Redemption at Windy Ridge

Stalking Sheep and Grizzly Bears

- Dawson Smith

The wind had picked up again, leaden skies threatened and off in the distance a small rockslide clattered. Bill Cash and I were in northwestern British Columbia. The previous few days had been terrible – mud bog after mud bog on the trail ride in, just as we remembered from our last trip into the area. My partner had a grizzly bear authorization in his shirt pocket while I had a Stone’s sheep permit in mine.

We had just spent the entire day stalking a band of 11 rams. In that band, there were two awesome sheep. The biggest was a heavy horned, dark-bodied, heavily broomed-off old character. Another ram had wide-sweeping oak-colored horns curling considerably beyond its nose. While there were a couple more that would pass the full curl test, the two big ones were what we had come the long way from our hometown of Prince George, British Columbia to find.

We had spooked them off a mountaintop first thing that morning when we foolhardily crested a ridge astride our horses. As they fled across the open bowl, we sat down in the blustery wind and watched where they went. A few hours later, we headed after them. Late that afternoon I had finally crawled up a rockslide, peered across the abyss that lay between the bedded rams and myself, picked out the exceptionally wide ram and shot. Then I shot again… then another…then maybe a couple more. I was shooting a .30-06, and in fact, I hadn’t even seen where the bullets landed! Bill kept looking at me in a quizzical way during the four-hour hike back to the waiting horses. We were camped low in a valley about an hour’s ride from a vantage point we aptly named “Windy Ridge.” That’s where we had busted the sheep earlier that day.