I’VE HAD FOUR shot opportunities on goats in my life, and none of them has gone especially well.
First there was the aoudad in West Texas, where I missed a 450-yard shot before connecting on a closer follow-up. (Aoudad are known as Barbary sheep, but they’re genetically closer to goats.) Next there was the bull tahr in New Zealand, where I made a good shot but watched the goat scamper across an unscalable (for a human) crevasse. We had to retrieve him with a helicopter. Then there was the mountain goat in Alaska, which I also hit well (multiple times) before it tipped off a massive cliff, never to be seen again. And lastly, there was the feral goat on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. I took a bad rangefinder reading by hitting the grass in front of the billy and ended up shooting below him, my arrow shattering against the lava rock and spooking him and his tribe.
So when I found out that I’d drawn a once-in-a-lifetime archery mountain goat tag in Utah, I was overcome not with excitement, but rather with a feeling akin to dread. I’d been putting in for the tag almost as an afterthought, like buying a Powerball ticket at the gas station simply out of reflex, not because you actually expect to win, and certainly not because you’ve ever considered the consequences of winning.
But it didn’t take me long to