Fair Chase in North America

by Boddington, Craig

  In early 2002 I was ordered to active duty and sent overseas to command a combined/joint task force in the Persian Gulf. That was my chance—a year’s worth of combat pay with the combat zone tax exclusion. I’m sure there were more sensible places to put it, but I couldn’t think of any. I called an outfitter buddy, Kirk Kelso, with whom I had enjoyed a couple of great Coues’ deer hunts in Sonora, and asked him to secure a permit for me.

  As the months passed my comfort level dropped. You might say I had a severe case of buyer’s remorse, complicated by a serious time factor. We had initially planned the hunt for early March 2003, but Sonora changed the closure of the sheep season from March 15 to February 28. Heck, I didn’t get home from overseas until January! The two weeks I had hoped to allow for the hunt shrunk to less than ten days, and suddenly it seemed like an awful lot of money and a very foolish thing to do. At the last minute I would have gotten out of it if I could have, but it was just too late. For the record, these regrets lasted until my ram stood far up on a ledge and offered me a shot. They went away at that moment, and have not returned…

  The desert bighorn is the southernmost variety of North American wild sheep, generally found in suitable habitat from Nevada and Utah south through Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas into Sonora and Chihuahua; and from southern California’s desert mountains south through the Baja Peninsula. At some point in the past his range was continuous with the larger California and Rocky Mountains subspecies, so there must have been a broad intergrade area. Today, although several states (Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, California) have herds of both desert and Rocky Mountain (or California) bighorns, they are kept distinct by broad separation between their ranges.

  The desert sheep is, of course, just a desert adaptation of Ovis canadensis. On the surface he is just a scrawny, tough little sheep, able to live much of his life without water and eke out a living in sun-baked rocks where rattlesnakes and gila monsters have a tough time. His high value to hunters is based, I think, on three things. First, he was made legendary by early sheep hunters like Jack O’Connor. Second is his relative scarcity and the difficulty in obtaining a permit (if not the difficulty of the actual hunting). Third, although his body size is often less than half that of a Rocky Mountain bighorn—a big ram will rarely weigh as much as 150 pounds—his horns aren’t that much smaller. Boone and Crockett’s minimum for inclusion in the All-time records book is 180 points for Rocky Mountain bighorn and 168 points for desert sheep—less than 10 percent difference in horn size against at least 40 percent difference in body size! At the uppermost end, even a smaller margin separates the World’s Records of the two varieties. A good desert ram is spectacular, with horns all out of proportion to his small body size.

  Although we typically speak of “desert sheep,” in actuality there are four fairly distinct subspecies that we lump together. Northernmost is Nelson’s bighorn, O. c. nelsoni, generally the sheep of Nevada and northern Arizona. At their most typical these bighorns tend to have flared horn tips with little brooming. In southern Arizona and down into Sonora you find O. c. mexicana. For those of us who grew up in the shadow of Jack O’Connor this is the most typical of the desert sheep, small in the body with tight, heavily broomed horns. The largest subspecies, at least based on horn size, is probably the sheep of northern Baja California, O. c. cremnobates. After Baja closed there was a lot of poaching in the northern Baja—and in this harsh range there probably weren’t many sheep to begin with—but many of the largest-horned specimens have been of this race of bighorn. As you progress down the Baja the sheep get smaller in both body and horn, with O. c. weemsi of southern Baja generally the smallest-horned of the desert sheep.

  The problem with all this is that nutrition makes a huge difference, so it isn’t necessarily accurate to categorize horn size by race. Typically the desert bighorns of mainland Sonora grow tight horns, with rams exceeding about 170 B&C points very rare. Mainland sheep were introduced on Tiburon Island, just a few miles out into the Sea of Cortez. In this “new” range the same darned sheep grow spectacular horns. Similarly, my friend Adrian Sada, a great hunter and Weatherby Award winner, purchased Isle del Carmen off the eastern coast of Baja and introduced weemsi sheep into this ideal, but previously unoccupied habitat. In most areas you are hard-pressed to find a weemsi that will exceed the low 150s in horn dimensions, but a ram from the original release onto Isle del Carmen appears, at least in photos, as if he will exceed 190 points. So go figure. And don’t worry about it. The primary problem with desert bighorn lies in obtaining a permit. Some fortunate hunters can afford to be picky, but for most of us any desert bighorn permit is a wonderful permit—and any place we are allowed to hunt them is a wonderful, wonderful place.

  So, in late February 2003, I went to my wonderful, wonderful place, where I had a wonderful permit, hoping to find a good ram. No. That’s not true. I would have liked to have found a good ram, and was willing to look for one, but I would have been very happy with any legal ram. While I haven’t been lucky enough to draw a tag, over the years several of my friends have. I’ve tried to learn from them. My publisher, Ludo Wurfbain, drew an Arizona tag a few years ago. He took a nice, mature ram that falls short of huge, and I’ve heard him describe it in slightly apologetic terms. That drives me crazy. He hunted hard for a long time and took the best ram he could find. By definition it’s a great trophy. Tom Gresham, who I co-host the Guns & Ammo Television show with, drew an Arizona tag as a resident. He took the only mature ram he saw. By Boone and Crockett score it isn’t large, but it’s a very large trophy in his life as a hunter. I was prepared to look for a good ram, but I wasn’t going to carry a tape measure and wouldn’t be counting up the inches!

  Desert sheep mountains rise from the Sonora desert as discontinuous spiky ridges. There are few “big mountains,” but many clusters of small mountains. Bighorns were never creatures of the highest peaks, but rather of middle elevations, foothills, and badlands. Similarly, desert sheep do not fear the desert floor. Naturally they will wander across the desert from one distant hill mass to another, seeking refuge up in the rocks, but following the rains that bring up new green. If you draw a permit in the States you are generally authorized to hunt your sheep in at least the major portion of a specific mountain range, allowing you to go where the sheep are.

  Sonora is a bit different. The permits are allocated to landholders and must be used within the confines of the ranch for which the permit is issued. Some areas, such as the Indian lands, are very large, but some permits are available on relatively small ranches that usually hold sheep… depending on the rains and no recent disturbance.

  My permit was for the western slopes and foothills of Pico Johnson, highest peak in the Sierra del Seri range. It is classic and traditional desert sheep country, not far from where Jack O’Connor, Charlie Ren, and my uncle took their “rams from inferno” long before I was born. From the higher slopes you can look off across the foothills to the deep blue Sea of Cortez, and if the angle is right you can see the rugged heights of Tiburon Island. Desert sheep are nomads, following the scant rains, so a big ram seen once may never be seen again—and there is no promise of a given ram being in a given place.

  When I flew into Hermosillo, Kirk Kelso was a bit worried. He had taken two nice rams elsewhere, but hadn’t hunted this particular ranch. That was good news; the sheep I would be hunting were undisturbed. Kirk and his guides had been doing some scouting, and they’d seen plenty of sheep, which was better news. Not so good was that, so far, they had glassed no big rams. “I don’t know, Craig,” Kirk said, “we might have to take a ram down in the low 150s. We’re just not seeing anything better.”

  Okay. No way could I afford to do this again, and my permit expired in a scant ten days. I remembered my promise to myself: We’d do the best we could, and that would be good enough. “No problem, Kirk,” I told him, and I meant it. “We’ll just do the best we can, and I’ll shoot whenever you tell me to.” The scarcity and value of a
desert sheep permit is such that most modern hunts are quite a production. In the States the fortunate permit holders usually have plenty of offers of help, with people coming out of the woodwork to help glass and share in the fun. Tom Gresham had hunted hard and was at a standstill until some folks left a note in his camp telling him they knew where a decent ram was and if he was stuck he should call them. He got to a phone, made the call, and a day or so later took the ram his newfound friends had spotted. My old friend Ray Salvatori drew one of Colorado’s first desert sheep tags. Hunting on his own, he was similarly stuck until the driver of a brown UPS van tracked him down and told him he’d seen a band of rams.

  Sonora is more remote, but we had plenty of help. Kirk’s wife, Roxann, was along to help glass. Roxie has a superb desert sheep that she took on an Arizona permit a couple of years earlier, and she’s a good hand with binoculars. And of course we had Kirk’s best Mexican guides, good hands all: Rafael, blessed with the best eyes I have ever seen; the Valencia brothers, Alex and Ramon. Collectively we had a tremendous amount of desert sheep experience in that camp, and all these guys have good optics and know how to use them. I didn’t know what we would find, but I was confident we would find the best ram in my area.

  As it turned out, “we” was a subjective term. I’ve got good eyes and have always prided myself on my ability to spot game. In these desert mountains I was totally outclassed! I used to think bighorns were difficult to spot, but they really aren’t. Bedded or facing toward you they blend in well, but the prominent white rump patch acts like a beacon that, with good optics, can be seen from miles away. Desert sheep are much more difficult to spot. Small and gray-brown, they are colored just like the jumbled rocks they live among, and are often hidden by the cacti, mesquite, and palo verde that manage to spring from the stones. Their rump patch is smaller and muted, more yellowish than bright white, and while their mountains are not tall they are rough and big. I found these sheep the very devil to spot, and often had trouble seeing them even when I slipped behind a spotting scope or the 20x60 Zeiss binoculars that were already focused on distant sheep.

  But we saw sheep readily, plenty of them. Most were ewes and lambs in small groups, but we saw a couple of bands of rams as well. Most were immature, with the largest in a group of seven rams right on Pico Johnson itself. He was not a big ram, but he was mature and legal, and Kirk and his guides had seen him earlier while scouting. Maybe we could do better. So we kept looking, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel, finding vantage points, and glassing into the distance.

  There was an old ranch house, long unused, in a little valley below the southwestern tip of Pico Johnson. It was late morning, and Kirk, Roxie, and I were glassing from the yard when one of the cowboys came to fetch us. Ramon Valencia had found rams.

  He was set up on a gentle slope at the base of the mountain, glassing southwest onto a series of low ridges. The sheep he had found, two rams, were working their way along a brushy basin well below the skyline. They were in and out of sunlight nearly two miles away. I have no idea how Ramon spotted them, or how he knew that they were worth a closer look. But the feats of vision I have seen these guys perform on Coues’ deer are such that you have to take it at face value: If Ramon, Alex, or Rafael say an animal is worth a closer look, you’d better go look.

  Through Kirk’s tripod-mounted 20x60s we could, with difficulty, make out the two rams. We could see them a bit better through spotting scopes, but the heat waves and mirage precluded accurate judgment. One ram was clearly bigger than his buddy, but the Valencias, using ten-power binoculars, already knew this. Leaving part of our crew to watch them, Kirk and I began to get closer.

  The land fell away from Pico Johnson in long fingers, then rose again in a series of ridges, with these sheep on the uppermost ridge. We got a better look at something less than a mile, and Kirk thought we might have something going with the larger of the two. But it was hot now with noon approaching and the mirage was terrible. We would have to get much closer to be sure. So we dropped into the valley and started over the series of ridges. If we were lucky the next-to-last ridge would give us a good look—and if we were even luckier—it just might be close enough to shoot across.

  By the time we crept into position on that ridge the rams had bedded on a brushy shelf maybe 80 yards below the skyline. Kirk found the smaller ram readily, but we could only get a partial view of the larger ram. He still wasn’t sure, and it didn’t much matter—we were still 600 yards out. This ridge dropped into a boulder-strewn drainage, then the main spine rose steeply. It would be ideal to circle the main ridge and come up from behind, above the sheep, but the wind was dead wrong. We looked at it for a long time, and figured just maybe we could go around the eastern end of this ridge, drop into the valley below the sheep, and just maybe get a shot from one of several little rock piles that rose from the valley floor. The sheep would be hidden, and we would be hidden from them, but sooner or later they would get up.

  Moving slowly and as quietly as we could, we slipped into the valley, at this point probably only 200 yards below the bench where we thought the sheep were bedded. From here the vantage point was terrible, the angle so steep that it was unlikely we would ever see the rams. Trading a bit of distance for visibility, we climbed onto the forward slope of the secondary ridge and set up. We couldn’t see either ram, but maybe. We waited perhaps a half-hour, Kirk with his 20x60s on the tripod, me with the rifle over a daypack. I didn’t like it—there were several ways the rams could move without giving us a glimpse.

  A bit farther down the valley there was a fairly significant pile of boulders jutting up from the valley floor. It would change the angle considerably, so we picked up and moved. I crawled to the forward edge of this rockpile, set my daypack on a likely rock, set the rifle atop it, and snuggled behind it, expecting a long wait.

  Kirk set up his tripod just behind me, and he found the ram almost instantly. Far up above us, 330 yards to be exact, was a shelf of black rock. A couple of palo verdes grew on top of it, and the ram was bedded in their shade, just a few feet back from the edge. Just a couple inches lower than Kirk’s tripod, looking through the rifle scope with much less magnification, it took me a long time to see him even though I was looking right at him. Finally I realized that the odd circle of light just behind a pale green bough was sunlight off his horns. Then it all came clear—he was bedded, body to the right, and that one horn looked good. In a few minutes he moved his head, and the second horn looked wonderful, too—heavy, carrying the mass well. Now the waiting was much harder!

  I don’t know how long I lay there behind the rifle. Probably not much more than a half-hour, but the angle was terrible and my neck muscles were on fire—and the pressure was extreme. The shot, if there was one, wouldn’t be easy, and it would be one of the most important in my hunting career. If Kirk gave me the word this shot could finish the long quest for a North American grand slam that had begun fully 30 years earlier with a Stone’s ram. Of course, this would also be the most expensive shot I had ever made in my life, but I was no longer thinking about that. My “buyer’s remorse” was long gone, and I was only thinking about exactly how I would make the shot… and trying very hard not to think about blowing it!

  Several eternities passed, and then the ram shifted his head several times. I knew he was going to get up, and he did. He stood broadside for just a moment, the chance I had hoped for, but was still screened by palo verde. And, as good as he seemed to look lying there, we really hadn’t yet seen the horns quite well enough. The moment passed, and now he was almost completely screened. Then he turned and walked to the edge of the black shelf and stood on the edge, quartering to me.

  He was beautiful, heavy-horned and magnificent, everything a desert sheep should be. Behind me Kirk said, very calmly, “I think you’d better take him.”

  This I already knew. I figured maybe six or eight inches of wind drift, not quite that much drop; the hold was on his flank, a bit below the backbone. The .
300 H&H went off, and the 150grain Sierra hit him precisely on the point of the on-shoulder, lodging under the skin in the off-hip. Of course I didn’t know that. With the crosswind I didn’t hear the bullet hit, nor, with the rifle in recoil, did I see it. Kirk, on 20 power, saw the bullet hit, and also saw the second ram, until now unseen, bail off the shelf and scramble up and over the ridge behind. He instantly told me not to shoot again, but I didn’t see that ram at all; I had the impression that my ram went off the back of the black rock, then ran hard to the right. And then I lost him in a clump of mesquite.

  “He’s down,” said Kirk Kelso. It was a moment worth waiting 30 years for.

  This is the position from which I shot my ram. It wasn’t comfortable, but was steady enough. The ram was bedded on the black shelf just below the skyline on the left upper edge of the photo, about 330 yards above me.

  Sheep hunting gear is relatively simple: An accurate, flatshooting rifle, good optics, and comfortable boots.

  Desert sheep hunting mountains are typically not high, but they’re rough, rocky, and surprisingly brushy. I found desert sheep to be one of the most difficult animals to spot that I’ve ever hunted.

  My ram is the classic example of the mexicana subspecies, heavy and tight-curled. He was taken with a Remington M700 rebarreled to .300 H&H specifically for this hunt by Rigby’s Geoff Miller.

  BLACK BEAR—The All-American

  Elusive, Unpredictable, Adaptable, and Available, the Black Bear is One of the Unsung Heroes of American Big Game Hunting.

  It seems to me there’s a relatively small cadre of truly serious black bear hunters, while most North American hunters either take the black bear for granted or ignore him altogether. Make no mistake, the serious bear hunters are indeed serious. Many of them are houndsmen, while many others happen to live in particularly good bear country, but they have in common a fascination for the American bear, old Ursus americanus. I can understand this, for there is much to be fascinated about—and much to recommend the hunting of this elusive creature.