Rick bent to one knee checking blood splatters on three-day-old snow crunching under his weight. It appeared pinkish—possibly lung blood. Staring up the hill, his gaze followed the mule deer’s tracks running straight to the top before disappearing into exposed rocks. Maybe the buck bedded down on the far side
Rick decided to hike to the trail to wait for Jay. Then they could track the buck together—like they had on Jay’s first buck 10 years earlier. Rick remembered envy creeping beside him as his best friend tracked the first buck either of them had ever killed.
At the time, Rick saw Jay as a friend—a friend who did not deserve to shoot that buck. Rick spent time scouting while Jay slept in. Rick spent hours on the shooting range while Jay played street ball. Rick called landowners for permission while Jay chased skirts. And after five minutes, sneaking through the aspen hotspot Rick had discovered, Jay stumbled upon an oblivious buck and stuck him with an arrow—an arrow Rick had, of course, purchased.
They had tracked that buck for 200 yards before finding him dead under a young cedar. Jay’s arrow had hit too far back, but must have punctured the liver or sliced a major artery. Jay’s lack of practice produced a predictable shot placement, but his luck always seemed to make up for any of his mistakes.
Now, the biggest mule deer Rick had ever seen just crested a steep slope as if the arrow had missed its lungs. Rick needed some of Jay’s luck. Where was he anyway?
Rick stared toward the hill’s crest. Maybe he should just follow the buck himself. No, he wanted Jay to see this buck. Besides, a forming mist crept over a western ridge. Rick disliked fog. He had no fear of getting lost in a strange place or even in the darkness, but fog disoriented him. It gave him claustrophobia. What if they could not relocate the blood-trail in the coming fog? Rick decided to climb to the top—just peek over.
Jay, his best friend for as long as he could remember, always smiled—always. He rarely raised his voice in anger. Everybody loved him and nothing seemed to bother him. With Jay by his side, Rick could amble through the fog all day without a single tremble. And for all his laziness and apparent apathy, Jay never gave Rick a reason to question his friendship.
When Rick’s father died, Jay drove out to the old cabin with him and helped him drink a bottle of scotch the old man never shared with Rick. Rick blamed his father for his mother leaving. Rick’s father also smacked him around when he was a kid. Maybe his father blamed Rick for his mother leaving. Jay knew all this, but sat quietly and never asked why Rick’s eyes filled with moisture. He just helped him finish the bottle and never brought it up again.
Jay never had those kinds of problems.
Like a spreading wildfire, the mist began to coat the mountain, thickening as quickly as the blood trail thinned. It brought a hush upon the mountain.
At the top of the ridge—at least Rick thought it the top—he could only see a few yards. He lost the blood trail a few steps back, but pushed on hoping he might spot the deer from a higher vantage point. Right when he considered turning back to relocate the blood trail. The fog thinned just enough to reveal something 100 yards down the slope. Just a dark spot, but odd enough to test his curiosity. Rick trusted his gut and his gut told him something looked wrong.
As he started toward it, the mist rolled back in to cover whatever he had seen. He slipped forward, actually using the mist as cover in case he had, in fact, only wounded the deer—no sense pushing it beyond retrieval. He made that mistake before and never recovered a big whitetail when he lived in the eastern part of the state. He spent five days searching for his buck, marking the heavy blood trail with bright orange tape and then moving in a wide circle away from the last spot without success.
Once Jay had made the same mistake. His deer ran 100 yards into an open field where it decided to rest. All Jay had to do was wait him out. He followed the trail for 100 yards and then found the deer dead just inside the tree line. Jay was always so damn lucky.
He took ten more steps and turned to look back. Visibility had dropped to three feet. He could see only the earth around his boots. He felt lost. The ground had leveled out and he no longer knew which direction he traveled.
He heard a snap. Whipping his head from side-to-side, he saw only fog. It sounded close, but from which direction? He felt his heart beating behind his ears.
What was that noise? Grunting? Breathing?
He backed up a step, his heel crunching ice-covered snow. He froze. He listened. The breathing, the grunting seemed to crawl up the back of his neck. Behind him? He closed his eyes for a breath. It had to be the deer struggling to breathe. He opened his eyes and stared into the fog. It moved like a dream you could not quite remember. Every few seconds a deep snort seemed to fall through the mist. It sounded nothing like a deer—at least no deer Rick had ever heard.
A shudder slithered from his fingers to his left knee. The urge to run crept into his belly—but which way?
What if a grizzly or a mountain lion had claimed the deer?
He had never seen either. He had seen tracks and scat. He had seen pictures. Jay had even caught a few grizzlies on video. But Rick had never seen one in the wild.
Every time he thought he pinpointed it, the sound seemed to originate from another direction—sometimes even from above. The fog did funny things to sounds. It did funny things to minds. Rick listened. No breathing. No grunting. Instead—crunching, ripping, chewing.
Unable to move, he turned his head. He tried to will the mist to rise. He wished he had gone for Jay. Jay would give him courage to face the unseen nightmare closing in around him. The back of his hair began to drip with moisture. The moaning wind seemed to snake through his chest.
He had to move—just pick a direction and go. Silence stopped him. A break in the fog revealed something. Antlers. His deer. He started toward it, but the fog revealed another form—a dark outline hulking above the buck. It moved, lifting its head. Though blurred by fog, Rick saw a bear’s open mouth, its bloodstained teeth reaching toward heaven.
When the bear roared, Rick stumbled backward. That sound. He had dreamed of it. Now it rattled inside his head and twisted the courage from his heart. He wanted to run. His legs proved immobile. The fog squeezed back in to hide the bear.
Had it seen him? Just before the fog covered its face, it seemed to lock eyes with Rick. It could have been moving toward him now and he would not even know it. Rick clenched his fist. He listened. He heard it, the heavy breath and muffled grunts. Feeding again? Rick had to move. He no longer cared about his inability to see more than a few feet.
He started slow at first, backing up a step then pausing to listen. A step—pause—listen. When he no longer heard anything but the ghostly whisper of wind, he turned to run and tripped on something and stumbled to the ground. He quickly pushed himself up, feeling the bear must be coming after him, but paused when he saw what appeared to be a boot lying on its side behind a nearby bush. He could not see the top half of the boot, but it had a high, over-the-ankle lace like the ones Jay wore. The sound of a heavy branch snapping behind him shot panic back into his heart.
He scrambled up the rocky slope, slipping on the moist grass, clawing at the ground. He ran out of breath but pressed on, certain the top was close. His bow clanked against the rocks when the slope steepened, but he didn’t care. He had forgotten he was carrying it. Now, he tightened his grip around it, finding some comfort in the weapon’s capabilities. He stopped behind a 10-foot-wide boulder to catch his breath and contemplate his next move. He nocked an arrow—just in case.
For a moment, he only heard his own labored breathing. He closed his eyes. He listened. He heard himself. He heard the wind moan. He heard his boot slip against the grass. No breathing or grunting or growling. He sat with his back against the rock, placed his arms on his knees and dropped his forehead to his wrists. When he closed his eyes, he could see the bear’s teeth, blood hanging from its chin like droplets of dew. And he could see the boot behind the bush.
For the next thirty minutes, Rick sat there, wrapped in fog, wiping a well in his eyes, and snapping his head toward every sound, no matter how slight. And though he could not remember the last time he had done so, he prayed. He prayed the bear chose to stay with the kill. He prayed the fog lifted soon. He prayed that Jay, the best friend he had ever known, was still safely at his stand.
When the mist finally lifted, he started hiking toward his best friend’s stand. When he found it empty, the horrifying reality of what he had run away from nearly caused him to pass out. It would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The authorities found Jay’s body the next day and then tracked and killed the bear. They determined Jay had stumbled upon the bear as it began to feed on Rick’s deer and believed the 18-year old boar attacked to defend its food. An aggressive bear that close to town posed too great a risk to human life.
Rick found no solace in the bear’s death and he would never again know a friend like Jay.
All of the men and women featured on these pages shared an unquenchable thirst for adventure, and a remarkable ability to survive in the face of extreme hardship and dangerous encounters in the wild outdoors. Spanning the years from 1800 to the mid-1900s, the careers of these dedicated hunters and explorers were filled with all sorts of adversity and challenges, which they somehow managed to overcome. Consider the amazing story of frontiersman Hugh Glass. Savagely attacked by a grizzly, Old Hugh was left to die by two of his fellow soldiers. Though severely injured, he began a weeks-long ordeal of crawling and eventually limping more than 250 miles, eating whatever he could find—including a rattlesnake— to sustain him on his harrowing journey. On the way he had to fight off an attack by Indians before he finally reached the safety of his fort. That same unyielding determination to survive the worst possible conditions can likewise be found in the Arctic research expeditions of John Torrington and Adolphus Greeley, who were stranded on ice floes for more than a year. Sir John Seerey-Lester devoted almost three years in researching and writing about these and other eminently fascinating characters, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Revered as two of the world’s greatest leaders, both men journeyed to Africa to hunt the Dark Continent’s dangerous game. Altogether, these pages relive the most compelling stories of 25 acclaimed hunters and explorers, all complemented by more than 120 paintings of wildlife from around the world. Buy Now
