Mark Sullivan

The Last Wild Man

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:38 -0400

Bart Schleyer was the kind of guy you rarely hear about anymore, a John Henry of a man, one who loved wild places, dangerous carnivores, hunting, science and laughter so much he crafted an amazing life around them.

Schleyer was a wildlife researcher, an artist, a writer, a philosopher and a consummate hunter. He was killed and eaten by a grizzly while bowhunting moose alone in the Yukon in September 2004. Virtually penniless at the time of his death, he was described by friends and colleagues around the world as the happiest man they'd ever known.

He spent much of his 49 years roaming the wilds of Wyoming, Africa, Montana, Alaska, Asia and, finally, the Yukon. He trapped grizzlies and tigers for a living, putting radio collars on them so they might be studied and preserved. In his spare time Schleyer hunted with a homemade longbow he based on a 4,700-year-old design and crafted from Russian ash and tiger sinew.

"Bart was the last wild man, the most unique individual I've ever known," says Kathy Quigley, a veterinarian for the Wildlife Conservation Society who worked with him in the Russian Far East. "He wasn't interested in career or money; he followed his heart and lived for adventure until the day he died."
This is his incredible story.

Bart Schleyer was born in Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1954. His physician father, Otis, took him hunting for the first time when he was 4, tying him into the back seat of his jeep as they chased antelope. Otis took his son on safari in Mozambique when he was 10. On the first day, Bart shot at an impala; he missed and started crying.

"I told him to stop right away, that hunting isn't about
bagging something," Otis says. "It's about enjoying the land, the animals and the people. Bart never forgot that. The last time I spoke to him, he'd just returned from a fourteen-day solo stone sheep hunt. He told me he didn't get his ram, but he sure enjoyed himself."
On subsequent trips to Africa at 13 and again at 17, Schleyer shot impala, gazelles, sables, ibex, wildebeests, warthogs and lions. But when he returned to Wyoming, he was just as excited to be chasing rabbits with his slingshot.

"With Bart, the act of hunting was more important than the location or the game," his sister, Claudia Downey, says. "He loved it more than anyone I've ever known."
The year after Schleyer's return from his last safari, Jim Downey, Claudia's husband, introduced him to bowhunting. Schleyer never hunted with a rifle again.

Montana Bear Stalker

Schleyer wanted to be a taxidermist when he was young, and then an artist. He studied wildlife illustrations in magazines like Outdoor Life and took art classes for two years before transferring to Montana State University, where he earned a master's degree in wildlife biology in 1979.

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His thesis was on grizzly bear activity patterns in Yellowstone National Park. Working for the famed Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team at MSU, Schleyer learned the live-trapping skills that would one day be the mainstay of his
professional life. He became a master at luring bears into
culvert traps, fitting them with radio collars and then tracking them with telemetry devices.

Mark Haroldson, now a supervisor with the team, was Schleyer's research partner on a study designed to figure out what bears did when disturbed by hikers.

"Bart's job was to get close enough to jump the bears out of their beds," Haroldson says. "He got chased up quite a few trees over the years. A lot of people thought what he did was insane, but he loved his job and worked hard at it."

He also worked hard at staying in shape. Haroldson remembers Schleyer returning to his wilderness camps after long, punishing days afield and performing hundreds of push-ups, sit-ups and squats with logs on his shoulders.

A Woman's Day magazine reporter who came to Yellowstone too a story on bear research ended up focusing her piece on Schleyer. She titled it "The Bronze and Beautiful Heartthrob of Cooke City, Montana." His coworkers jokingly called him "Body Beautiful Bart."

Keith Aune, now the research director for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, recruited Schleyer in 1985 for a grizzly study on the Rocky Mountain front northwest of Choteau-country too steep and unforgiving to work with culvert traps and helicopters. Instead, they used horses and backpacks
to bring Aldrich leg-hold snares into the Bob Marshall Wilderness. They ran traplines for grizzlies in some of the nastiest terrain in the state. Schleyer routinely endured trips of 30 to 40 days in the bush, packing 80 pounds of snares and raw meat on his back with a big grin on his face.

He was an expert at building sets that forced bears to step in his snares and then darting grizzlies at close quarters. While they were drugged, he treated the bears like his children, making sure they were safe. Once a bear was collared, he'd follow it on foot, sleeping when it slept, eating when it ate, moving when it moved.

"That was Bart's thing, following right behind them," Aune recalls. "His job, basically, was to trap bears and then stalk them. He'd trap and follow bears for six solid weeks toward the end of summer, then come out of the wilderness, take a shower, get his gear together and go right back in with Paul to hunt for real."

Paul Schafer, a bowyer from Kalispell and another MSU grad, was widely regarded as the greatest bowhunter of his time, and was like an older brother to Schleyer. He introduced him to traditional archery and built Schleyer a recurve that he used to hunt elk, deer, moose and bighorn sheep.

Working with bears, hunting with Schafer and dating the occasional beautiful woman were the focuses of Schleyer's life in the 1980s. He had plenty of opportunities to move up the career ladder, get his Ph.D., run research teams, make more money, settle down and have a family. None of it interested him. Schleyer wanted to be in the wild.

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Alaska Calls

By the end of the '80s, however, Schleyer found that Montana could no longer sate his appetite for adventure. In 1991, he moved to Wasilla, north of Anchorage, where he worked in Dan Foster's taxidermy shop.

"It didn't matter if he was doing the grungiest job, he was cheerful," Foster says. "In the field, he was a phenomenal outdoorsman, the guy everyone wanted to hunt with."

Schleyer met Dale Routt in Foster's shop that first year in Alaska. Routt was a lifelong Alaskan with broad experience hunting and surviving in the bush. But he'd never seen
anyone like the Bronze and Beautiful Heartthrob.

"I'll go another lifetime before meeting someone like Bart again," Routt says. "Physically he was a Neanderthal. Intellectually he was brilliant. Spiritually he loved being out in the wildest parts of Alaska. Some of my greatest days were in the field with him."

Schleyer was a gifted moose caller, Routt says-so good that he once called in a grizzly bear while they were hunting. Routt had to climb a tree to escape the charge.

In 1992, Schleyer drew a permit to hunt brown bears on Kodiak Island. Two hunting buddies from Montana State-Brad Adams, a respected guide on the Alaska peninsula, and Jeff Booth, a biologist with U.S. Fish & Wildlife-decided
to accompany him. Paul Schafer came up from Montana
to film, to back Schleyer with a 12-gauge and to hunt blacktails.

Mid-afternoon on the fifth day, the four men were on a ridge miles from camp when they spotted a huge brown bear moving to bed. When they got to 125 yards, Booth and Adams decided to hang back and watch the final stalk.

Schleyer and Schafer made it into a gully 50 yards away when the bear heard something, got up and came straight at them. That's when Adams realized that Schafer was still filming; his shotgun was on his back.

"I was thinking this could get bad real quick," Adams recalls. "But Bart waited for
the bear to step forward at twenty yards and expose its ribs, slightly quartering to him. Then he got up and drew. The bear saw Bart just as he released, putting the arrow right behind its shoulder. Luckily, instead of attacking, the bear ran off forty yards, looked back, and then dove into the alders and died. Only Paul and Bart could have gotten away with something like that."

Hunting Tigers

Tragically, it was their last time afield. The following winter Paul Schafer died while extreme skiing at Big Mountain in Whitefish, Mont., and Schleyer was recruited into the next phase of his life. Maurice Hornocker, a renowned wildlife researcher at the University of Idaho, was launching a study of Siberian tigers, and he needed an expert to trap and collar the big cats safely. Schleyer was his choice.

For the next nine years, when he wasn't hunting, Schleyer lived in the coastal rain forest of the Sikhote Alin Biosphere Reserve near the town of Terney, in the Russian Far East.
"I don't like using the word 'trapper' to describe Bart because his skills went far beyond being able to get an animal to step in a trap," says John Goodrich, the project's field coordinator. "Bart excelled in dealing with them once they were caught. He had an innate sense about animals and their behavior and had tremendous compassion for them."

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During his years in the Russian Far East, Schleyer met a Russian woman named Tatiana who worked on the project. They began seeing each other and had a son, Artyom.
In 1995, he returned to Alaska to go on a memorial hunt for Paul Schafer in the Brooks Range with Brad Adams and Jeff Booth. On the second to last day of the hunt, Schleyer spotted a giant Dall sheep and crawled on his back for hours across a 50-degree slope to get in range. He shot the 40-inch-plus ram late in the day at less than 30 yards.

He spent the night on the mountain with his ram. While hiking out the next day, Booth flew over in his Super Cub, heading home. It was the last time Schleyer would see his friend. About an hour later, Booth crashed his plane and died.

As Schleyer approached the new millennium, his friends say he was dealing with the pressures that his lifestyle put
on those closest to him, especially his girlfriend and son.

"The trade-offs were very difficult for him, particularly between hunting and his family and working on the tiger project," John Goodrich says.

As had happened to him in Montana nearly a decade before, Schleyer began to feel penned in by encroaching civilization in Alaska. In 2002 he moved to Whitehorse in the Yukon to fulfill his dream of hunting
stone sheep. "In my opinion, the Yukon was one of the
last Schafer was still filming; his shotgun was on his back.

"I was thinking this could get bad real quick," Adams recalls. "But Bart waited for
the bear to step forward at twenty yards and expose its ribs, slightly quartering to him. Then he got up and drew. The bear saw Bart just as he released, putting the arrow right behind its shoulder. Luckily, instead of attacking, the bear ran off forty yards, looked back, and then dove into the alders and died. Only Paul and Bart could have gotten away with something like that."

Hunting Tigers

The Fever (An Incomplete Memoir)

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:36 -0400

My old man suffers the fever bad. He gets a variety as intense and recurrent as malaria: the shakes, the sweats, the flushing, the gape of confusion wrapped in tension that tautens to unbridled anxiety and a severing of control that triggers panic, explodes in failure
and lingers as shivers of disbelief and looping memory.

The illness grips him most often in November, usually on opening morning of Vermont's whitetail season. I've borne witness to several of his bouts with the malady and heard enough breathless accounts of the others to reduce all tales about his virulent buck fever to one.

It's opening morning. The second Saturday of the month has dawned bright, cold and snow-clad. The old man is sitting in his fixed wooden deer stand overlooking a hardwood flat. Suddenly, as if in answer to a prayer, he notices a flicker of movement, then spots a doe being chased by a nice buck.

No matter how hard he tries to prevent it, the fever ignites in his gut and quickly flames through his chest and up into his forehead. The ague grows more severe as the deer approach him and he knows he has to shoot. By the time he flips off the safety, he is gasping, more often than not on his scope.

"The scope was fogged!" he'll say later. Then he'll recount how he had to dig a handkerchief from his pocket as he watched the buck close to within 60 yards.

By now his heart's racing and there's the metallic taste of alarm on his tongue. He feels the situation slipping away. He gets the gun to his shoulder, clutching it like a teenage boy with his first slow-dance partner.

Dad slams his left eye shut. The crosshairs rumba as he tries to settle on the buck trotting through the trees. His entire body tenses. His finger trembles toward the trigger. He flinches and boom! his .30/06 goes off.

The scope smacks him in the eyebrow. The bullet flies high. It whacks a shagbark hickory tree.

The buck, meanwhile, scrambles up the bank after his doe. The old man flings lead as the deer bounds away. Boom! Boom! And maybe another boom!

[pagebreak]
When it's over, he's gasping, complaining about what he calls the "Billy Brackos"-a severe gastric condition that often results in his lurching from his tree stand and staggering uphill before offering his breakfast to the woods.

Mind you, my dad's a formidable intellect. Profoundly hard of hearing since childhood, he has nevertheless earned three degrees: two in electrical engineering and a master's in business from Harvard. He helped build and run several high-tech corporations. He was known as a brilliant negotiator and an innovative leader. But put a buck in front of him and, like so many of us at one time or another, he falls apart.

Indeed, the beautiful and insidious truth about the disease is that no one is immune. Buck fever can hit anyone at any time, no matter how smart, experienced or tough.

Consider Hogan. Now there was a hunter, my friends: a tall, handsome, strapping man who spent his young adulthood carrying out clandestine operations for the CIA. A man who then went on to dedicate much of the last 30-odd years of his life to laughter, fishing and hunting.

Hogan used to hang around my dad's deer camp in the mid-'80s when there was a huge 11-point buck ghosting about our property. As he later told the story, the second morning of the 1986 season found him hiding in the crown of a blowdown maple, looking down on two intersecting game trails. His back was to a steep, tangled slope.

Around 9:15 Hogan heard a branch snap behind him. He eased around and saw six does and the monster coming right at him. The buck had his nose stuck against the tail of one of his lady friends. He was grunting, oblivious to danger.

I'm going to get him! Hogan thought joyously. I'm going to get him!

Now keep in mind that this was a man who used to make a ling sneaking around North Korea and Red China without getting caught. But as the herd moved downhill toward him, he was as excited and unnerved as he'd ever been in his life.

I'm going to get him! Hogan thought. I'm going to get him!

The 11-pointer and his harem passed Hogan's makeshift blind at 15 yards.

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I'm going to get him! I'm really going to get him!

It wasn't until the herd ambled out to 65 yards that Hogan recognized the symptoms of the fever and fell to pieces. He threw up his .30-40 Krag and sent a barrage of Hail Mary shots that missed the buck by a country mile.

Back at camp that night, Hogan sat in a chair, nursing a bottle of wine and moaning, "I had him. Swear to God, I had him. But it was like I went to another world."

Now before you go thinking that as an experienced outdoor writer I'm above it all and have never been stricken, I admit I had a minor bout with the fever shooting my first whitetail at age 15. But the true virus did not lay me low until I was in my mid-30s.

Then it struck twice...in less than a week.

The first traumatic experience unfolded in a northwestern Montana river bottom on the last afternoon of a 10-day trip. The weather had been lousy for deer hunting: warm and windy with a full moon.

My friend Dave and I looked at a map, and he, being a triathlete, and I, being a chucklehead of some note, decided to climb 2,000 vertical feet down the backside of the
mountain we'd been hunting to investigate an otherwise inaccessible, crescent-shaped flat beside a river that shall remain nameless.

When we at last reached the bottom, the wind was in our faces and the river roar drowned out our footsteps. We split up. Dave worked the bank while I still-hunted the seam where the mountainside met the flat. I hadn't walked 50 yards when I picked up a five-point shed antler. I hadn't walked another 50 yards when I spotted a doe moving ahead of me in the thick cover. I stopped, looked to her left and was hit with an ICU case of the fever. There, at 80 yards, was one of the biggest bucks I'd ever seen: wide, tall, heavy-antlered, with bladed tines going every which way.

Voices began chattering in my head. I can't remember what they all said, but I distinctly remember hearing echoes of my father: My scope's fogged! And another more like my own that screamed, Shoot, you fool! Shoot!

[pagebreak]
Not a chance for this fool. When the doe stepped into an opening at 70 yards, I started trembling like I had hypothermia. My joints turned arthritic. I saw spots and thought I might pass out.

In hindsight I should have waited. Eventually the buck probably would have entered the same shooting lane the doe had. But the night before around the dinner table we'd discussed the merits of taking the first good shot you have on a big buck because you might not get another. In the grip of the fever, that idea turned loony.

I got up the gun somehow and tried to aim at him through a maze of branches. Boom! The deer sat back on his haunches like he was hit. My spirits soared. Then he got up and started hauling buttocks out of there.

"Buck. Huge" was all I could manage when Dave found me wandering in circles. Then my verbal skills collapsed into total gibberish.

Dave, a former U.S. Army burn surgeon who is not easily shaken, looked at me in disgust. He figured the buck might try to circle us and ordered me forward across the flat as he dry-tracked the buck uphill.

We hadn't split up a hundred yards when Mr. Cool Burn Surgeon jumped him and got the fever himself. He managed only a fleeting shot as the buck took off downhill.

Hearing the report, I started running back the way I'd come. I don't know who was more surprised, me or the buck, when we almost collided. Seeing him skidding at five yards threw me back into babbling idiotdom. Having no such issues, the buck took off in 20-foot bounds, showing me a profile of his incredible rack. I responded by heart-shooting a spruce branch. We'd never scratched him.

During our entire climb out of "the buck pit," as we'd taken to calling it, we relived the nuanced horrors of the fever. Every nanosecond of the incident kept playing in my head in this crazy closed loop. It kept playing well into the next week as I sat in a box blind in central Saskatchewan.

I was sharing a guide with a guy from Alabama whom I'll call Harry, as savvy a hunter as I've encountered over the years. Every morning, we'd be dropped off at our blinds. Every evening, we'd tell each other what we'd seen on the ride back to camp.

[pagebreak]
Midweek in the pre-dawn darkness, I was convinced that I'd screwed up so badly in Montana I'd angered the deer gods, and that there was no way I was going to see one of the giant whitetail bucks the area was known for. Wrong, fool.

Shortly after first light a doe danced across the slough bottom I was watching. Another doe followed and then a seven-pointer that chased her around. Suddenly from stage right, an absolute bruiser buck stepped from the willows.

He was a massive-bodied 10-pointer with blood trickling
from fighting wounds, high tines and beams that curved
forward of his nose.

Freakin' Canadian monster! I jabbered to myself with insane glee. I'm gonna get him! I'm gonna get him!

Not recognizing the origin and dark portent of the Hoganesque phrases bubbling from my subconscious, I somehow got my rifle barrel out of the shooting slot without banging it against the plywood. The buck, meanwhile, bristled his hair, laid back his ears, lowered his head and charged, ramming his rack into the smaller buck's rump.

That's when I completely lost it.

My heart beat like a bongo. I began panting and drooling like my chocolate Lab. I felt sure I was going to throw up. Then the schizophrenic voices started.

Shoot him, bone-brain! I heard. Don't shoot, you ignoramus! another cried. He's big! He isn't. His body's big-his rack's small!

In retrospect, the deer was easily in the 160-class, perhaps better. But the fever had me so strung out it sounded like a flock of crazed mynah birds squawking in my skull.

Smart move. Don't shoot! You're a moron. Take him! And
so forth.

The monster chased the doe around in front of me for nearly 20 minutes. I had the safety off twice. But in the end the voices paralyzed me. I never pulled the trigger, and he disappeared back into the willows.

[pagebreak]
All day long, I sat in the box, near catatonic, praying with revivalist fervor for one more look at that buck. "I promise I'll shoot," I kept telling the chickadees that flitted about the blind. "I promise."

Atdom. Having no such issues, the buck took off in 20-foot bounds, showing me a profile of his incredible rack. I responded by heart-shooting a spruce branch. We'd never scratched him.

During our entire climb out of "the buck pit," as we'd taken to calling it, we relived the nuanced horrors of the fever. Every nanosecond of the incident kept playing in my head in this crazy closed loop. It kept playing well into the next week as I sat in a box blind in central Saskatchewan.

I was sharing a guide with a guy from Alabama whom I'll call Harry, as savvy a hunter as I've encountered over the years. Every morning, we'd be dropped off at our blinds. Every evening, we'd tell each other what we'd seen on the ride back to camp.

[pagebreak]
Midweek in the pre-dawn darkness, I was convinced that I'd screwed up so badly in Montana I'd angered the deer gods, and that there was no way I was going to see one of the giant whitetail bucks the area was known for. Wrong, fool.

Shortly after first light a doe danced across the slough bottom I was watching. Another doe followed and then a seven-pointer that chased her around. Suddenly from stage right, an absolute bruiser buck stepped from the willows.

He was a massive-bodied 10-pointer with blood trickling
from fighting wounds, high tines and beams that curved
forward of his nose.

Freakin' Canadian monster! I jabbered to myself with insane glee. I'm gonna get him! I'm gonna get him!

Not recognizing the origin and dark portent of the Hoganesque phrases bubbling from my subconscious, I somehow got my rifle barrel out of the shooting slot without banging it against the plywood. The buck, meanwhile, bristled his hair, laid back his ears, lowered his head and charged, ramming his rack into the smaller buck's rump.

That's when I completely lost it.

My heart beat like a bongo. I began panting and drooling like my chocolate Lab. I felt sure I was going to throw up. Then the schizophrenic voices started.

Shoot him, bone-brain! I heard. Don't shoot, you ignoramus! another cried. He's big! He isn't. His body's big-his rack's small!

In retrospect, the deer was easily in the 160-class, perhaps better. But the fever had me so strung out it sounded like a flock of crazed mynah birds squawking in my skull.

Smart move. Don't shoot! You're a moron. Take him! And
so forth.

The monster chased the doe around in front of me for nearly 20 minutes. I had the safety off twice. But in the end the voices paralyzed me. I never pulled the trigger, and he disappeared back into the willows.

[pagebreak]
All day long, I sat in the box, near catatonic, praying with revivalist fervor for one more look at that buck. "I promise I'll shoot," I kept telling the chickadees that flitted about the blind. "I promise."

A

To Hell and Back

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:36 -0400

Fair warning, couch potatoes and faint of heart: If your idea of prime time afield is plopping your flabby butt astride the old ATV and vroom-vrooming out to your favorite tree stand on the back 40, this article is definitely not for you. Ditto if your idea
of dangerous game is a rabid squirrel or a scolding goose.

But if you're one of those old-fashioned types who lives for the road less traveled, who thinks that the greatest hunts are more about the adventure experienced than the trophy taken, who longs for dramatic vistas and exotic locales-in short, if you're up to the challenge of lung-
busting, leg-wobbling terrain, bitter-cold conditions and quarry that could potentially turn the tables and kill you, read on.

You see, we're not talking mildly demanding hunts here, the kind that force you to work up a sweat or two, or might
blister your big toe, or actually require more than a modicum of shooting skill. We're talking tough, treacherous hunts, the kind that will push you to your limits physically and mentally in pursuit of trophy big game. We're talking dangerous hunts that could get you gored, stomped, chomped or flayed.

But if you dare to go on any
of these six hunts, if you've got the right stuff and have fine-tuned your gear and trained and
practiced hard, you just might come home with the trophy of a lifetime-and a whopper of a tale to match it.

WHITE MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS ELK// New Mexico

Even when it's easy, elk hunting's tough, but it's darn near brutal in the towering volcanic crags west of Ruidoso, New Mexico. The peaks and canyons off the backside of the famed Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation are 9,000 to 11,000 feet high and crawling with big bulls. Unit 36's 50,000 acres are so steep, rocky and choked with underbrush that they have reduced grown men to tears. Literally.

"You'll see guys come back into camp that first day pale, sick and near crying from the altitude and the steepness," says Colorado native Mike Unruh, a physical fitness and elk nut who applies to hunt in the White Mountains every year. "You won't find a tougher elk hunt anywhere, but if you're prepared you could kill the biggest bull of your life."

Kentucky hunter Jimmy Boone, who arrowed a 360-class 7 by 7 in the White Mountains several years ago, agrees. "There are some absolute giants in there. But it's as nasty or nastier than the Wyoming unit where I killed my bighorn ram. The second morning I was there another hunter started throwing up right after breakfast. He'd survived the first day, but he knew what was coming and just couldn't face it."

Johnny Hughes lives in Ruidoso and has guided for elk in the White Mountains for more than 10 years. "The hunters who are successful here have been in rugged, high-altitude country before and know what it takes to get through a six- to ten-day hunt," he says. "And it's not about age. We've had twenty-five-year-old guys collapse after a day, and we've had a sixty-seven-year-old who went everywhere we asked him to."

Hughes's clients have killed bulls approaching the 400-class, but they've worked insanely hard for them: An average 14-hour day chasing elk on foot in Unit 36 during archery season demands that a hunter cover five to seven miles and climb anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000 vertical feet. Muzzleloader hunters have it a bit easier, but they should still be in the best shape of their lives.

"The first year I wasn't fully prepared and I'd like to have died, but I kept seeing this three-eighty bull and had to go back," says Nevada muzzleloader hunter Harlan King. "The next time I went, I started training four months before by loading my pack with twenty-five pounds of lead shot and climbing for five miles five times a week through the steepest stuff I could find near my house. Six weeks before the season I increased the weight to fifty pounds. Then I was ready. I di't get the monster I was after, but I'm applying again this year. The elk are too big for me not to."

Contact: New Mexico Department of Game & Fish (505-476-8000; wildlife.state.nm.us). Johnny Hughes, Elite Outfitters (505-257-5379;
eliteoutfitters.com)

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CAPE BUFFALO// Tanzania

Of Africa's Big Five game animals, the Cape buffalo is the one almost guaranteed to give you nightmares and trigger a flood of adrenaline. Myopic and volatile, "dugga boys," as the oldest bachelor bulls are known, can also be lethal, especially when they are tracked and stalked in the classic style, which requires a hunter to walk anywhere from two to ten hours to get close for the shot.

"Cape buffalo are notoriously short-tempered animals prone to charge when they're wounded or when their comfort zone is violated," says Jill Kleynhans, a safari operator who specializes in tracking Cape buffalo hunts in the famous Selous preserve in southern Tanzania. "We often track them through mopane forests and twelve-foot-high grass where you can stumble onto them. It can be a deadly scenario if you're not prepared."

Adam Clements, another professional hunter who specializes in Tanzanian safaris and shot his first dugga boy at age 7, agrees. "Nine times out of ten, if they wind you they'll stampede away. But if you get close before they scent you or you wound them, they head for the thickets and lie in wait. Then you're in for trouble."

Indeed, every year buffalo hunters are charged, stomped and gored, which is akin to being hit by a pickup truck with horns. Making matters worse is the habit some buffalo have of circling back to check their trail when being
followed. If you're lucky, you'll never have that experience.

"It's always in the back of your mind," says Robert Crew, who had to follow a Cape buffalo he wounded with Clements in the Selous in 2003. "He went into the thick stuff and we had to crawl
in after him on our hands and knees. It was almost like night in there. We had to inch forward, studying the shadows, listening to the beast crashing ahead of us. My eyes were as big as saucers and every hair on my neck stood on end the entire time we were
in there. Five shots later, he
was dead."

Contact: Adam Clements (210-698-0077; safaritrackers.com) or
Jill Kleynhans (+27 83-280-3558; mafigeni.co.za)

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BIGHORN SHEEP// Montana

These six hunting units in southwestern Montana are the last places in the Lower 48 where you are guaranteed to pull a sheep permit if you apply. Even nonresidents don't need to hire an outfitter to go.

Unlike in most other bighorn sheep units in Montana, pulling the permit is the easy part. The unlimiteds are so tough that experienced sheep guides who've tried to conquer them have left limping and shaking their heads. Why? Much of the country is so sheer and rocky that using horses to pack in a camp is impossible. Everything goes in and comes out on your back. Couple that with the fact that sheep numbers are so low that you might have to hike a hundred miles or more to get a shot at a ram. Oh, and did we mention that the unlimiteds are infested with grizzlies?

Most sheep aficionados agree that the biggest rams in the unlimiteds live, not surprisingly, in the toughest unit, 501, which encompasses a large portion of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness between Red Lodge and the Paradise Valley.

"It's like hunting on the moon," says Tim Schinabarger,
a sculptor who has successfully hunted several of Montana's unlimited units, including 501. "The Beartooths are Montana's toughest mountain range. Going after sheep in them means you've got to put in miles and miles
of backpacking."

Schinabarger helped his wife, Roxanne, hunt 501 in 2003. Between scouting and hunting trips the couple put in 37 days, hiked 125 miles and climbed and descended more than 30,000
vertical feet before she at last
shot her sheep, an exceptional, broomed-off ram that scored 165 Boone and Crockett points.

"To do well in 501 you've got to be darn near obsessed, ready to wear out a pair of boots and aware that you'll be dealing with grizzlies," says Schinabarger, who had a sow and two cubs charge into his camp during the hunt. "But if you've got the time and are prepared and committed to the hunt, you can shoot a nice representative ram."

Mike Lovely has hunted sheep for 25 years and bought the rights to outfit 501 from famed guide Jack Atcheson Jr. "Jack used to say that God deposited ninety percent of the rock in Montana in 501, and I'd say he was about right. I've had clients who've hunted in the Brooks Range up in Alaska and down in Mexico come here and tell me it's the toughest sheep country in all of North America."

Indeed, when people call Lovely about hunting 501, he tries to discourage them. He tells them that they'll be crawling around in scree slides and boulders above 9,000 feet, that they might go eight days without seeing a sheep and that they could face everything from heat to
blizzards to gale-force winds.

"It takes a special kind of person, someone who's as tough mentally as physically, to succeed in the unlimiteds," Lovely says. "Older hunters seem to do better than the younger guys, who all seem to spend too much time watching the Outdoor Channel rather than getting ready. But nice rams are killed in the unlimiteds every year. It all comes down to the hunter and what he's willing to endure to succeed."

Contact: Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks (406-444-2950; fwp.state.mt.us). Guide Mike Lovely, Rollin-Boulder Outfitters (406-932-5836; rbo@mtio.net)

[pagebreak]
PRAIRIE WHITETAILS// Canada

The temperatures and wind chill in late November in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba can easily hit 20 or 30 below zero. Blink and your eyelashes might freeze. Take off your glove and you'll be frostbitten in minutes.

But when it's bitter cold and the rut's on, some of the biggest whitetail bucks in the world start to move. Rifle hunters survive the brutal conditions by using box blinds with heaters. Archery hunters, however, have to tough it out, perching in tree stands where they'll face the elements for 60 hours during an average week afield.

"It can be tough, real tough," admits Jim Hole Jr., who guides in the famous Edmonton bow zone, arguably the best place in the world to hunt giant whitetails. "If you don't have the right gear to survive the cold, the strength to climb trees and hang stands and the positive mental attitude necessary to succeed in the harsh conditions we can get up here, you're finished before you even begin."

Indeed, if you move too fast and sweclimbed and descended more than 30,000
vertical feet before she at last
shot her sheep, an exceptional, broomed-off ram that scored 165 Boone and Crockett points.

"To do well in 501 you've got to be darn near obsessed, ready to wear out a pair of boots and aware that you'll be dealing with grizzlies," says Schinabarger, who had a sow and two cubs charge into his camp during the hunt. "But if you've got the time and are prepared and committed to the hunt, you can shoot a nice representative ram."

Mike Lovely has hunted sheep for 25 years and bought the rights to outfit 501 from famed guide Jack Atcheson Jr. "Jack used to say that God deposited ninety percent of the rock in Montana in 501, and I'd say he was about right. I've had clients who've hunted in the Brooks Range up in Alaska and down in Mexico come here and tell me it's the toughest sheep country in all of North America."

Indeed, when people call Lovely about hunting 501, he tries to discourage them. He tells them that they'll be crawling around in scree slides and boulders above 9,000 feet, that they might go eight days without seeing a sheep and that they could face everything from heat to
blizzards to gale-force winds.

"It takes a special kind of person, someone who's as tough mentally as physically, to succeed in the unlimiteds," Lovely says. "Older hunters seem to do better than the younger guys, who all seem to spend too much time watching the Outdoor Channel rather than getting ready. But nice rams are killed in the unlimiteds every year. It all comes down to the hunter and what he's willing to endure to succeed."

Contact: Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks (406-444-2950; fwp.state.mt.us). Guide Mike Lovely, Rollin-Boulder Outfitters (406-932-5836; rbo@mtio.net)

[pagebreak]
PRAIRIE WHITETAILS// Canada

Yukon Giant

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:32 -0400

The glacier loomed at six miles, an earth-churning ice machine that supercooled the coming rain. Fifty-knot gusts lashed the cloud of sleet at us, over the last blue ice at the moraine, across a river silver with silt and salmon, across tens of thousands of acres of mud flats, flooded meadows and tag alder jungles separating the glacier from the Gulf of Alaska 12 miles to our rear.

"Hold on tight," growled Marcus East, a sinewy, dour man with a red beard and an uncanny ability to locate game in cold rain forests.

East and I were 60 feet up in a moss-coated spruce tree that towered over a 2-mile by 500-yard oblong maze within the greater swamp. It was madness-we had no safety belts and no time to climb down before the microburst hit. Following East's lead, I hooked my arms around branches and braced my legs on two stout limbs.

The wind reached us first, whipping the alder crowns into a raging olive sea far below our perch. Seconds later the sleet pinged off the Gore-Tex and commercial fishing gear we wore head to toe. The top of the spruce, still 20 feet above us, began to lurch and buck and I wondered what in God's name my wife would say if she could see me now.

Common sense dictated that we turn our backs to the wind, hug the tree and pray. Instead, we jammed our spines against the spruce trunk, dipped the brims of our hoods into the wind and squinted against the frozen rain, focused on one particular swell in the alder sea, 80 yards out and 60 feet down. We had good reason to take such risks: One of the biggest deer in the world was right there in that little patch.

Inside the chaos of the swirling alders, we kept seeing flashes of him: his blackened hump scarred from fighting, the pendulous bell below his chin, one monstrous left antler, at least 17 points, 5 of which jutted off the brows, one of which lobbed off below the paddle. A drop-tined Alaska-Yukon bull moose.

When the big gusts struck, East and I thought of nothing but hanging on for dear life, though a few times I wondered just how I had gotten myself into such a predicament. Then I remembered a photograph of my great uncle.

W hen I was eight, my mother got a Christmas card from her
uncle that included a black-and-white photograph of him and an Indian guide crouched beside a giant moose in a foggy swamp. Both men looked exhausted but happy. I've never seen a picture that evoked more of a sense of adventure than that one. I was born into a whitetail-deer-hunting family, but right then I knew someday I'd go to Alaska as my great uncle had and hunt the biggest deer in the world.

For the next 35 years, I read up on Alaska-Yukon moose, their territory and the men who specialized in hunting them. By the time I was ready, my attention was focused on the country around the Bering and Tsiu rivers,
east of Cordova, Alaska. This region
accounts for roughly 20 of the top 100 Alaska-Yukon bull moose scored in the Safari Club system (total inches of antler with no deductions), including the number-one moose in this category.

In 1999, on the Okalee Spit west
of the Tsiu River area, within what is known as the Bering Unit, Michigan hunter Debra Card shot the largest-racked Alaska-Yukon bull ever measured. Card shot her bull on the season-opening morning. The bull's rack was 75 inches wide, had 56 points and
measured an astounding 7311/8 inches. Marcus East was Card's guide.

Few men know the behemoths of the Tsiu country as well as Sam Fejes and Marcus East. Fejes,
an Alaskan Master Guide and
outfitter, has been flying and hunting the Tsiu since his early teens. His uncle flew the mail route across the vast sodden wilderness between the Chugach Mountain Range and the Gulf of
Alaska and would drop his nephew
off for days at a time. Soon Fejes's knowledge of the Tsiu country and the
animals it held became legendary among serious hunters. So there was nouestion about whom I'd hire to
organize the hunt when I pulled a
limited-entry tag for bull moose in the Bering Unit of the Tsiu River country.

Fejes picked me up in Cordova in late September and we flew east in his DeHavilland Beaver, one of the classic Alaska bush-pilot aircraft, toward his base camp near the Tsiu River. We soared across miles of mud flats and river courses, over bays choked with floating ice, over flooded thickets thousands of yards wide. To the north, glaciers swept down from 13,000-foot mountains. To the south, surf pounded a gray-sand coastline that was deserted for 40 miles.

"It's rugged country," Fejes said. "But it takes big, rugged country to hold an animal this big."

Upon arrival at his base camp, he cautioned me not to expect to see many bulls during my hunt. Despite Alaska's reputation as a hot spot for big moose, the Alaskan government does not categorize the Bering Unit as a trophy hunt. Instead, the state allows 25 residents and 5 nonresidents a "subsistence" or meat hunt in the area. To get their moose meat, hunters are allowed to use Everglades-style airboats to go deep within the Bering unit after moose. Fejes vehemently opposes the use of the boats, calling it "unfair chase," but he has not been able to convince the government to discontinue
it. The airboat hunters had killed 20 moose in the nine days before I arrived. The big bulls, Fejes said, were hiding deep in the alder thickets with their cows, behaving like whitetail deer.

"It'll be tough," he said. "But if you're willing to hunt hard the rewards here can be big."

That afternoon, I hopped into a Super Cub and East got into
another and we went flying. Within an hour, we spotted a very big bull deep in the northern part of the Bering unit. He was not particularly wide by Tsiu standards-in the mid-60s-but he was massive, with many points and a drop tine off the left paddle, and I wanted to hunt him.

Before twilight, Fejes flew East and me to a sandbar in the Bering River, several thousand yards from where
we had seen the bull. We waded to the shore in hip boots, our gear held high overhead. Then we climbed the riverbank and used machetes to hack our way through the thick, dank alder
jungle that lined the river.

By dusk we had set up a spike camp with tent, fly and tarp. At dark it began to drizzle. Within an hour, the drizzle turned into a downpour that lasted all night and by dawn it was a deluge. Around nine the next morning, the rain abated several degrees and we donned fleece, wool, Gore-Tex, hip boots and commercial fishing bibs, coats and gloves and began to slither, slop and chop our way northeast through the dripping alders toward the bull's last known position.

An hour later, we reached the edge of a flooded, foggy meadow miles long and again as wide. Here and there across the vast expanse we could make out other alder jungles to our north, at least 2,000 yards across the bog.

East pointed to a nearby spruce and whispered, "We're on as flat a piece of ground as you're likely to see. The only way to spot moose is by climbing."

And so it went throughout the day. We'd climb a tree, take a long look around with our binoculars, then forge out into the flooded reeds, heads bent against the driving rain, peeking into the fingers of the vast meadow. Where the airboats had crossed, our legs sank in the stirred-up muck. We walked for miles in the stuff. At dark, we returned to the camp exhausted and drenched. We'd not seen or heard a single moose.

It rained harder that night but slowed before dawn and once again we set out. East was interested in a line of spruce trees that towered over the alder tangle 4,000 yards northeast and we headed toward it. Some hours later, we found ourselves in a glen where the ground and the trunks of the gnarled spruces were covered in spongy, black-green moss. Winding through the moss were trails beaten deep and muddy by hooves as big as a Clydesdale's. The alders that lined the glen had been stripped by giant antlers. East sniffed a musky perfume in the air.

"Moose," he said.

We left our guns and packs at the bottom of the biggest tree and climbed it. The breeze was strong but the rain had stopped and we had a clear view of a second flooded plain that ran out toward the Bering Glacier. East spotted our bull almost immediately-the moose was traipsing after a cow in the alders 150 yards from our tree.

We dropped down to a finger meadow that ran from the spruce glen to the alder thicket. East used a moose shoulder bone to rake the tree branches and called to the bull. But the breeze had
become a steady wind and our calls were drowned out within 50 yards.

We crawled back up the big spruce and relocated the bull just as the microburst of sleet and gale hit. For more than an hour we rode the tree, petrified, trying to keep track of the bull's location. Once, we lost him for nearly 15 minutes, only to have him appear in an opening right out in front of us at less than 60 yards.
Just as suddenly as it had come, the wind died and the glacier emerged from the gray clouds again. East motioned to me to get down from the tree. We stood at the bottom, weak from the experience, and then eased forward to where we could look out at the narrow meadow and alders where the bull hid.

East grunted and used the shoulder bone to rake another tree. We heard a tremendous crash in the alders and then nothing. East scrambled back up the tree, and then came down fast. "He's a lover, not a fighter," he said. "He's moved off about a hundred yards. Maybe if we can get your gun up the tree, you can shoot him from up there, whitetail style."

It took us 10 minutes to get the .300 Winchester safely into position. East stood behind me and held onto my jacket while I rested the rifle over a branch. All I could see was the bull's neck and drop-tined rack. Under ordinary conditions I would have attempted the shot, but the wind had stirred again, I could not keep the sights steady and the bull disappeared.

We didn't see the drop-tined bull the next day or the morning after that. By then it had been pouring off and on for nearly four days. Our equipment was so wet it was unusable, a dangerous situation that made the difficulties of coastal moose hunting profoundly clear.

At noon Fejes flew us back to the base camp. We took a hot shower and then dried our equipment in a shed
designed for the task. By late afternoon, Fejes was urging us to finish our hot meal and grab our gear; he'd been flying all afternoon and had seen the bull again, lying out in the flooded meadow northwest of the big spruce.

We flew back to the Bering River the fourth night of the hunt and re-erected our cough the moss were trails beaten deep and muddy by hooves as big as a Clydesdale's. The alders that lined the glen had been stripped by giant antlers. East sniffed a musky perfume in the air.

"Moose," he said.

We left our guns and packs at the bottom of the biggest tree and climbed it. The breeze was strong but the rain had stopped and we had a clear view of a second flooded plain that ran out toward the Bering Glacier. East spotted our bull almost immediately-the moose was traipsing after a cow in the alders 150 yards from our tree.

We dropped down to a finger meadow that ran from the spruce glen to the alder thicket. East used a moose shoulder bone to rake the tree branches and called to the bull. But the breeze had
become a steady wind and our calls were drowned out within 50 yards.

We crawled back up the big spruce and relocated the bull just as the microburst of sleet and gale hit. For more than an hour we rode the tree, petrified, trying to keep track of the bull's location. Once, we lost him for nearly 15 minutes, only to have him appear in an opening right out in front of us at less than 60 yards.
Just as suddenly as it had come, the wind died and the glacier emerged from the gray clouds again. East motioned to me to get down from the tree. We stood at the bottom, weak from the experience, and then eased forward to where we could look out at the narrow meadow and alders where the bull hid.

East grunted and used the shoulder bone to rake another tree. We heard a tremendous crash in the alders and then nothing. East scrambled back up the tree, and then came down fast. "He's a lover, not a fighter," he said. "He's moved off about a hundred yards. Maybe if we can get your gun up the tree, you can shoot him from up there, whitetail style."

It took us 10 minutes to get the .300 Winchester safely into position. East stood behind me and held onto my jacket while I rested the rifle over a branch. All I could see was the bull's neck and drop-tined rack. Under ordinary conditions I would have attempted the shot, but the wind had stirred again, I could not keep the sights steady and the bull disappeared.

We didn't see the drop-tined bull the next day or the morning after that. By then it had been pouring off and on for nearly four days. Our equipment was so wet it was unusable, a dangerous situation that made the difficulties of coastal moose hunting profoundly clear.

At noon Fejes flew us back to the base camp. We took a hot shower and then dried our equipment in a shed
designed for the task. By late afternoon, Fejes was urging us to finish our hot meal and grab our gear; he'd been flying all afternoon and had seen the bull again, lying out in the flooded meadow northwest of the big spruce.

We flew back to the Bering River the fourth night of the hunt and re-erected our c

Yukon Giant

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:29 -0400

In The Bow Zone

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:27 -0400

Abundant feed, means the area is crawling with bucks like the one Lesley Parks arrowed that early November morning.

Or the 1971/8 typical Don McGarvey shot as it entered an alfalfa field in The Zone in September 1991. McGarvey's buck ranks as the No. 4 typical of all time by the P&Y scoring method.

Which is not to say that hunting The Zone is guaranteed easy pickings. "Seventy percent of the area is open field, leaving little cover for either deer or hunter to hide in," says 37-year-old Jim Hole, who has hunted The Zone since he was a youngster. "And their contact with humans is limited to a farmer sowing or mowing once or twice a year. So you have an animal completely intolerant of infringement on its territory. Make one mistake and these bucks go nocturnal.

Hole is not unlike a drill sergeant as he continues. "Because they are so sensitive to pressure, you need to do at least four dozen things right every time you go out if you're going to succeed. But if a hunter works hard to do those four dozen things right, he'll get an opportunity on a Pope and Young whitetail."

Quite an assertion. But Hole has been outfitting in The Zone for 15 years. In that time, he's been the tactician behind the taking of more than 60 record-book whitetails, not to mention scores of big deer that have been missed by his rattled clients over the past decade and change.

Indeed, when most people talk about The Zone, they talk about Hole. And when they talk about Hole, they are actually talking about "The Program," his rigid tactical and philosophical approach to hunting monster whitetails.

"That first time up there, if you try to play the game his way, it's like Jim hunts through you," says Chris Green, a New Jersey hunter who has been to The Zone eight times. "Some people don't like it and rebel. Those are the ones who usually go home empty-handed. The ones who decide to go with The Program usually get their crack at a big deer. But it's more than that-you learn The Program and you take away a lot of ideas that can work back home."

A week-long immersion in Hole's program begins on Sunday afternoon with the examination of every piece of equipment a hunter plans to take into The Zone. Any metal or plastic surface that might clink or clank on the way to, sitting on or walking out from a stand site is wrapped in black hockey tape. The rubberized surface of the tape deadens sound.

Then knapsack-packing methods are critiqued, as are range-finder choices, clothing and bow sights. Because so many of the biggest bucks are seen only under low-light conditions, Hole expects his clients to hunt with a tritium pin and range finder, not peep sights. Next, the novice to Alberta puts on all his cold-weather clothes and demonstrates that he can organize his gear according to Hole's strictures. Binoculars must be cinched to chests with elastic straps. Bows must snap into a spare arm hook that hangs on the hunter's left hip. There must be a loop on the hunter's right hip where Hole's custom-designed portable tree stand will hang on the hikes, frequently long ones, to and from the hunting areas.

Hole's tree-stand setup is based on a male-female pin system. Each stand has an aluminum nodule that juts off the back of the seat. It will fit perfectly in all of the more than 100 female receivers he has placed in trees throughout The Zone. Hole devised the system to give his hunters as much flexibility as possible.

But before they can take advantage of that flexibility, a hunter will drill on the practice pin in the yard of the hunting lodge. He must prove to Hole that he can climb the tree and slide the stand into the female fitting in total silence. "Sound carries for miles up here, literally," Hole says. "Make one wrong noise, especially metal-on-metal contact, and that buck is gone!"

Hole's approach to bowhunting is like a Wall Street takeer specialist's: He's conservative as a rule, and ruthlessly aggressive at the moment it's time to capitalize. The guy even totes a briefcase into the field. In it he keeps maps and a cross-referenced list of all of his pin sites, as well as a chart that tells him the required wind direction to hunt a specific pin and up-to-date notation as to the last time a human went to that site.

Hole has his stands further subcategorized in terms of what he calls "tolerance." A high-tolerance stand is one that forgives noise or minor shifts in the prevailing wind currents. The odds are somewhat against the hunter in these stands, which are often in narrow hedgerows or on the edge of fields 200 or more yards from a bedding area.

It was the third week in November a few years back when Mark Stanley was in just such a high-tolerance stand. Shortly after dawn, he saw a huge buck creeping the woodline of the far side of the field he overlooked. Stanley picked up his rattling antlers and crashed them together. The buck raised its head and made a great loop to within 15 yards of Stanley's position. The basic 5x5 gross-scored 174 points P&Y.

A low-tolerance stand, by way of comparison, is one that's situated where any noise or shift in the wind will stomp out the likelihood of seeing a big buck. But because such stands are often ambush sites that are close to, or actually within, known bedding areas, the risk can be more than worthwhile.

Just ask John Smith, a Michigan bowhunter who rattled in four monsters in 15 minutes from one such stand five years ago. The biggest one, which Smith figures would have made Pope and Young (more than 170 inches), passed just out of range. Two minutes later, a magnificent eight-pointer strode in and Smith arrowed it. Five minutes after that, two other eight-pointers came in and went to war just below Smith's stand. Smith got so excited he vomited.

If Hole is intense about stand selection, he is fanatical about how his stands are approached. After he has checked the wind and determined that hunt's pin site, he tells his clients exactly how they are going to travel from his van to the stand. No one gets out of the van unless they can repeat the approach direction, the prevailing wind and the strategy for the stand.

Hunters are expected to go directly to their pin sites and move straight up their trees without pausing. Hole believes that any time on the ground brings an equal increase in scent pollution. Indeed, he is so obsessed with ground pollution that he often drives hunters to within 10 yards of their evening stands at the edge of grainfields; the deer are used to tire scent because they encounter farm equipment, but they are not used to having humans on the ground near them.

Immediately prior to, or during the peak of, the rut, Hole has his clients rattle three times during each morning's hunt. An hour after sunrise they tickle the antlers. An hour after that the hunter intensifies the clash of the horns. And an hour later the hunter goes to war. Each sequence is 45 seconds or less.

"We kill 50 percent of these studs rattling or calling," says Hole.

Hole knows that hunters new to his program often find his demands difficult to master. "It's a technical hunt-which is not easy," Hole allows. "But if you learn to hunt like this, the rewards can be phenomenal."

Phenomenal, but not instantaneous. Doug Hole, for example, has been hunting according to his younger brother's program for years. The week after Parks shot his 14-pointer, Doug rattled in four bucks in a slough bottom. But the deer came in so fast and so close that he didn't have a chance to raise his bow.

Six days later Doug decided to move uphill into a low-tolerance stand 400 yards north of the slough bottom. It was an evening hunt and 31 degrees below zero. "I had to go 800 yards through thigh-deep snow in total silence to make the stand work," Doug says. "But I did what Jim talks about all the time and got settled in. Just as it was getting gloomy, a doe appeared from the north. Five minutes behind her, a buck with horns like you wouldn't believe stepped out. You spend a lot of time in The Zone and you learn that most times the rack follows the buck. With true monarchs the buck has to follow his rack."

Doug refused to look at the antlers. He forced himself to focus on the tenets of The Program, making sure he could capitalize on opportunity. When the deer stepped behind a clump of bushes, Doug drew. But the deer froze. "I remember asking myself how long I could stay at full draw," Doug says. "I said, 'For a buck like this, a long time.'"

When the buck finally stepped out, Doug put the pin behind his shoulder and shot. The nine-pointer wheeled and charged into the field. It crested a hill and died halfway to the slough bottom. The 5x4 gross-scored in the high 160s P&Y. "The key up here in The Zone is to work my brother's program," says Doug. "Sooner or later your attention to his details will create luck."
the stand work," Doug says. "But I did what Jim talks about all the time and got settled in. Just as it was getting gloomy, a doe appeared from the north. Five minutes behind her, a buck with horns like you wouldn't believe stepped out. You spend a lot of time in The Zone and you learn that most times the rack follows the buck. With true monarchs the buck has to follow his rack."

Doug refused to look at the antlers. He forced himself to focus on the tenets of The Program, making sure he could capitalize on opportunity. When the deer stepped behind a clump of bushes, Doug drew. But the deer froze. "I remember asking myself how long I could stay at full draw," Doug says. "I said, 'For a buck like this, a long time.'"

When the buck finally stepped out, Doug put the pin behind his shoulder and shot. The nine-pointer wheeled and charged into the field. It crested a hill and died halfway to the slough bottom. The 5x4 gross-scored in the high 160s P&Y. "The key up here in The Zone is to work my brother's program," says Doug. "Sooner or later your attention to his details will create luck."

Trophy Elk in Grizzly Country

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:26:23 -0400

We don't dare move. By the clock it is legal shooting time on the opening morning of Wyoming's rifle elk season. But falling snow, fog and heavy cloud cover make it
impossible to see the bull bugling and raking a tree somewhere in the vast meadow below us. My guide, Tim Doud, is afraid that if we ease through the timber to get a better vantage point we might spook the bull before I can see clearly enough for a shot.

At the same time, we're nervous about creeping through this white bark pine forest in the dim light because we saw the fresh tracks of a grizzly bear as we rode through the area on the way into camp just yesterday.

Waiting there anxiously in the gloaming light, ears craned to catch the bull's slightest moan, I keep hearing Doud's speech at the trailhead echoing in my mind: "Our camp is at Bliss Creek meadows in the Washakie Wilderness, 22 miles up the South Fork of the Shoshone River. The elk hunting is some of the best you'll ever see and it gets better every year. But it's also smack in the middle of one of the densest concentrations of grizzlies in the Lower 48. To hunt safely in there you've got to be constantly aware of the bears."

I've come to hunt with Doud because he has twice won the Wyoming elk-calling championship and has a deserved reputation for putting his bow and rifle hunters onto very big bulls. But more important, I've recently relocated from Vermont to the northern Rockies and want to learn how to hunt successfully and unmolested in grizzly habitat.

The wiry 39-year-old beside me in the dark timber, the one with the salt-and-pepper beard and the cowboy hat rimmed with black bear claws, is one of the acknowledged masters at doing just that. For five months each year, for each of the past 11 years, Doud has lived deep in the Wyoming backcountry among the steadily expanding
grizzly population of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

As a result, he has become a serious student of Ursus
arctos horribilis behavior, especially in the bears' encounters with humans. On the basis of his experience, the state of Wyoming now has Doud teach courses for outfitters, guides and hunters called "Safety for People, Safety for Bears."

"My attitude is that the grizzlies have as much right to be in the wilderness as any human hunter," Doud says. "Our goal is to take advantage of the tremendous hunting opportunities here in the northern Rockies while behaving in ways that do not attract bears or provoke attacks. We aim for peaceful coexistence."

Indeed, almost every facet of Doud's comfortable camp is designed with bears in mind. No snacks, no booze, no candy bars, no soda pop, not even used sandwich bags are allowed in the sleeping tents. All food and beverages, other than
water, are stored in bear-proof lockers in the mess tent, which is kept scrupulously clean.

Grain for the horses and mules is stored 20 feet off the ground in an elaborate enclosed cache suspended between six trees. Any fresh elk meat, hides or racks are kept 200 yards from camp on a similar platform. The trunks of the trees that support the cache platforms are wrapped in sheets of aluminum that make them virtually unclimbable.

"By paying that kind of attention to detail, we've never had a bear in camp," Doud says. "Make no mistake, they're all around us. But we don't give them any reason to come in."

Dawn is finally upon us and Doud signals that we should move. We leave the horses and drop through the timber to the edge of the lower meadow and peer out.
Six hundred yards away, across the Shoshone River, the bull we heard in the low light bugles one last time before filtering into the far tree line.

Doud calls to him, attempting to halt his retreat. The bull answers, but he's already going hard up the mountain and deeper into the forest. Doud decides that we will hunt the ridges on this side of the meadow first. If we d't get into elk in the series of finger parks above us, we'll loop toward the bull we just watched disappear.

Even though I'm carrying a .300 Winchester Magnum, Doud asks if I've got my pepper spray canister accessible
before we begin the climb. Doud never carries a firearm when guiding. He relies totally on the spray. And he believes even armed hunters should rely on the pepper gas first and resort to the gun only as a last resort.

"If you study all the information on bear attacks, you'll see that in more than 95 percent of the cases, the spray will stop and repel a charging bear," Doud says. "Besides, it's just plain easier to be effective with the spray than with a gun. The gas canister throws a cloud of defense out in front of you. A bullet's a small thing and I just don't think most people would have the ability or the presence of mind to shoot accurately when being attacked at close quarters. I know I wouldn't."

I pat the pepper spray in its holster on my right hip and he nods. As we climb up into the deep timber, I am aware of the fact that in order to hunt well, we have to break several rules of safe behavior in bear country. We can't make noise that might ordinarily alert a bear to our presence. And we are walking into the wind instead of keeping it at our back. But there's nothing we can do about violating these rules other than to stay hyperalert.

Fifteen minutes later, we come to the edge of a small park. Doud mews on a diaphragm call. Two cow elk appear on the ridge above us, looking down through the falling snow into the trees where we're hiding. After several minutes, they slide to the north, and almost immediately, from much farther up the mountain, we hear the high, three-note song of a mature, rutting bull.

"That one's in the avalanche slide," Doud whispers
urgently. "He's gonna go for the top of the mountain. If we don't move fast, we'll never catch him."

We drop our packs. And now we're sprinting up an acute incline through sagebrush and over loose, snow-clad chunks of stone. In minutes my lungs feel like someone's tossed a lighted match down my throat. My thighs, hamstrings and calves are threatening to charley horse.

At last we reach a plateau of sorts and the snow's falling very hard. We race across the flat into another patch of white bark pine, the preferred habitat of grizzlies in early fall, but I've got no time to be concerned; the bull is screaming nearly nonstop ahead of us not 200 yards. And then he goes quiet.

Doud slows. He slips and peeks, slips and peeks and suddenly ahead we can see where the timber gives way to a second small park and beyond it a dizzying avalanche chute gouged into the side of the mountain. At least 20 cows and three young satellite bulls mill at the base of the chute. But we can't see the herd bull.

A tremendous crash sounds in the timber to our left and for a second I think we've been winded. The breeze, however, is steady and in our face.

"He must have run off a satellite," Doud whispers, pointing in the direction of the crash. "I think he's back that way."

As if to confirm Doud's suspicion, the harem master sounds off again, so close that his chuckle seems to rattle in my chest. We retreat and sneak to where we heard him. Doud eases out from behind a tree, freezes, then slides back to me.

"He's right in front of us and he's a good one," he whispers. "Get out there and take him."

I come out from behind the tree on my knees. Through the timber 150 yards out into the aft end of the park the massive-bodied, 300-class 7 by 6 lays his rack back on his haunches and bellows his dominance into the cold October dawn. My shot takes him through both shoulders and he staggers. The bull is down. His herd panics, then explodes pell-mell straight up the face of the avalanche chute.

I'm stunned. For the first time in my life, I've harvested a big-game animal on opening morning. We walk up to the bull through the driving snow, marveling at the great sweep of his non-typical rack and the incredible bulk of his blond torso. For a minute or so, I'm filled with melancholy at the idea that his thundering bugles will no longer sound except in the snowy canyons of my memory.
Then I think happily how he will feed my family through the coming winter and how wonderful his rack will look on my wall, and I find myself silently thanking him and the wilderness that sustained him all these years.

The first thing Doud says after congratulating me is, "Okay, we've got to be careful now. You haven't just shot a magnificent bull here. You've set a bear bait."

Doud says that research has shown that some grizzlies are conditioned to move into hunting areas in the fall in search of elk carcasses. There's even some evidence that suggests the bears are becoming conditioned to the report of rifle shots and immediately come to investigate.

We slide the safety caps halfway off our pepper spray canisters, and, just in case, I reload my rifle. Then we head back through the white pines to retrieve our gear. An hour later we've finished taking pictures and the snow has slowed to flurries. We look for ways a bear might approach us, then begin to skin and quarter the bull, taking care not to gut him until we absolutely have to;
the entrails and blood will throw a powerful scent stream for miles and we're in no mood for surprise visits. As we work, one person constantly scans the tree line.

When each quarter is separated from the carcass, we throw it across our shoulders and take it downhill some 200 yards. There Doud and I lash the quarters, backstraps and tenderloins to a crossbar we've affixed between two young spruce trees. That done we cut a dozen or so aromatic softwood saplings and arrange these in a dense tepee formation around the meat.

"If you can't get your meat out of the kill area immediately in grizzly terrain, you want to get it at least 200 yards from the gut pile," Doud says. "The bear will always go to the strongest smell first, which is the intestines. Elk meat
itself doesn't have much of an odor, and by covering it with young firs, you not only reduce the scent, but protect it from scavenger birds."

We hang the cape and rack high in a tree another 200 yards away from the meat, then head back to camp. The minute we climb off our horses, Doud has us strip out of our bloody clothes, put them in plastic bags and hoist them up onto one of the bear-proof platforms. (He tells people who don't have such platforms already built to hang food, meat and bloody clothing at least 10 feet off the ground and at least four feet from either side or top supports.) Our knives and game saws go immediately into a pan of bleach and water where they are scrife, I've harvested a big-game animal on opening morning. We walk up to the bull through the driving snow, marveling at the great sweep of his non-typical rack and the incredible bulk of his blond torso. For a minute or so, I'm filled with melancholy at the idea that his thundering bugles will no longer sound except in the snowy canyons of my memory.
Then I think happily how he will feed my family through the coming winter and how wonderful his rack will look on my wall, and I find myself silently thanking him and the wilderness that sustained him all these years.

The first thing Doud says after congratulating me is, "Okay, we've got to be careful now. You haven't just shot a magnificent bull here. You've set a bear bait."

Doud says that research has shown that some grizzlies are conditioned to move into hunting areas in the fall in search of elk carcasses. There's even some evidence that suggests the bears are becoming conditioned to the report of rifle shots and immediately come to investigate.

We slide the safety caps halfway off our pepper spray canisters, and, just in case, I reload my rifle. Then we head back through the white pines to retrieve our gear. An hour later we've finished taking pictures and the snow has slowed to flurries. We look for ways a bear might approach us, then begin to skin and quarter the bull, taking care not to gut him until we absolutely have to;
the entrails and blood will throw a powerful scent stream for miles and we're in no mood for surprise visits. As we work, one person constantly scans the tree line.

When each quarter is separated from the carcass, we throw it across our shoulders and take it downhill some 200 yards. There Doud and I lash the quarters, backstraps and tenderloins to a crossbar we've affixed between two young spruce trees. That done we cut a dozen or so aromatic softwood saplings and arrange these in a dense tepee formation around the meat.

"If you can't get your meat out of the kill area immediately in grizzly terrain, you want to get it at least 200 yards from the gut pile," Doud says. "The bear will always go to the strongest smell first, which is the intestines. Elk meat
itself doesn't have much of an odor, and by covering it with young firs, you not only reduce the scent, but protect it from scavenger birds."

We hang the cape and rack high in a tree another 200 yards away from the meat, then head back to camp. The minute we climb off our horses, Doud has us strip out of our bloody clothes, put them in plastic bags and hoist them up onto one of the bear-proof platforms. (He tells people who don't have such platforms already built to hang food, meat and bloody clothing at least 10 feet off the ground and at least four feet from either side or top supports.) Our knives and game saws go immediately into a pan of bleach and water where they are scr

Hunt Smart. Hunt Fit.

outdoorlife-editor — Wed, 31 May 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Follow our easyfitness plan to get into hunting shape in just 8 weeks

Ask outfitters to identify the leading cause of injury or failure in the field, and they'll usually tell you it's a general lack of fitness among the hunters they guide. Most can tell stories of out-of-shape clients who lasted only a day or two before succumbing to injuries or exhaustion. Mike Murgatroy, an avid bird hunter and manager of the Main Street Gym in Bozeman, Mont., and Liz Ann Kudrna, who runs Body in Balance (a Bozeman Pilates studio), have put together a simple program hunters can follow to get in shape for the upcoming season. It requires only $30 in equipment and will take 30 to 60 minutes a day.

Do these exercises every other day, and take walks on your days off. You'll be surprised at how much better you'll feel this fall.

1 SUPINE LIFT

THE EXERCISE: Lie flat on your back with your feet and palms flat on the floor and knees raised. On a count of two, press down on your palms and lift your hips 5 inches off the floor while keeping your feet stationary. Hold for a count of four, then drop slowly back to the start position. Do two sets of 10 to begin and work your way up to three sets. As you get stronger, try the supine lift with your feet on an exercise ball. You'll have to grip the ball with your toes to hold it steady as you raise your hips.

MUSCLES WORKED: This lift stretches your lower back and works your abdominal muscles, usually the weakest part of the body. The stabilization phase of the exercise strengthens the upper back and neck.

HUNT BENEFIT: Strengthens muscles used when hauling gear all day.

2 TABLE LIFT

THE EXERCISE: Sit on an exercise ball, spine straight, head high, and walk your feet forward, lowering your back onto the ball. Get your knees square to your feet. On a two-count, lift your pelvis and buttocks to create a flat surface along your stomach and back. Hold for a count of four and then lower. Do three sets of 10.

MUSCLES WORKED: The table lift increases general strength in your lower back, upper thighs and abdomen.

HUNT BENEFIT: Increases general strength, stamina and ability to carry loads, like a full frame pack.

3 SITTING LEG LIFT

THE EXERCISE: Sit on the ball with your spine straight and shoulders back. Tighten your abdominals, point your toes and, on a count of two, lift your right leg parallel to the floor. Hold for two, then lower. Repeat with left leg. Alternate for three sets of 20.

MUSCLES WORKED: Builds deep muscles of the abdomen and smaller muscles of the back; also stretches and strengthens the quadriceps and hamstrings.

HUNT BENEFIT: Helps you climb into tree stands or chase elk.

4 SEATED ROWING

THE EXERCISE: Attach an exercise band to a stable object. Sit facing the band's anchor with your knees slightly bent and back straight. Hold straps in either hand. Draw handles toward you in a rowing motion to either side of your hips, hold for a count of two and release on a count of four. Repeat for three sets of 10. For variation, try upright rows as well, where you stand on the band with both feet and pull both handles toward your chin.

MUSCLES WORKED: Seated rows build up the core as well as the shoulders, biceps, triceps and upper back. Upright rows work strands of the same muscles with an emphasis on your wrists.

HUNT BENEFIT: This is perfect if you row a boat to your duck or goose blind.

5 HAND WALK

THE EXERCISE: With the exercise ball in front of you, roll across it onto your abdomen. Tighten your abdomen against the ball. Walk forward on your hands until your knees are balanced on the ball. Hold for two seconds, then retreat. Repeat 10 times for two sets. As you get stronger, walk all the way out and balance on your ankles or toes.

MUSCLES WORKED: The hand walk will strengthen your entire core as well as your triceps and lats.

HUNT BENEFIT: If you're a sheep hunter, do push-ups while you're extended. This will provide the upper-body strength you'll need.

6 DEAD BUG

THE EXERCISE: Lie flat on your back, legs straight, arms to your sides and palms down. On a count of two, raise your arms above you, shoulder width apart, and lift your legs into a seated position. Hold for a count of two and lower on a count of four. Repeat 10 to 15 times for three sets.

MUSCLES WORKED: Stretches the lower back and works the abdominals. It also strengthens the hips, buttocks, shoulders and arms.

HUNT BENEFIT: Builds muscles used to carry heavy packs up hills.

7 SCISSORS

THE EXERCISE: Get on all fours with your hands flat and your toes pointed behind you. Raise your right arm and point it straight ahead. Tighten your abdomen and raise your left leg on a count of two. Hold for a count of two, then lower your right arm and left leg while raising your left arm and right leg. Stabilize for a count of two, then switch. Alternate left and right lifts for two sets of 10. As you get stronger, work to three sets. This can also be done resting on an exercise ball.

MUSCLES WORKED: Works muscles diagonally through your torso and strengthens the entire core of your body as well as the upper back, neck, glutes and hamstrings.

HUNT BENEFIT: Improves balance and agility needed to climb over rocks and ford rushing streams.

8 BALL SQUATS

THE EXERCISE: Stand with your back pressing an exercise ball against a wall. Lower yourself into a sitting position. The ball should roll with you, supporting your lower spine all the way down. Hold for a count of four, and then drive up, again keeping the ball behind you. Repeat for three sets of 10.

MUSCLES WORKED: Improves leg power, especially glutes and quadriceps.

HUNT BENEFIT: If you're planning a strenuous hunt, such as a goat hunt, repeat for five sets of 20. This will build the muscles involved in climbing up or down steep hills.

9 CLASSIC PUSH-UP

THE EXERCISE: Lie face down on the floor. Bring your hands beneath your shoulders, palms down. Breathe in. Get up on your toes, tighten your abdomen and glutes and on a count of two, exhale and push up. Hold for a count of two. Lower during a count of four. Start with three sets of 10, then work up to three sets of 25.

MUSCLES WORKED: A classic exercise, push-ups are great for building core strength, biceps and triceps.

HUNT BENEFIT: Push-ups increase upper-body strength needed for lifting and moving large game.

10 CHAIR DIP

THE EXERCISE: With your back to a chair or bench, put both hands on edge of seat. Straighten your arms, tighten your abs and stretch your legs out. With your chin up, lower your body as deep as you comfortably can, hold for two seconds, then press yourself back up. Repeat for three sets of 12.

MUSCLES WORKED: Builds back, triceps, shoulders and lats.

HUNT BENEFIT: Strengthens muscles needed for toting heavy packs or dragging that trophy deer out of the woods.

11 SUPERMAN LIFT

THE EXERCISE: Lie on an exercise ball. Tighten your stomach and raise your head and arms into a Superman flying position. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and draw back your elbows so your arms form right angles to your shoulders. On a count of two, raise your entire upper body 2 to 4 inches. Hold for two seconds, then lower and extend your arms. Repeat for three sets of 10.

MUSCLES WORKED: Builds arms, upper back, lower back, abdominals, quadriceps, hamstrings, calves and toes.

HUNT BENEFIT: Improves muscles used when you're hunting rough terrain.

12 SLOW LUNGES

THE EXERCISE: Stand with your spine straight, shoulders back and feet in line with your hips. Keeping your left foot in place, take a step with your right leg and sink into the lunge. Watch the toes of your right foot: Be careful not to drive your knee so far forward that you lose sight of them. Hold the lunge for a count of two, then step forward with your left leg and repeat, alternating for a set of 10 for each side. Repeat for three sets on each side. Increase the number of lunges per set as you get stronger.

MUSCLES WORKED: Strengthens hips, glutes, quads, torso and helps balance.

HUNT BENEFIT: Builds muscles needed for strenuous hikes and dragging large game, such as deer or antelope.

Take A Hike

The best starting point for any fitness program is simply to do what the first hunters did: stand upright and walk.

Why it works: "Walking is the perfect exercise for hunters over forty," says Mike Murgatroy, a gym manager and avid bird hunter. "It's low-impact, so it saves your joints, and it brings your heart rate up and keeps it there, which is key for cardiovascular health. Walking will also help you toughen your feet, shed pounds quickly and raise your mood. And other than sitting on a stand, walking and hiking are really the foundation of the sport."

How far is best?: Even if you don't do anything else, walk for at least 30 minutes three times a week. Slowly build your endurance to the point where you're walking at least two miles in that time frame. As you feel more fit, alter your route to include hills. You should also consider wearing ankle weights (as shown above) or throwing some weight in a pack to carry as you're walking. This will build lung capacity and increase your heart rate toward the upper limit of your target range, as well as get your body adjusted to toting the additional weight hunters commonly carry.

Two weeks before the season begins, take longer walks similar to the hikes you'll be doing when you actually start hunting.

Hit Your Target (Heart Rate)

To make the most of walking or other cardiovascular exercise, you should reach and sustain your ideal target heart rate (THR). To determine your THR, first calculate your maximum heart rate (MHR) by subtracting your age from 220 (226 for women). For instance, if you are a 35-year-old male, your MHR is 185 beats per minute (bpm).

When you exercise, your target heart rate should be between 60 and 80 percent of this number. Multiply your MHR by 0.6 and by 0.8 to find your THR exertion range. In the example of the 35-year-old male, this calculates to 111--148 bpm.

Begin your regimen by walking one mile in 25 minutes for five days. After walking 10 minutes, count your pulse and adjust your speed until you hit your THR. Add distance each week and increase speed until, by week four, you're covering two miles in 30 minutes within the target range. For the next four weeks maintain that aerobic workout.

You Blew It. Now What?

outdoorlife-editor — Wed, 31 May 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you fail. Happens in work. Happens in sports. Certainly happens in hunting. Experts will tell you that after failure, you're at a crossroads. One way leads to further anguish. Down the opposite path lies greater success.

CONSIDER VERMONT DENTIST EARL OLSON

For years, Earl had been attempting one of the most difficult hunts I know—bowhunting a giant whitetail buck. Over the course of six years Earl spent nearly seven weeks in tree stands near Edmonton, Alberta, trying to arrow one. He'd see them over the seasons but never in shootable positions. Then early one November day in 2003, after years of effort, it looked like it was going to happen. It was the last evening of a six-day hunt. Earl's tree stand overlooked a logging road at the edge of a woodlot by a grain field where a snowmobiler had just been buzzing around. But Earl remained upbeat and focused.

Around 4 p.m., a full 90 minutes before sunset, a partial eclipse of the sun threw the Alberta countryside into early twilight. Deer began to move. Earl caught movement, pivoted and saw his dream realized: a massive non-typical with five drop tines was approaching on the logging road. It was a mega-buck that had been caught on film and was expected to score better than 230 points on the Boone and Crockett scale.

The deer paused behind brush 23 yards away. Earl drew. The buck walked into his sights at 17 yards. Earl released and hit the deer square in the shoulder bone with an expandable broadhead on a lightly spined arrow, a speed setup with no capacity to break bone. The monster shook the arrow loose in less than 100 yards and soon found a doe to pester.

Earl, understandably, was crushed. He couldn't believe that after six years of commitment to a dream, he'd failed to see it realized. He simply could not believe it. The pain of his failure was almost nauseating.

The disbelief and grief lasted months. Earl talked about it in phone calls over the winter, describing again and again what had happened. This reaction, it turns out, is characteristic of people who eventually turn failure into success: They feel their screw-up fully and painfully, chewing it over constantly.

"Humans are programmed to move away from pain," says Shyanne Smith, a Colorado psychologist and life coach. "If they experience something painful enough, they'll change. It usually starts with retelling the story of their failure, looking for lessons and new meaning in each retelling."

And that's what happened. Rather than give up his dream, Earl changed.

He started the process by giving the blown opportunity a new, more positive meaning. About four months after the incident, Earl told me how grateful he was just to have seen a buck like that in the woods.

"If you can't attach a new, positive meaning to a failure, you'll never move on toward success," Smith says. "It's really the essential step."

By April, Earl had recommitted to his dream. He would return to Alberta. After rebooking, he did something experts like Smith say is also characteristic of people who turn failures into success: He admitted that he had been ill-prepared and set about preparing anew.

"Call this a retooling phase, where you turn an honest, critical eye toward yourself," Smith says. "You figure out why you failed and correct it."

Earl tore his hunting gear and his shooting technique apart, questioning the value of everything. He bought a new bow. He beefed up his arrow weight and switched to a fixed, heavy broadhead. He practiced every day.

By the time he left for Alberta in November, the recommitment, retooling and hours of practice had allowed Earl to reimagine the miss of the big non-typical. The day before he flew to Edmonton he told me he believed he was supposed to miss that buck because there was some other giant out there he was meant to hunt.

Earl got into deer right away, seeing a buck in the 160-class the first morning. Two bucks of equal stature wandered by the second morning but offered no shot. Still, Earl remained positive. After every session in his tree stand, he returned to camp, shot his bow and continued to visualize what to do if presented with the opportunity for a large deer.

At dawn the third morning, a 140-class eight-pointer walked by his stand on the edge of a woodlot. Twenty minutes later, a 14-point, 180-class typical stepped out of a spruce thicket 40 yards inside the woodlot.

Earl took one look through his binocular, then blew softly into his grunt tube. The buck picked up its head and trotted in on a string, slightly quartering to him. The buck then looked up—right at Earl. The hunter froze in place and quickly drew when the buck turned its head and took a step.

Earl held the arrow well back from the shoulder bone, concentrated and released, driving the broadhead down through the buck's ribcage at less than 15 yards. The deer bounded and disappeared back into the spruce thicket where Earl heard it crash. There would be no regrets this time.

SEAN LAWLOR GOT A SECOND CHANCE ON A BIG BUCK

A hydrogeologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Montana, Sean is the best hunter I know. As a boy he learned to hunt whitetails from his father in New Hampshire. As a young man, he ran the mile well enough to race at the Melbourne Games in Madison Square Garden, the world's premier indoor track event.

By the time he was in his late 20s, Sean had incorporated his running skills into an aggressive hunting style that emphasized tracking and moving swiftly through big buck hideouts, jumping deer out of their beds, then hurrying through the woods to make a killing shot. No kidding. He used to do it all the time.

Indeed, if it were not for Sean I would not have killed my biggest whitetail and seen firsthand how doggedness and creativity can turn failure into success.

Back in the early 1990s, northwestern Montana had some of the best public-land whitetail hunting in the country. One Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, we were driving to our hunting area when two mature 10-pointers crossed in our headlights. Sean's father, Doc, was in the truck behind us. He said that a third deer had crossed between us. It was the biggest buck Doc had ever seen—a massive, high-racked 6 by 6 he figured would score in the 180s.

The three bucks were headed up a mountain where Sean's brother David had killed a heavy nine-pointer the day before. The mountain had a knoblike peak where ponderosa pines and tawny grass grew among boulders and ledges. A huge cedar thicket covered the north flank. The bucks had gone in across a flat toward the mountain's west slope, a 2,000-foot stack of forest benches choked in winterberry and jack pine.

Sean drove another two miles, got out of the truck and climbed steeply and diagonally south, hoping to cut the bucks' tracks in the snow. Doc flanked below him. I climbed from the north along the edge of the cedar thicket.

An hour after first light, Sean found fresh tracks. He slowed to a creep, heard a crash and halted. A doe flashed through an opening ahead with one of the 10-pointers right behind her in hot pursuit. As he raised his gun, a second doe blew through the opening followed by the monster and the second 10-point, all of them with their tongues hanging out, all of them climbing hard.

Sean rushed uphill, hoping to catch them on the next bench. No sooner had he reached the plateau than he saw the first 10-pointer go through, still on his doe. Sean brought up his gun. The second doe trotted through the opening. Catching movement, Sean put his finger on the trigger. He saw big antlers. The instant the buck's shoulder came into view, he fired.

The second 10-pointer took two jumps and collapsed. The 12-point leaped over his dead rival and kept on. Sean had killed an excellent deer, but not the one we were after.

"Why would I assume the deer would keep the same exact place in the herd?" Sean kept saying. "I can't believe I didn't make sure before I shot."

Luckily it was not hard to come up with a new, more powerful meaning to the incident: The monster buck was still on that mountain. Even if Sean could not shoot it, he could help hunt it.

We worked the mountain for the next two days, but there were no sightings. On Thanksgiving morning, Sean's father scouted the peak in fresh snow. That night he described what he'd found: Many of the biggest tracks were heading into the cedar thicket on the mountain's north flank. A plan was devised. In effect, we retooled.

An hour before first light we dropped Sean several miles southwest of the peak, way down on the flat. He climbed quartering into the wind, while Doc and I came in higher from the north, more directly into the wind.

Around 11 a.m., in a rain and snow squall, we took stands below the knob. Doc watched a large, steep meadow. Several hundred yards away, I stood in the woods on a narrow shelf north of the peak, watching it and the edge of the cedar thicket.

Sean climbed to the top of the knob, urinated, and then wiped his armpits with a paper towel and hung it on a tree.

The cedars were soppy with snow, rain and fog when he entered the thicket with the wind at his back. Bushwhacking his way through the worst of it, he jumped a heavy-racked 11-point with a split brow tine.

There was a smaller eight-point with him. The big buck tried to trot around Sean, who managed to cut the deer off. The eight tried to get by him in the opposite direction, with the 11 following. He cut them off again. The bucks whirled and reluctantly took off downwind out of the thicket. I saw the deer flash through the woods toward Doc.

I waited for a shot. But the bucks winded him and cut uphill trying to circle. Then they hit the urine and body scent Sean had left. The deer turned and bounded downhill, charging straight at me. I shot the 11-point at less than 30 yards away.

We never did find the monster again, but not a single one of us remembers that hunt as a failure. That's what Smith says is ultimately what turns any loss into a win.

"When you lose, don't lose the lesson," Smith says. "The most successful people are quite often the ones who fail the most. But their attitude about failure is different."

MARK DRURY KNEW FAILURE

Don't believe it? Talk to whitetail bowhunting expert and call maker Mark Drury. He'll tell you that he and his brother Terry suffered more than their share of failures.

"Too many stories to tell," Drury says. "But as we were learning we tried to take any negative and turn it into a positive. We took the approach that if something was working, we did it all the time. If something went wrong, we wouldn't live in the past and moan about it, we'd try to fix it in the future."

Consider Drury's biggest buck ever. For years, he and Terry had been hunting Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. They were successful, but never on the truly huge deer they knew were there.

"We couldn't figure out why," Drury recalls. "We were setting up in the areas with the most big-buck sign—down in the creek bottoms and the bottoms of draws. We'd see tracks everywhere in the soft soil and the densest scraping and rubbing activity. But we'd never see the really huge bucks there. More often, they'd peg us looking down from above or wind us and bolt."

Several years ago, Drury was hunting a bottom where two ridges led to a field. Sign was everywhere. But the 170-inch deer that came off the ridge behind Drury winded him, then spotted him and bolted before he could shoot.

"I had a decent wind—consistent and the right speed—or so I thought," Drury recalls. "With that hunt I decided that the swirls in bottoms are too unpredictable. Big bucks don't like them, and I figured neither should I."

That winter while shed hunting near the ridge behind his old stand, Drury found where the ridge joined a greater ridge, forming something of a T in the woods. The wind was consistent and the slope below led to a food source.

"I put up a stand there solely based on structure," Drury said. "There was no sign. But I figured that during the rut it had to be a major travel corridor."

The first time Drury hunted the stand was the morning of November 9.

"Six or seven bucks came through in both directions after dawn," Drury recalls. "Then the biggest deer of my life came in. He had no idea I was there and walked right in to within five yards."

Drury's 10-pointer scored in the 190s. Since then he has made it a hard-and-fast rule to hunt high for big bucks in the Midwest. Result? The brothers have dramatically increased their success.

"The best hunters are the ones who analyze day in and day out, looking for the positive and also willing to admit their failures and learn from them," Drury says. "Recognizing failure and then changing is the most important thing you can do to succeed."

THE FORMULA FOR SUCCESS

Attitude counts. The right outlook can turn a devastating misstep into the foundation for tremendous success. Here are the stages in that process.

GNAWING GRIEF So you whiffed on that B&C buck you had pegged at 20 yards and can't stop thinking about it. Not to worry. Mulling over your screw-up is not only perfectly normal; it also sets the stage for you to learn from your mistake so you do better next time.

GREATER MEANING If you can transition out of your initial depression by finding a positive message in your failure, you've just taken a huge step toward moving on to bigger and better things. Olsen did it by saying to himself that he was lucky to see a 230-class deer, even though he didn't kill it. Lawlor accomplished the same thing by realizing he could help his friends hunt the monster whitetail he messed up on.

REDEDICATION Armed with your newfound positive attitude, rededicate yourself to the cause. Remember the lessons you learned and translate them into action.

RETOOL Methodically examine your equipment, your tactics, your technique and any other aspect of your hunt that contributed to your failure and rebuild it, even if it means starting over from scratch. Not only will you correct concrete problems, but you will also rebuild your confidence in the process.

The Last Wild Man

outdoorlife-editor — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:00:00 -0500

BART SCHLEYER WASTHE KIND OF GUY you rarely hear about anymore, a John Henry of a man, one wholoved wild places, dangerous carnivores, hunting, science and laughter so muchhe crafted an amazing life around them.

Schleyer was awildlife researcher, an artist, a writer, a philosopher and a consummatehunter. He was killed and eaten by a grizzly while bowhunting moose alone inthe Yukon in September 2004. Virtually penniless at the time of his death, hewas described by friends and colleagues around the world as the happiest manthey'd ever known.

He spent much ofhis 49 years roaming the wilds of Wyoming, Africa, Montana, Alaska, Asia and,finally, the Yukon. He trapped grizzlies and tigers for a living, putting radiocollars on them so they might be studied and preserved. In his spare timeSchleyer hunted with a homemade longbow he based on a 4,700-year-old design andcrafted from Russian ash and tiger sinew.

"Bart was thelast wild man, the most unique individual I've ever known," says KathyQuigley, a veterinarian for the Wildlife Conservation Society who worked withhim in the Russian Far East. "He wasn't interested in career or money; hefollowed his heart and lived for adventure until the day he died." SCHLEYER WAS BORN IN CHEYENNE, WYO., IN 1954. His physician father, Otis, tookhim hunting for the first time when he was 4, tying him into the back seat ofhis jeep as they chased antelope. Otis took his son on safari in Mozambiquewhen he was 10. On the first day, Bart shot at an impala; he missed and startedcrying.

On subsequenttrips to Africa at 13 and again at 17, Schleyer shot impala, gazelles, sables,ibex, wildebeests, warthogs and lions. But when he returned to Wyoming, he wasjust as excited to be chasing rabbits with his slingshot.

"With Bart,the act of hunting was more important than the location or the game," hissister, Claudia Downey, says. "He loved it more than anyone I've everknown."

The year afterSchleyer's return from his last safari, Jim Downey, Claudia's husband,introduced him to bowhunting. Schleyer never hunted with a rifle again.

MONTANA BEARSTALKER

Schleyer wantedto be a taxidermist when he was young, and then an artist. He studied wildlifeillustrations in magazines like OUTDOOR LIFE and took art classes for two yearsbefore transferring to Montana State University, where he earned a master'sdegree in wildlife biology in 1979.

His thesis was ongrizzly bear activity patterns in Yellowstone National Park. Working for thefamed Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team at MSU, Schleyer learned thelive-trapping skills that would one day be the mainstay of his professionallife. He became a master at luring bears into culvert traps, fitting them withradio collars and then tracking them with telemetry devices.

Mark Haroldson,now a supervisor with the team, was Schleyer's research partner on a studydesigned to figure out what bears did when disturbed by hikers.

"Bart's jobwas to get close enough to jump the bears out of their beds," Haroldsonsays. "He got chased up quite a few trees over the years. A lot of peoplethought what he did was insane, but he loved his job and worked hard atit."

He also workedhard at staying in shape. Haroldson remembers Schleyer returning to hiswilderness camps after long, punishing days afield and performing hundreds ofpush-ups, sit-ups and squats with logs on his shoulders.

A Woman's Daymagazine reporter who came to Yellowstone to do a story on bear research endedup focusing her piece on Schleyer. She titled it "The Bronze and BeautifulHeartthrob of Cooke City, Montana." His coworkers jokingly called him"Body Beautiful Bart."

Keith Aune, nowthe research director for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, recruited Schleyerin 1985 for a grizzly study on the Rocky Mountain front northwest of Choteaucountry too steep and unforgiving to work with culvert traps and helicopters.Instead, they used horses and backpacks to bring Aldrich leg-hold snares intothe Bob Marshall Wilderness. They ran traplines for grizzlies in some of thenastiest terrain in the state. Schleyer routinely endured trips of 30 to 40days in the bush, packing 80 pounds of snares and raw meat on his back with abig grin on his face.

He was an expertat building sets that forced bears to step in his snares and then dartinggrizzlies at close quarters. While they were drugged, he treated the bears likehis children, making sure they were safe. Once a bear was collared, he'd followit on foot, sleeping when it slept, eating when it ate, moving when itmoved.

"That wasBart's thing, following right behind them," Aune recalls. "His job,basically, was to trap bears and then stalk them. He'd trap and follow bearsfor six solid weeks toward the end of summer, then come out of the wilderness,take a shower, get his gear together and go right back in with Paul to hunt forreal."

Paul Schafer, abowyer from Kalispell and another MSU grad, was widely regarded as the greatestbowhunter of his time, and was like an older brother to Schleyer. He introducedhim to traditional archery and built Schleyer a recurve that he used to huntelk, deer, moose and bighorn sheep.

Working withbears, hunting with Schafer and dating the occasional beautiful woman were thefocuses of Schleyer's life in the 1980s. He had plenty of opportunities to moveup the career ladder, get his Ph.D., run research teams, make more money,settle down and have a family. None of it interested him. Schleyer wanted to bein the wild.

ALASKA CALLS

"It didn'tmatter if he was doing the grungiest job, he was cheerful," Foster says."In the field, he was a phenomenal outdoorsman, the guy everyone wanted tohunt with."

Schleyer met DaleRoutt in Foster's shop that first year in Alaska. Routt was a lifelong Alaskanwith broad experience hunting and surviving in the bush. But he'd never seenanyone like the Bronze and Beautiful Heartthrob.

"I'll goanother lifetime before meeting someone like Bart again," Routt says."Physically he was a Neanderthal. Intellectually he was brilliant.Spiritually he loved being out in the wildest parts of Alaska. Some of mygreatest days were in the field with him."

Schleyer was agifted moose caller, Routt says—so good that he once called in a grizzly bearwhile they were hunting. Routt had to climb a tree to escape the charge.

In 1992, Schleyerdrew a permit to hunt brown bears on Kodiak Island. Two hunting buddies fromMontana State—Brad Adams, a respected guide on the Alaska peninsula, and JeffBooth, a biologist with U.S. Fish & Wildlife—decided to accompany him. PaulSchafer came up from Montana to film, to back Schleyer with a 12-gauge and tohunt blacktails.

Mid-afternoon onthe fifth day, the four men were on a ridge miles from camp when they spotted ahuge brown bear moving to bed. When they got to 125 yards, Booth and Adamsdecided to hang back and watch the final stalk.

Schleyer andSchafer made it into a gully 50 yards away when the bear heard something, gotup and came straight at them. That's when Adams realized that Schafer was stillfilming; his shotgun was on his back.

"I wasthinking this could get bad real quick," Adams recalls. "But Bartwaited for the bear to step forward at twenty yards and expose its ribs,slightly quartering to him. Then he got up and drew. The bear saw Bart just ashe released, putting the arrow right behind its shoulder. Luckily, instead ofattacking, the bear ran off forty yards, looked back, and then dove into thealders and died. Only Paul and Bart could have gotten away with something likethat."

HUNTINGTIGERS

For the next nineyears, when he wasn't hunting, Schleyer lived in the coastal rain forest of theSikhote Alin Biosphere Reserve near the town of Terney, in the Russian FarEast.

"I don't likeusing the word "trapper' to describe Bart because his skills went farbeyond being able to get an animal to step in a trap," says John Goodrich,the project's field coordinator. "Bart excelled in dealing with them oncethey were caught. He had an innate sense about animals and their behavior andhad tremendous compassion for them."

During his yearsin the Russian Far East, Schleyer met a Russian woman named Tatiana who workedon the project. They began seeing each other and had a son, Artyom.

In 1995, hereturned to Alaska to go on a memorial hunt for Paul Schafer in the BrooksRange with Brad Adams and Jeff Booth. On the second to last day of the hunt,Schleyer spotted a giant Dall sheep and crawled on his back for hours across a50-degree slope to get in range. He shot the 40-inch-plus ram late in the dayat less than 30 yards.

He spent thenight on the mountain with his ram. While hiking out the next day, Booth flewover in his Super Cub, heading home. It was the last time Schleyer would seehis friend. About an hour later, Booth crashed his plane and died.

As Schleyerapproached the new millennium, his friends say he was dealing with thepressures that his lifestyle put on those closest to him, especially hisgirlfriend and son.

"Thetrade-offs were very difficult for him, particularly between hunting and hisfamily and working on the tiger project," John Goodrich says.

As had happenedto him in Montana nearly a decade before, Schleyer began to feel penned in byencroaching civilization in Alaska. In 2002 he moved to Whitehorse in the Yukonto fulfill his dream of hunting stone sheep. "In my opinion, the Yukon wasone of the last places big enough and wild enough to hold him," Keith Aunesays.

DEATH IN THEWILD

Late summer of2004 found Schleyer back in the Yukon. He hunted stone sheep unsuccessfully butwas in high spirits when he called his father, girlfriend and son to tell themhe was going back into the bush to hunt for a moose. He hired a pilot to takehim into upper Reid Lake on September 14. His plan was to stay two weeks.

But when thepilot returned on the 28th, Schleyer was nowhere to be found. The RoyalCanadian Mounted Police were summoned. Evidence found at his camp indicatedhe'd eaten only one meal and had never built a fire. The Mounties discoveredhis raft a half mile from camp before bad weather forced them to end thesearch.

Dibs Williams,Schleyer's best friend in Whitehorse, flew into upper Reid Lake once theweather quit. He found Bart's bow leaning against a tree not far from the raft.He also found his balaclava with blood and hair in it.

The Mountiesreturned and found a human skull later identified as Schleyer's. The Mountiesalso found bear and wolf scat that proved to contain human remains.

Schleyer'sfriends greeted his death with disbelief and profound grief. "To most ofus, Bart was invincible, one of those guys who'd live forever," says Aune."And the idea of a bear getting to him? It was impossible. Couldn't havehappened. We thought he'd have punched the bear in the nose and knocked himout."

Schleyer's sisterand father were shocked by the outpouring of emotion they received in hundredsof cards and e-mails from all over the world.

"We knew Bartwas good at what he did, but we had no idea how well-respected and loved hewas," says Claudia Downey. "We got so many messages that said what agreat loss it was to wildlife conservation and to them personally. When Bartdied, he didn't have much. But I realized after reading all those cards ande-mails that my brother's wealth had not been in money or material things. Hiswealth was in his life, his experiences and his friendships."

This past summer,Schleyer's remains were spread from a plane over his beloved Brooks Range inAlaska. The last wild man had come home.

There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race thatcan't stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam theworld at will. --"THE MEN THAT DON'T FIT IN," ROBERT SERVICE