Deadfall

It was a long, steep climb back past the main lodge and across the road, around and around the mountaintop till the path became so narrow that we had to get off the ATVs.

The land was barren, except for small bushes of sage and large craggy rocks, which formed the top of the peak.

Karl went off on his own, climbing higher and disappearing behind an enormous boulder, returning moments later with a younger man—about forty—who was his body double. It must have been his son.

The young one smiled more easily than his father and reached out to shake hands. “Good morning, Ms. Chidra. Welcome home.”

She thanked him and introduced us to Junior, as Jansen’s son was known. We expressed our condolences about his cousin, and he seemed grateful for the comments.

“Is it okay to talk here?” she whispered.

“Sure can,” Junior said. “The animals are pretty far off.”

Junior was holding a pair of binoculars in his hands. He raised them to his eyes and looked down and away—miles away, it seemed to me.

“Why don’t you tell Alex and James what you’ve been up to this last month?” Persaud said. “They want to know about hunting the bighorn.”

“Right, then,” Junior said. “From scratch?”

I smiled at him. “From scratch.”

“So, there are four primary kinds of wild sheep in North America. Here in Montana we’ve got the Rocky Mountain bighorn, which is where you might guess they’d be,” he said. “There used to be millions of these fellows just over a century ago. Millions of them. Lewis and Clark probably saw bighorn every day of their travels through here.”

“Hunted to near extinction now,” I said. “And pushed out by a growing human population.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “But then, people like Ms. Persaud, she’s helping bring ’em back. They’re coming back again.”

“But you’re hunting them,” I said. “You and your father are guiding people out here for the specific purpose of putting a bullet—or an arrow—into one of these sheep to kill it.”

Chidra Persaud took the binoculars from Junior’s hands and put them to her eyes. She looked over the landscape below, moving the set back and forth, until she came to a stop. She passed the glasses to me.

“There,” she said. “Can you see them?”

I looked through the lenses but saw nothing. I opened my eyes and looked again. “Dots in that field,” I said. “All I see are shiny dots, like they’re on a curved surface of some sort.”

“That’s it, Miss Alex,” Junior said. “When you see that glow against the browned-out field, that’s a bighorn. The curve is the horn itself, and for some reason, it shows up all shiny-like—the only animal I know to do that. There’s a pack of them down there in the valley.”

“They could be almost anything,” I said, passing the glasses to Prescott.

“Not when they’re curved,” he said. “Not many circular-shaped horns on wild animals.”

“Just how do you help save these creatures, when what you’re doing is bringing people here to kill them?” I said to Persaud, looking at the rifle she was holding, which seemed to me to be a newer model than Karl Jansen had.

“By transplanting scores of them, Alex,” she said.

“What do you mean by transplanting?”

“We capture them alive—tranquilize them and airlift them out in large canvas slings—and send them off to live on reservations all over Montana and the Dakotas.”

“Native American reservations?” I asked.

“Yes, there are seven of them in Montana. I send forty or fifty bighorn to Rocky Boy’s, up north, every year. It’s the reservation of the Chippewa Cree, on the Canadian border. They’re quite happy to have them.”

“Why would you possibly need a high-powered rifle to take sheep alive?” I asked. “And if that’s what you think hunters are doing to preserve a species—transplanting a few dozen a year—I’d be the first to say it isn’t quite enough, in my humble opinion.”

Junior walked away from us, back toward his perch behind the large boulders. Chidra Persaud followed, returning the binoculars to him, and we went behind her.

“Looking for others?” she asked.

“There was a group of about twenty on that ridge across the river, but I must have run them off a while ago,” he said. “Sheep have really sharp senses. They spook easy.”

Some days I felt like that myself.

“Are you looking for Horace?” Persaud said to him.

“Yes, ma’am,” Junior said. “Saw six rams in that herd this morning. Horace—well, he just jumps out at you.”

Persaud turned around to face us. “Let me tell you about Horace,” she said. “Let me answer you by explaining what we’re doing out here.”

“All ears,” Prescott said.

“Most people like you think that the great white whale of North American land mammals is whatever scares you the most—a giant black bear or a mountain lion, maybe a moose that charges when you get too close to its calves. You think those are the game that hunters want most to chase.”

“But you’re going to insist it’s these bighorns,” Prescott said. “And we want to know why.”

“It’s a rich man’s sport, hunting bighorn. It’s more expensive than you might imagine, for starters.” Chidra Persaud rested her rifle against a rock formation twice her height. “Secondly, the opportunities to participate are limited, because of where the animals live. The third thing is that the hunts are extremely difficult, in such remote areas in the West that they can last as long as three weeks without snagging a trophy.”

“How much does it cost for a chance to kill a Rocky Mountain bighorn?” I asked.

“We don’t use the word ‘kill,’” she said. “We call it harvesting.”

“Nothing like a quaint euphemism,” I said, “to make something sound more appealing.”

Persaud powered on. “There are two ways to hunt wild sheep.”

“Legally?” Prescott asked.

“Yes, of course legally,” she said. “There’s a lottery of sorts in Montana. I think it only costs about twenty dollars to enter, and the state raffles off a limited number of licenses—each restricted to a particular geographic area—to hunters.”

“What are the odds of winning?” Prescott asked.

Persaud smiled. “Not very good, I’m afraid. Thousands and thousands of applications come in every year just for residents of the state. Not very many winners. Am I right, Karl?”

The senior Jansen confirmed her story. “I’m seventy-six years old. I’ve been tossing my hat in for a sheep tag since I was fourteen, and I’ve never gotten one.”

“What’s the other way to hunt—or, shall I say, harvest these creatures?” I asked.

“What do you think a big-game hunter would rather have, Alex?” Persaud asked. “Season tickets to a box at Yankee Stadium, right over the dugout, or a chance to find a bighorn—a ram with some age on him?”

“I’d even take a box at Fenway, given that choice. But your folk think otherwise.”

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