ON A HILLSIDE a half mile below us, three rams graze on lush, green grass. A few hundred yards to our left, four young rams are bedded in a dirt patch. And across the valley, on the far ridge, dozens of white dots flicker in my binoculars. Before today, I had never seen a live Dall sheep, though I had read about them, watched videos about them, edited stories about them, and dreamed about hunting them for years. Now there are Dall sheep all around me.
Through my binoculars, the distant sheep look like Mary’s little lamb, fleece white as snow. But through my guide Rod Collin’s spotting scope, turned up to 60X, I can see their stocky, muscular frames. I can see brownish-yellow horns curling back behind their ears. My heart races at the sight. More rams.
“Just young ones,” says Collin, a veteran guide with no wonder in his voice. “We’ll keep working along this ridge.”
We spent the morning riding and then climbing to this ridgetop, and from here we can glass into two basins. There are sheep in both, but so far, neither holds the type of ram we’re looking for: at least 8 years old with horns that curl up beyond the bridge of his nose, or even better, an ancient ram with massive horns that are broomed (broken off at the tips).
This is, after all, a trophy hunt, a term that many Americans and even many hunters are uncomfortable with. This fact makes sheep hunting in the Yukon sustainable and at the same time threatens its future. Very few American hunters will ever get to chase Dall sheep, and the weight of the opportunity weighs heavily on me, even on this second day of our hunt. I very badly want to kill a ram. But even more, I want to be worthy of the chance to do so. Because if I’m being realistic, this is probably the only chance I will ever get.
HISTORY IN THE HIGH COUNTRY
The pursuit of mountain sheep, at least for white North Americans, has always been a niche endeavor, if not necessarily always a prestigious one. In the early 1900s, America’s big-game hunters simply weren’t infatuated with trophy rams the way we are today, and sheep hunting was mostly left to local mountain men. That’s what Jack O’Connor, ’s late shooting editor and a famed sheep hunter, wrote.