A brisk northerly, cooling breeze carried blood-red and sun-yellow leaves to an already leaf-littered forest floor. The aroma of fresh earth turned by a black bear melted with sweet scent of pines, but also with the faint odor of a musky rutting whitetail wafting through limb and bough. No doubt a buck had recently freshened a nearby scrape, leaving an advertising calling card for both bucks and does.
The “season of painted leaves” had finally arrived. I breathed deeply of the November air and felt a surge of primordial excitement and anticipation. My time of the year had finally, once again, arrived as it had for eons long before my earthly appearance. I recalled relishing mightily my previous seventy autumns.
My past days on Oklahoma’s Choctaw Hunting Lodge had passed far too quickly. Success in the hunt had occurred half-way through my scheduled days on that piece of Heaven. Both my nicely racked “mountain” whitetail and fat wild hog hung in the lodge’s cooler. Soon, I’d have properly aged meat for my freezer, and a cape for Double Nickle Taxidermy.
This evening I was content to simply sit and enjoy the afternoon. As an old gray-haired gentleman once told me, “Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes simply sit!” I planned on a bit of the latter. After dark there would be ample time to hoist high a wee dram or two to commemorate old friends, great stags bested and more which had bested me.
The oak which against I sat was thick, gnarly and old. I seriously doubted I was the first to sit under its branches, back leaned against its trunk. The ancient forest monarch grew tall and wide on a ridge overlooking a broad creek bottom. Perhaps a buck-skinned longhunter three or so centuries before had sat where I now did, watching and waiting, or simply just sat.
I leaned my .275 Rigby Ruger Number 1 with Trijicon scope and Hornady load against a reachable sapling…just in case. The ‘just in case’ meant only if a marauding coyote or long-tusked wild boar sauntered by. Mostly I had my Ruger with me because, when in the fall hunting season woods without a gun, I feel “naked!”
I dug my heels into the soft earth and pushed dirt forward. Immediately I could smell the musty aroma. The pure “earth scent” would help mask my human odor. Had I been seriously hunting I would have set up my Ozonics unit, but I had loaned it to one of the other hunters in camp who had not yet taken his deer.
Leaned back…a couple of deep breath, warming sunshine…ahhhh! All was right in my world!
“Veck ouf!” spoke the Tyrolean hat crowned jaeger while shaking my arm. “Soo the oest, naah de vahnt, oof den heegle. Dah its dein steinbok!” Shaking cobwebs, I glassed the mountain to the east, located what looked like a rocky wall and spotted the ibex.
“Vee alt?” I asked recalling some German from my long-ago youth, questioning the ibex’s age.
“Noin or seine!” said my guide, proclaiming the billy to be nine or ten years.
“Ve goen!” said the loden-green clothed Austrian as he gathered gear and started walking in the opposite direction of the ibex. I followed. Once we were out just below the crest my guide stopped when he came to a bit of bare ground. There he bent over, and with stick in hand drew the mountain and our intended stalking route in the soft, wet soil. According to his dirt map, we were going to drop back, then work our way on the back side of the ridge to our left to come around behind and above the ibex. I nodded, took several deep breaths and away we went.
Ten minutes later I was seriously questioning why I had not more often pushed away from the dinner table. I wished too, I had not eaten quite so much of my favorite Blue Bell Ice Cream long before heading high into the Austrian Alps.
Forty minutes more and we were in position to make our final ascent to make the shot. My ibex should be just the other side of the ridge. Cautiously I moved upward, then peek over the crest…
“Weishuhn, forget the horse! He’s too tired and weak to carry you anyway. Come on! We gotta go!” It was Tim Fallon, honcho with the FTW Ranch where they teach Sportsman All-Weather, All-Terrain Marksmanship (S.A.A.M.). I cast a look around. Obviously, I was no longer in the Austrian Alps. By the extreme shortness of breath, I knew for certain I was also not on the FTW located in the beautiful Texas Hill Country!
The mountains were much taller, devoid of trees with tall peaks topped with snow. I shook my head to clear my mind. “Guides have finally found ibex three miles west of camp. Hopefully we can get a shot,” he said. Looking at me in a concerned manner, he asked “You OK? You’re acting a bit goofier than normal. No matter, we gotta go!”
I followed Tim, walking a hundred yards then stopping to breathe, feeling a bit “light-headed.” Cause of the dizziness no doubt had to be the boiled, hanging-in-the-sun, five-day old domestic sheep carcass we had been eating since our arrival in this mid-Asian Ibex camp in Kyrgyzstan. Surely it could not be the fact I live at less than 1,000 feet elevation and here I was above 12,000 feet, or was it 13,000?
For the past days we had ridden, though mostly lead, our horribly emaciated horses, which could only carry our weight for a few hundred yards before falling totally exhausted to their knees. Our guides’ solutions were nothing short of horrific. Suffice it to say I said many prayers of thanks I had not been cast a lot to be a horse in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Frankly I hope in their after-life our guides will at least for a while be treated the same way they ‘cared for’ their mounts.
The acute steepness of the slopes we traversed in route to the alleged ibex sighting was much akin to trying to walk on the side of an upright flag pole! The farther up the mountain we went, the closer came the intervals I stopped to catch my breath. Finally, Tim and I both stopped, bent over, hands on knees trying to catch our breath and draw into our lungs what little oxygen there was. Raising up, my hunting partner pointed. “There!” I followed the angle of his out-stretched right arm. He was pointing slightly down.
“Hallelujah! I don’t have any more in me!” I managed to say before trying to gasp more precious oxygen. “I’ll follow you…”
Finally, at the guide’s side, Tim shrugged a question, “Where?” knowing the guide had no idea what he was saying. When the guide mimicked Tim’s questioning gesture, my first thought was, “Oh no…”
“After checking the crayfish traps we’ll make certain your rifles are sighted in. Even big roe deer are small-bodied compared to your whitetail.”
What???? Crayfish? Roe Deer?
“Larry, your Ruger is down stairs in the gun room. I know it should still be sighted in. But you will feel much better knowing it is shooting exactly where you want it to. Know where there is a really good Gold Medal buck I want us to go after,” suggested my friend Stefan Bengssten who with his wife Sofia owns Scandinavian Prohunters. I liked how he thought!
I felt a tugging on my right shoulder.
“Wake up, Larry!”
I roused but only a bit, sorry to leave where I had been transported….
“Can’t believe how soundly you were sleeping, said a grinning Travis Benes. “I made a bunch of noise on purpose to let you know I was coming. You were really sleeping! But you did have a smile on your face!”
Yes, I imagine I did.