In Thin Air

I don't remember much of what happened for a little while. I couldn't stay awake, but I couldn't sleep, and I hurt all over. Amazingly, the Diamox worked. In eighteen hours I could more or less function, and in twenty-four hours I was as good as I was going to get for a while, which wasn't particularly good at all. But it was good enough that, a few days later, I shot an old, heavy-horned Marco Polo ram, becoming the first person in my profession to take this magnificent creature.

I was first by default only. One of the great gunwriters of the previous generation, an experienced sheep hunter, went to Afghanistan to hunt Ovis poli in that brief period when it was open, before the Russian invasion. He got altitude sickness and was evacuated before he ever got a chance to hunt. I knew this and didn't want my story to end the same. Reality, however, is that he did (or was forced to do) the sensible thing and I did not. Altitude sickness is extremely serious and absolutely nothing to mess with (like I did). It's also insidious, in that it's impossible to predict if or when it might strike. There is even evidence that people in really great shape are more likely to be affected, because they push themselves too hard without acclimatization.

The good thing, if such can be said, is that altitude sickness is not known to be cumulative like heat exhaustion or frostbite. So far it hasn't been with me. A year later, on a blue sheep hunt in China, we crossed a windswept ridge that the map said was 18,000 feet--no problems. In 2003 I went back to the same camp in Tajikistan. Note, please, that this is not a hunt many people do more than once. I didn't care about a bigger ram; my excuse was simply that this is a wonderful adventure as well as a great sheep hunt. My real reason, however, was that I was so sick that I didn't enjoy the hunt much the first time. I wanted to see if I could do better.

Indeed I did. This time I felt neither young nor tough, but totally at the mercy of the mountains. As I had in China, I followed conventional mountain wisdom as well as my doctor's orders, and I started taking Diamox forty-eight hours before ascending. It was colder that year, and a longer and tougher hunt. It was near the end, after a nine-hour stalk, when I finally took my ram. I was tired, but I felt great throughout.

It is, quite literally, a miracle that I survived to do this or any other hunt. Altitude can kill. So can being bull-headed.