with you riding the crest of the cascade. I am standing on the heaped up Eastern flank of Europe, the continent shoved up by the restless Asian sub\continent’s underiding. So, I am looking at the upended floors of the Indian Ocean, with marine limestone intruding into what was a piece of Pangeia’s ancient landmass. Such are the thoughts one can think with the whole story on display before one’s eyes if the interpretive code book is lying nearby—and a whole lot more is made up or interpolated without known answers.

A FEW SECONDS OF ACTION ON THE RUN,

PUNCTUATED BY A SINGLE SHOT,

A SPECTACULAR HIT,

AND A TROPHY TUR

FELL 387 METERS AWAY ON A LEDGE OF ALPINE WILDFLOWERS

“What was that?” A long way away on the far side of the mountain crest at my back on the other side of the chasm we heard a shot, followed by another. These are the shots fired from the old single barrel shotguns—my first ever weapon called, in my fifteen-year-old case “Scout”, sixteen gauge. The guides make their own, hand loading re-used cartridges with primer, powder and stuffed with paper as wadding making a confetti shower when it is fired. But, its purpose is to make noise, and that they were doing just now at this instant. The noise was being employed to wake and flush bedded tur that may have been spotted on the far side of the mountain by the separate teams of the drivers to see if they might run for cover in a direction that might expose them to “The Gun.” In this case—this was I—or more correctly, the Bennelli R-1 rifle.

I looked behind me as nothing much happened, until another shot was heard from further behind the first, ripping in non-directional echoes around the canyons on all sides. It was 12:28 PM—and I was alert for what might follow. “There! There!”

A group of Tur had run up the far side of the mountain behind us, and had crested the ridge, being skylined for only a fleeting glimpse. The first one seemed to be the only nanny, and behind her came a regal procession of bounding males, bearing their heads high. I could not see all at once, but it seemed like there were eleven in all, as they ran under the ridge making them harder to see from our vantage, perhaps 250 meters away. A last Tur popped over the ridge and followed. “Ah, the Last! Big Tur!” I could not see all of them to compare, but they dropped in an almost giddy slow motion into the chasm behind us out of sight. I could imagine the bone jarring shock absorption of those magnificent tendons and joints as they could self arrest with their four wheel drive spinning them around on the bottom and driving them nearly straight up the chute of a stony vertical rise over a grassy ledge. I could see only the nanny as she entered the chute.

“Why no shoot?” These strained English words were no longer whispered but hissed by Kayyam. I could not see the group as the first males lunged up the chute, and one by one they disappeared over the far side, until there were no tur visible. “Oh…..” was a sigh that came from my right, where Kayyam was venting disappointment. Then, he appeared. In an amazing demonstration of power, he accelerated straight up the chute, alone, the last of the procession to enter the cul and running full speed for the top.

I had the Burris scope on 10X and the Bennelli safety off as I swung ahead of him. No time to figure the distance, since he was going as fast as a flying waterfowl, and I passed the crosshairs in front of him, and at some point in the swing ahead of his forequarters the rifle went off nearly startling me as though I was unaware that this might happen. We stood in awe at the spectacle that followed as the 165 grain Vital Shok covered the long gap between rifle and target.

At nearly the top of the chute, the big Tur launched over backwards, the weight of his head seeming to pluck him off the chute, and, airborne, he turned two complete somersaults in mid-air, with only a scrambling kicking of his legs seen as he landed on the grassy ledge below. “What great Huntsman!” “Kandalay! “ yelled my junior guide, Kayyam. “One shot—Pow!”

I did not discourage him by letting him know I had used up a lot of luck on that one, but thanked him, as was the custom here in the Halal Butchery, and giving thanks to God and the wildlife of this wild and spectacular country before jacking the re-loaded shell from the chamber, and fixing the Bushnell Range-Finder on the still kicking forelegs on the ledge where he lay, about 60 meters below where he had been hit. “387 meters!” The shot must have caught him somewhere over 450 meters up the chute, and on the vertical acceleration he had had in his blast-off, there is only a trace of skill to account for that connection. The majority may have been pay-back for the hard effort invested in the hunt right down to my raccoon eyes and deviated nasal septum which now began to remind me of the recoil of the rifle shot off hand and upward.

We packed up our kit and started scrambling up the slope to a point where we could make a lateral transit across the chasm. It took us twenty seven minutes to make the ascent the Tur had covered in two and a half seconds, and at much greater risk of danger to us than for all but one of them. My guide was still burbling “Last Tur—what a Big Big Tur; Biggest in bunch, and One Shot! Korasho!” I was puffing as I pulled up to the ledge. The cloudy overcast now began to spit a light rain toward us dampening the sound of the yells. I listened: “Kandalay!” It was a yell from the other side of the mountain where the two shots had been fired and from where they no doubt heard the one shot. They know the drill, so they had figured the meaning of the single shot and had run up the mountain’s far side—only slightly less agile than the group of Tur that had preceded them up the same route.

“Akhbar John, Kandalay!” I heard echoes from both sides of the mountain. Then I saw a distant figure crouching and firing the home-made load into a confetti cloud overhead. They had spotted the downed Tur, and were signaling to the others using the ancestral name of Karaj—his grandfather Kandalay—a legendary hunter. This highest accolade was even more appreciated than the warm handshakes and congratulatory slaps and high fives all around when we rendezvoused at the Tur, lying in a bed of alpine wildflowers on the grassy ledge amid the spectacular mountain scene through which he had just run on his last full-speed excursion. He was thirteen years old, the limit of full maturity and strength, and the master Billy of the herd. He had heavily scarred thick beamed horns. The tips of each horn were broomed off as they often do in the case of the full curl sheep as well to keep from interfering with their phenomenal vision, but also as a “personal resume’” of battles fought and won with other rivals. He is a magnificent trophy. He deserves a full mount, both because of the nature of the specimen itself, but also as a treasured souvenir of the experience and adventure that had brought us together for this brief and eventful instant. This was my first close-up view of Capra cylindricornis since the Tur billy had materialized out of the mist right next to me in the white out on the other mountain—just before I had pitched headlong off the same mountain that this one had—the Tur in this instance having done a back flip whereas I had done a full header.

We each posed for pictures with each of them learning photography on the spot, as they took my picture, and I had each of them posed to show the background to maximum advantage promising that I would forward the pictures to each of them. We set to work skinning the trophy for an intact full mount saving all of the russet red-brown hide and dappled legs with the hoofs that seem to be able to stick like suction cups to vertical rock. Later the tape would show 90 X 30 cm L and 80 X 30 cm R (broomed) and his weight would be in excess of fifty five kilos. Every edible part of him was collected for the transit down the mountain, and when Akhbar John had finally heard the signal shots—one of which I got to fire in honor of the earlier spectacular shot that had fortunately connected, I blew the confetti chaff into the chasm that had signaled to Nakti, and Rahim and the others who crested the slope with shouts of “Kandalay!”

RETURN FROM THE HUNT:

A FREE FALL SCREE SCRAMBLE NEARLY STRAIGHT DOWN, THIS TIME WITH MEAT SHANKS AND HIDE AND HORNS

RIDING HIGH ON THE BACKS OF THE PORTER/GUIDES

It was an amazing sight to see, let alone participate in as a thrill seeking glissade scree-skier! We vaulted into the avalanche chute and fell in large sliding scrambles of rocks directing our next lunge with the mountain climbing stick as if we were in a grand slalom course. I at least had Gore-Tex boots, while the shear forces felt like they were separating the skin off the bottoms of my feet. In their cheap tennis trainers, they must have felt like they were barefoot water skiing, and they made the sounds to match. “Whee!” down the fall line. “It’s a hard knocks life for us—gather up the small thrills of just having survived another adventurous arduous day in the ‘Big Caucasus,’ Fellow Caucasians!”

We all gave high fives at the avalanche chute as they stopped for a cigarette break before going down to the Babachay River to catch several horses to clamber aboard bareback two at a time to ride the last two kilometers back to camp. Their hunt, and their season is over, and this means both payday and the fact that they will see their families again after a months’ absence, with haying to get done for their winter horse forage. They loaded one horse with the hide/ horns and my back pack and had me lead the procession back to camp sitting high on top of the massive horns of Capra cylindricornis.

On arrival, Patrick Montgomery came out to greet the entourage on return to camp. What a missed film shot! If ever there would have been the ideal trophy kill scene for TV, the double back flip somersault in the chute to land on the floral ledge after a single long shot would have been a sure thing on the networks, but that missing tape is another part of the cultural milieu of the hunt here in Azerbaijan. Patrick was happy for me since he said he was eager as well as they were that I go out and score on a Tur and a trophy like this one with a story of the hunt that was such an adventure was a capstone. They were all egger that this hunt be successful and that this hunt had climaxed their season, as well as furnishing them what they needed to live on and continue their tradition.

We did a taped interview with the Tur trophy heads and a brief explanation of some of the other adventures entailed in this “Extreme Hunt”—more arduous than almost any sheep hunt—and I also gave a film clip interview about my close encounter with the bear and the story of my free fall to the encounter in the dark with a birch which I broke, as it broke my fall—and my face. So, this hunt is not for everyone. In fact it is for very few people not built with the endurance of an Akhbar John or Gogol. I had only traveler’s checks, a species unfamiliar to them all so it will have to be relayed through Emil the interpreter, an obsession that clouded their final departure minutes with me, but I believe they can trust me as I had trusted them—and we had trusted each other with our lives on the steep and treacherous slopes exposed to elements that are not user friendly—we Caucasians together on the hunt.

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