White Rams, Of Course

People are often taken aback when they hear what it is that I do for a living. I suppose that in this day and age--when single-parent families are the norm, farms and ranches are split among distant cousins with dissimilar last names and people are no longer held accountable for their actions--I shouldn't be surprised. It is kind of crazy to think that someone can actually make a living from hunting. But hunting is the essence of man's survival, I remind them, and then I'll note that the editors of surfing magazines surf. Conversations generally get smoother after that, and invariably they lead to a very difficult question: "What do you like to hunt most?"

I don't always know a quick, easy answer. As a kid ducks were my thing. In my late teens, I loved to chase chukars and I began bowhunting deer. I'm also quite fond of pheasant hunting in the Dakotas and sharptails in Montana. Dove hunting is a perennial favorite. In the past five or six years, though, my answer to the question has been deer, mulies or whitetails or maybe even elk.

If you asked me what I like to hunt most this very day, the answer would be Dall sheep. Hands down.

I wasn't feeling quite so fond of sheep hunting just a few short days ago, however. Halfway up the most rugged and steep ridge I've ever climbed in my forty years, I was beginning to have doubts. It was the first day of a nine-day hunt. I knew it would be tough, but I didn't expect it to be so immediate.

Jaydee Kirby, my thirty-something guide and someone I would grow quite fond of during the coming days, had been on the mountain several days before the chartered Helio dropped me off in the bush. He and a client had taken a sheep on opening morning in the snow, which allowed Jaydee to return to town for a few days before coming back to camp to hunt with flatlander me. Even though he carried most all of our spike camp on his back to the bottom of the basin, there was no way I could have kept his pace on that ridge--a ridge that I hoped would lead us to a big ram. To my salvation.

Alas, a fulfilling sheep hunt shouldn't be easy. Although a Dall sheep hunt might not be the most expensive North American sheep hunt, it certainly can be among the most difficult; getting around in the Alaska Range, where I was sucking wind while ascending its drainages and ridges, is not a smooth stroll in the park.

Recent estimates suggest that perhaps more than 60,000 Dall sheep call Alaska's rugged landscape home. They occur in several distinct locations: the Alaska Range, Brooks Range, Chugach Mountains, Kenai Mountains, Talkeetna Mountains, Tanana Hills, White Mountains and the Wrangell Mountains. These white sheep are spectacular in contrast to their surroundings; they appear fragile and delicate in contrast to the shin-busting mountainsides they thrive on. Their thick white coats glow against a dark shale background, and yet you'd be surprised how difficult they are to spot up in the rocks at times.