By Jeff Johnston, FE Hunting & Shooting Editor
“Alright you fuckers, let’s powwow,” I said from my stoved-up position on the camp’s hatchet-hewn bench. I was still drenched in sweat and as close to total exhaustion as I’d ever been. We all knew we would crawl into our bags without eating again because we were just too damn tired to start dinner at midnight in the rain. My flatlander knees were swollen from down-hilling to the point I couldn’t walk, my ankles now so entirely cankles that I couldn’t take my Meindls off even if I could reach them—which I couldn’t. The horses were in even worse shape after the full-body beating they’d endured while carrying our asses most of the way. Eddie, my hunting partner, was completely cashed, and for the first time since we’d arrived at the spike camp he forgot to bitch about sleeping on the ground. It had been something like an 18-hour day covering half as many miles—most of them vertical—and I’d failed to drink my Mountain Ops because that shit doesn’t work anyway.
Our mountain goat guides, Carter and Adam—average age 20—looked at each other, shrugged as if to say, this oughta be good, then momentarily ceased their chores just long enough to look in my direction. The curly haired Carter, still in his chaps and cowboy hat, had yet another heater dangling from his mouth, and I think he was hoping I was going to surprise him with a shot of whiskey. I didn’t, because I’d run out well before the 8-turned-16-hour disaster of a horse pack ride into camp ended. I couldn’t help but like this crazy young canuck whom I’d only met when the bush plane had dropped us off at base camp seven days prior. I wished like hell for all of us that I had another bottle of Jameson stashed in a pannier somewhere, but I’ve never been great at rationing booze.
“You guys are fucking great,” I said, leading off. “Your enthusiasm is off the charts despite the shit conditions, and that’s the most important thing. Adam, it’s obvious you’re a great hunter, and Carter, in a few more years you’ll be there too. Y’all are doing the work of four men with the cooking and wrangling and all. Other than the camp hygiene issue, we are pleased with the hunt. You’re both tough as shit, no doubt. I think at one point a few days ago we were even having some fun. But,” I said, leaning in for emphasis … “we are NOT going to bushwack down that fucking mountain again on those horses after dark. It’d be swell to kill a couple of mountian goats, sure, but neither Eddie nor I want to fucking die doing it. Cool?”
Carter kinda nodded his head diagonally, perhaps signaling that he understood, or maybe he just thought I was being a total pussy. But I knew he didn’t understand. The rodeo of steel-shoed horses bucking over granite in bear country was why he signed up for this Mike Rowe-style job in the first place; it sure as hell wasn’t to get rich and fat. How did I know this? Because for most of my life that’s also how I defined fun … the more dangerous the better. But that was before I was 44 years old with a two-year-old at home wondering when daddy’ll be back.
“Sorry bud, I chose to ride a malnourished horse off an icy cliff in British Columbia, all for a chance at a shaggy white rug for my bathroom floor. Hope mom teaches you a decent curveball someday. —Your Old Man.
Now, dear reader, please know that I still dearly love adventure and I’m not afraid of a little adversity—danger even—during a hunt. But these days guys like Eddie and I also see great value in actually getting to recount the memories of the hunt later on, and preferably a hunt where someone, particularly me, doesn’t get medivacked straight to the fucking Vancouver morgue.
So let me be frank here without intentionally sounding macho: I’ve done some fairly stupid shit in my day, like most of the rest of us. I’ve jumped out of planes; thought that was pretty tame. Scuba dived at night by myself with hammerheads; sporty, but it’s not like sharks can horn ya. I staggered unarmed through Baltimore once; ignorant as hell. Got married and taught my wife how to shoot a handgun; one of the most dangerous things a man can do. But you see, all those things were performed either after careful calculation or while shit-faced drunk. But spooky-ass stock horses on slick cliff edges at night for hours at a time—often while sober and with no trail to follow? That puts the ole Odds-O-Meter just a little too far to the right for me not to feel like I’d make one of those Darwin award memes that are normally reserved for guys with more cherry bombs than teeth, or anyone who rides a bicycle on the highway for exercise. In the case of these horses, if one pine needle strikes even one of these near-retarded, unpredictable beasts in the eyeball at anytime, the fucker is liable to happily hop right off the stone skyscraper faster than an Apple factory worker.
If I sound like a pussy … well then I guess that is what I’ve become. I can live with that insult now, and I guess that’s part of the discipline of growing up. All I’m saying is, nowadays I just don’t really like leaving the balance of my admittedly meaningless life to the whims of a glue factory-caliber animal and a couple of 20-year-old hand humpers.
Alright, you get it, and by now I’ve probably overhyped the danger of this hunt. Reality is, it was likely a typical mountain goat hunt in typical mountain goat habitat. But for Eddie and me on our first and likely last goat hunt, it seemed it was getting a touch, uh, Middle America … as in, Middle Meth America. …
The next morning we woke up to the smell of a barnyard full of chickens and pigs and shit and soon realized we were the barnyard. Dank, ripe, bloody, dirty and cheesy—lordy we were foul. But soon after staggering out of the tent and gazing at God’s snow-capped glory, across the lake, Eddie received the shot of confidence he needed: We spotted a billy from camp. Sure, it was about three miles or five hours away and looked to be in an alpine bowl accessible only to goats and eagles, but through the Leica at least, the grain-of-rice-sized spec represented hope. So after a wholesome breakfast of instant coffee from a single plastic kiddie cup and a fistful of Sour Patches, we set off, bound for glory and goats.
Now humor me while I tell you about the daily morning ride into goat country. As they say, mountain goats start hanging out where sheep don’t dare climb, so from camp we immediately forded an icy river, chugged up a hill through thick piney wilderness before cresting at the banks of the most pristine mountain waterfall I’ve ever seen. I’d packed a telescoping Wal-Mart fishing rod in my backpack and at every opportunity casted an inline spinner into the greenish blue depths and repeatedly pulled out native grayling and rainbows that gave no indication they’d ever seen the shadow of man. I’m telling you, if Bigfoot is alive, I’d have seen his tracks at this hidden pool in what’s arguably the most remote wilderness area in all of North America.
But on this morning instead of fishing and glassing, we forded the lake at its headwaters and rode on along its rocky bank for a half mile before turning the horses’ heads straight up the mountain, bushwacking the whole way. (Bushwacking is what guides call making your own trail as you go; it entails cutting, sawing and fighting your way through pine jungles, while each branch of each tree tries its damdest to gouge all eyeballs, pull all rifles from their scabbards and rip all riders right off the backs of their mounts. Plenty of times, they succeed.) Then, after topping out over the forest and into the apron of alpine country, we traversed the mountain until the rocks became impossible for the horses, where we tied them up, marked them on the GPS and set off toward the highest peak in sight. It was one of the most beautiful places I can ever recall seeing.
Hours later and now 500 yards or so underneath the goats, we crawled into a decent shooting position on a flat-topped rock. For the next couple hours we tried to determine three things: 1. If it was a mature, trophy goat. 2. If the wind, distance and angle would allow an ethical shot. And 3. If Eddie were to kill him, could we get to him? These three questions were very difficult to answer.
A mountain goat, in my limited experience, is one of the trickiest animals of all to judge, because one inch can mean the difference between a mature trophy and one that needs more time. Even for pros such as Adam, one measly inch of black bone is goddam tough to judge at 500 yards—I don’t care what optics you’re running, so long as it’s not Vortex.
Fortunately for Eddie, he was viewing his world through a top-end Trijicon Credo scope, and having been on hundreds of big game hunts over a long career in the hunting industry, he’s no rookie behind the gun. He’d doped the rifle to 600 yards and, pending wind, felt he could make a shot, especially when he knew this was the best he was going to get. So, when the goat finally hoofed his way into a little basin three-quarters up the mountain, Eddie squeezed.
Through the spotter I could see the contrail of the .300 Win. Mag. ELDX bullet as it arched, spun right and dropped into the pocket formed by the billy’s massive chest and foreleg. I saw the beast lurch as the pill entered its heart, and then I saw it stagger and fall, the white of his fur and the crimson of blood and the green of new grass brilliant among the gray rock. And then we all watched as the billy did not slide down the mountain and into the crevasse where he would have been delivered by gravity more or less to our feet. Rather, the goat died right there, 300 vertical yards up smooth-as-stripper’s-leg granite.
Despite the culminating drama of a perfect, pressure-filled shot on such a hard-earned trophy that was visibly down within sight, we all looked at each other and simultaneously mouthed one simple phrase that transcends cultural boundaries:
Oh, fuck.
That’s right. The billy was stuck.
Perspective is tough until you actually get your hands on the rock face and look up, though, so we scrambled up the scree field to the mountain face where we instantly received a full and total appreciation for just how menacing the mountain really was. It also gave us that much more respect for these incredible goats who prefer this impossible terrain as their home. What looked like small, scalable boulders from the shooting position were actually sheer rock walls and craggy vertical faces the size of barn doors.
Double fuck.
In a few short moments several things became instantly clear to all of us. 1. We might not recover the billy at all; a helicopter would be useless where the goat landed—and believe me, we discussed it. 2. If we were to have a chance of recovery at all, we’d need some type of climbing gear—of which we had none. 3. If we did try for the goat, the odds of someone getting seriously hurt would spike to silly levels. 4. Whatever we decided, it wouldn’t be done on this day, as we only had an hour of light left. That’s right, we still had a five-hour ride back down through hell ahead of us, and it wouldn’t be with the added motivation of a goat head strapped to our packs. We’d be bushwacking down the mountain again.
Fuck to the third degree!
I’ve seen better morale at cancer clinics than back at camp that night, well past midnight, as we rode in like zombies. But it was important that we made a decision and live with it, so we held a Goonies-style meeting and put the recovery of Eddie’s goat to a vote. Before passing out in our Kuius again, we hatched the following plan:
We’d trek to the kill site again in the morning, but this time we’d lug all the lariats, rope, carabiners and any possibly useful shit we could carry. We’d rig up a redneck belay system concocted of rope tied to a saddle’s belly band to use as some sort of protection against a catastrophic fall. But a belay system on virgin rock depends on one big if: That is, if one of us could scale the multifaceted crevasse to secure each belay point before dropping the rope down to the next man. We figured it was safer to go as a team with ropes than one man free-soling Alex Honnold-style, but without Honnold’s skill or a bag of rosin.
Carter tried to volunteer, but he was wearing glorified cowboy boots and still smoking heaters for Christ’s sake. And Adam, for all of the beyond-his-years knowledge this young man has, he was unaware of what a belay system even was. And poor Eddie was out of shape.
Me? I’d rock climbed once while in the Tetons about 25 years prior, and I’d recently watched a Netflix documentary on climbing Everest. I think most of the guys died in the show, but the point is, I felt like I was the most qualified.
“Boys,” I said sheepishly, “Despite what some spineless, no-adventure asshole might tell you at some point in your lives, the fact remains: “No stones, no bones.”
And back at our cheap Vancouver hotel a few days later, I couldn’t recall steak, beer, a hot shower—and the raw memory of laying our hands on that goat—ever feeling so good.
