The Twilight Zone of the Huntress

By Kay Evon Sampson

The Twilight Zone of the Huntress is a collection of short stories relaying the author’s adventures over the past 19 years, beginning when she married her current husband. At age 54, Kay Evon Sampson married a big game hunter and soon became one herself.

At 65, she harvested a Kodiak brown bear and a mountain goat on Kodiak

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643141879

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Copyright © 2019 by Kay Evon Sampson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Biography

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Foreword

Come along with me on my journey to adventures I never dreamed would be possible for me to experience and survive. I went from city slicker executive secretary to seasoned world traveler, and along the way I entered my twilight zone: a place where I was caught between the masculine and feminine worlds. I trust you will enjoy reading of my adventures as much as I have enjoyed writing them down for you.

When I agreed to marry Roy Sampson, I agreed to accept a totally new way of life. I really didn’t have a clue about what I was getting myself into. Here I was, a fifty-four-year-old grandmother, agreeing to marry a sixty-year-old grandfather who was obsessed with travel, adventure, and big game hunting. This was a vital part of who he was. For the next eighteen years we traveled all over the world—visiting five continents encompassing twenty countries—and experienced many exciting adventures, some even life threatening: a lion mauling in Tanzania and a plane crash out in the wilderness of Africa. I am now a seventy-two-year-old great-grandmother and, yes, I am still involved in hunting.

In the pages of this book, along with telling you about our many adventures, I provide information presenting positive viewpoints about hunting. Anyone who is exposed to hunting would benefit from reading these passages.

Through experience I learned that there is a time and place for hunting that is needed. Proper management of wild animals is very constructive and has resulted in a healthy wild game population in America, as well as in other countries.

For instance, in areas without proper game management, the deer population grows until it becomes a curse. In a Colorado mountain town, I sat in a restaurant and listened to some folks at the next table recounting how many deer each of them had hit with their car. I don’t think hunters typically enjoy killing animals, even though they may enjoy hunting them. The killing serves a necessary role in proper game management. My husband and I both have the highest respect and regard for all of the animals we harvest. We thank God for each of these animals, and we salvage all the meat we can to put into our freezer.

We seldom buy meat from the grocery store. We hate to see cows penned up in what my husband calls a cow concentration camp, where they are held to be fattened up until they are butchered to provide hamburgers, steaks, roasts, and leather goods. Animals taken in the wilderness by careful hunters have been allowed to live in their natural habitat until humanely killed. Animals in the wild do not typically die a pleasant, natural death: they either starve to death or are taken down by a predator. I have learned that a careful hunter is actually a blessing to these animals. Now, join me as I tell of our many adventures. I don’t think you will be bored—I surely wasn’t.

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to:

My husband Roy, who organized all of these trips

And was there throughout the eighteen years of adventures.

Also to:

My brother Doug Evans and my son Michael Hoffman,

Who continued to aggressively pressure me to

Write this book.

Without these three men,

This book wouldn’t have been written.

I must also give credit to:

Naomi Salmon, who scoured my writing with a practiced eye for any errors and gave much valuable advice and suggestions to improve the content of the book.

Biography

Kay Sampson was born in the state of California in 1937, and for her first forty years, she lived a basically uneventful life. She married young, at age eighteen, and raised three children. At age forty, she suddenly found herself single after twenty-one years of marriage. Now she proceeded to support herself and her twelve-year-old daughter (the youngest of her three children) with art work and as an executive secretary for the next fourteen years, until Roy Sampson entered the scene. When she agreed to marry him, at age fifty-four, she entered a new world of adventure and travel around the world, visiting over twenty countries spanning five continents. In 2002, at age sixty-five, she was awarded the Safari Club International’s Diana Award in recognition of her hunting exploits that year, which included taking a brown bear on Kodiak Island, Alaska, as well as a mountain goat and four species of game in Namibia. Now, at age seventy-two, she is again venturing into uncharted waters with the writing of this book of narratives and poetry chronicling the amazing and life-threatening adventures experienced over the past eighteen years. And, as of this date, the adventures have not stopped.

Chapter One

The Call of The Chilkoot

When I met up with Roy Sampson, my life took a 180-degree turn and I entered a world I had never known. At age fifty-four, I was introduced to the big game hunter’s exciting world of danger and adventure. In my wildest dreams I had never imagined the adventures I would experience, and over the next eighteen years we traveled around the world on hunting trips that often brought exciting experiences, some even life threatening.

Roy and I dated for about two years until in late December of 1991, Roy got his courage up enough to ask me to marry him. He took me to the Grand Canyon and reserved a table at the El Tovar Lodge restaurant. There, overlooking the magnificent Grand Canyon, he asked me to share his life. When I said yes that day, I had no idea of the journey that lay ahead of me. How could I have imagined the scope of the adventures we were to face over the coming years?

We had discovered that we both had a long-suppressed desire to live in Alaska, so that seemed to be the logical place to get married. Off we went to Anchorage in February of 1992. We were married at the Hilton Hotel right after our church service. We hadn’t planned to be married at the Hilton, but our regular church hall was being renovated so the minister leased a meeting room at the Hilton that week. We both agreed that it wasn’t a bad thing to be forced to get married at the Hilton. We didn’t send out invitations—whoever happened to be at church that day was invited. We knew the chef at the Hilton and he prepared a nice buffet for us. We had gone to Costco earlier and bought several cakes, including a chocolate and a carrot cake and, I think, a spice cake. That was our wedding cake.

It was sixteen degrees below zero outside but cozy and warm inside. Since we had paid for a nice buffet, Roy negotiated with the Hilton Hotel and they gave us the two hundred dollar bridal suite at no charge. He quickly cancelled his prior reservation at the Captain Cook Hotel. Our room was several stories up and we could look out over Anchorage and down on the Fur Rendezvous taking place just across the street right below us.

The next morning we bundled up in warm clothing and checked out the Fur Rendezvous. This was not an ordinary swap meet. Where else could you find the selection of furs auctioned off here? Roy bought a full musk ox hide and a couple of very nice beaver pelts. Only the brave would endure the sixteen-degree–below-zero weather to attend this auction. The entire event was held out of doors. No wimps here! These were rugged Alaskans.

We planned a drive up to Fairbanks and then on down to Denali National Park and back to Anchorage. We left for our trip later that day and found the scenery breathtaking, against a backdrop of the Matanuska Mountains with its glacier and raging river. Everything was covered in snow, presenting a virtual winter wonderland.

We drove that day as far as the Sourdough Roadhouse, the oldest operating roadhouse in Alaska, situated on the old sled-dog trail. The roadhouses had been located at the approximate distance a sled-dog team could travel in one day. This was a very quaint little establishment, with very low ceilings in the main lobby area and huge logs supporting the roof. They had huge Alaskan cinnamon rolls, one of Roy’s weaknesses.

The roadhouse consisted of several cabins that had served as a school house, a supply store, and lodgings. There was indoor plumbing, but it was about fifty yards from the cabin. The outdoor temperature was now thirty-two degrees below zero. Obviously, you didn’t want to go to the bathroom during the night. This was quite a change from the bridal suite of the Hilton Hotel. As I recall, this one rented for twenty-five dollars per night. We survived the night and had a nice hot breakfast the next morning and then left for Fairbanks. Our little Chevy S-10 pickup groaned a little when it started that morning. We continued on our trek toward Fairbanks, driving through country that was totally covered in snow, including the dwarf black spruce trees. They stay small because there is such a thin layer of soil for them to root in. The tundra stays frozen basically all year. When we finally arrived in Fairbanks, the outdoor temperature was now down to thirty-six degrees below zero.

There was a lot of snow along the entire length of this trip, and at thirty-six below zero, the snow is squeaky cold. When you walk on it, it really squeaks under your feet. Roy’s little S-10 Chevy pickup didn’t complain too much about the cold and made the trip with no problems. In Fairbanks they provide an electricity connection where you can plug in a heater to keep your engine warm overnight.

We spent that night in a nice bread and breakfast lodge and left the next day to drive down to Denali and on to Anchorage. It was a pleasant trip and the scenery, including the highest mountain on the North American Continent, Denali (also known as Mount McKinley) was a wonder to see. There are really no words to adequately describe it. Years later we were privileged to fly around Denali on a rare clear and sunny day, such as few tourists are privileged to enjoy. Only 20 percent of tourists to Denali are lucky enough to get a clear day when the mountain is visible. Usually it is enshrouded in clouds. A flight really impresses you with the magnitude of Denali. You depart from a landing strip in the Denali National Park and you fly and you fly and you fly until you finally reach the immense side of the mountain; then you realize the entire plane with you inside is just a speck in comparison.

We continued driving toward Anchorage and thoroughly enjoyed the views of Alaska’s beautiful untamed wilderness. Alaska remains as the last bastion of an untamed frontier in America. Thoroughly enjoying the Alaskan landscape again, we were both even more convinced that we wanted to live there permanently.

We left Anchorage the next day to fly back to Phoenix, Arizona. What an extreme change. It was around eighty degrees above zero in Phoenix. Through the years we have found a strange bond between Alaskans and Arizonans. I think they both have a renegade spirit of adventure. There is also that frontier spirit alive in both extreme lands: the extreme heat of Arizona and the extreme cold of Alaska. And it seems as though the people of both states are not pretentious: what you see is basically what you get. No façades, just real people. Both Alaskans and Arizonans have gun racks in their pickup trucks; but Alaskans have guns in theirs.

We lived in Roy’s earth home in Fountain Hills, Arizona, until we could arrange the final move to Alaska. This was a real earth home and was designed like a huge igloo. It was round and had been set back into the side of the mountain; then the bulk of it was buried under tons of dirt. The east side faced a wide, dry riverbed and provided windows and light and a view from that side of the house. Every room had an outside source of light. The living room had a cupola of windows up at the top of the ceiling. The entrance to the front door was at the end of a bridge situated over a window well as large as a good-sized patio. This window well provided light through large sliding glass doors to two bedrooms on the lower level. This structure maintained a very nice, livable temperature. We could basically heat the house with the exhaust from the refrigerator for the majority of the winter.

One time, before we were married, Roy experimented to see how low he could keep his electric bill in the summer. The outside temperature that year was near 120 degrees. The Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport had been closed because the heat prevented lift for the planes to fly. Roy had a pool filter running and he installed a small Coleman camping refrigerator, since he didn’t keep much refrigerated. This allowed him to shut off the big refrigerator. For two months his bill was around 120 dollars total. He did cool his house down at night, mainly using a huge attic fan, which he closed up during the day. Most homes in the Phoenix area of a similar size would have an electric bill of 300 to 500 dollars per month in those days. Roy has a bit of an obsession with insulation. The R rating on the entrance to the earth home was 145 as I recall.

Roy soon revealed that he had planned for some time to drive his small Odyssey motor home up to Alaska. Now that he had someone who wanted to live in Alaska with him, he was anxious to get started on this plan. He had purchased a small wood stove for the Odyssey. That stove was his pride and joy. He had purchased it in Alaska and brought it down to Phoenix to have it installed in the motor home months earlier. The fellows who installed it told him he needed a four-foot length of stove pipe to make it safe; so we had this huge stove pipe sticking out of the top of the motor home. We had to be very careful when driving into a gas station, as some of the covers over the pumps were too low to accommodate the pipe. After several months, and several close calls at knocking it off, we discovered that we only needed about a one-foot extension. That was a relief!

Finally the day came to leave for Alaska. I soon discovered that Roy’s technique was to spend the whole first day of a trip packing and to leave at about 5:00 p.m. and make it to the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot for the night. We spent our first night of the trip at the Wal-Mart parking lot near the highway on the south side of Phoenix (this was about sixty miles south from the earth home in Fountain Hills). The next day we made it to Yuma, Arizona. We were heading south to San Diego, California, to pick up two sea kayaks before we could start heading north to Alaska.

Roy liked to drive about 45–50 miles per hour, and for years I had been called a hot-rod grandma, so this took some adjusting to. One thing that helped very much is my habit of reading. I began to read James Michener’s book Alaska out loud to Roy as we made our way up toward Alaska. This added a lot to our trip, especially after we entered the Yukon.

In Yuma we decided to pull off the highway to find a quiet spot to spend the night. Roy didn’t believe in paying for a spot to park, so he found a place near a warehouse and we settled down for the night. We didn’t know it, but we had chosen to park next to a boat motor repair shop. The revving up of the motors was loud all night, and that, along with the heat, sure didn’t give us much comfort for sleeping. We didn’t have air conditioning in the motor home and Yuma is known for its extreme heat, especially in the summer. I believe it was in mid-June of 1992.

The next day we drove to San Diego, California, to a Kevlar Kayak shop to pick up the sea kayaks Roy had ordered. We picked them up and tied them on top of the motor home, cushioned on several inflated inner tubes. By the time Roy finished tying them on, it was near dark so we stayed that night in the parking lot of the kayak store. The next day we drove to the south edge of Los Angeles and turned onto a side street into a neighborhood that was very quiet. We were looking forward to a nice cool, quiet night’s sleep. Well, this time we were parked near a post office—and they were delivering mail all night. Again, we didn’t get much sleep. We continued on up the coast throughout the next day and finally found a place to spend the night: next to a cemetery. We figured it would be quiet there and thankfully it was!

We gradually adjusted (or I should say I adjusted) to our travel routine and made our way up the coast of California. We took a side trip to Yosemite to see the giant sequoias and El Capitan, then drove back to the coast. In the Seattle/Tacoma area we took some sea kayaking lessons and did some hiking on Mount Rainier. We then continued on up toward Canada.

We crossed into Canada and began our trek up the Cassiar Highway. The scenery was beautiful, so pristine. One night, as we began to look for a place to park, Roy spotted a small landing strip punched out of the woods. The owner was nearby, so Roy asked him if we could park on his airstrip. The fellow was very friendly and agreed to allow us to stay there. As we were preparing to settle down for the night, the man came back and knocked on our door. He said he had just seen two black bears rooting in his dump. Roy asked him to take us down to see them. We hopped into the man’s truck and away we went. Sure enough, there were two black bears at the dump. We watched them for a while and then returned to our motor home.

After the man left, Roy said, Let’s go park by the dump and then we can watch the bears. So we parked at the dump and Roy watched the bears for most of the night while I slept. Little did I know at the time that this would become our routine for the rest of our trip up the beautiful Cassiar Highway. At each little town we came to, Roy would seek out the local dump, and we’d park there hoping to see bears. So our evening scenery was usually a city dump tucked into a beautiful pristine wilderness.

One evening we invited a young cyclist to have dinner with us as we were parked by an awesome beaver dam near the highway. Those beavers had made an impressive creation. We ate fresh homemade chili and fresh cinnamon rolls that I’d made for dessert. I offered to give the cyclist a couple of rolls to take with him and he said, No way, I will eat them right now—and he did! We usually got a late start, so he was long gone when we got started the next day. I prepared a package of food to give him should we catch up with him. Soon we saw him in the distance and when we drew up beside him, he stopped and his eyes really lit up when I handed him the package of food. This young man had ridden a bicycle from California and was planning to go all the way to Anchorage, where he had purchased a yacht he planned to sail back down the inside passage to his home in California.

We finally passed into Alaska and on down to Skagway, the old gold rush town of the 1897–98 gold rush era. Skagway was a true historical town, set amid towering mountains and beautiful waterfalls. We thoroughly enjoyed hearing all about the history of this town, known as the Gateway to the Klondike. There were so many stories about the renegades of the gold rush days, like Jefferson Randolph Soapy Smith and other con men who used their wiles to relieve many of the prospectors of their hard-earned money.

Eventually the town was divided into two factions: the skinners and the skinned. The skinners were more united and stuck together against those they had skinned. Into this arena came Soapy Smith. He was already a practiced con man and he fit right into the scene. He was very instrumental in expanding the activity of the criminal element, introducing the idea of the gambling halls and saloons that sprang up along the main street. Soapy Smith was eventually gunned down and his tombstone attracts tourists to this day.

Back in 1992 Skagway still had the frontier touch, with wooden boardwalks and old buildings. Even though this was July 4th, there were no fireworks scheduled, since the sky didn’t get dark enough to see them here, with the extra-long days this time of year. We learned that they have their big fireworks displays on New Year’s Eve. Even after 118 years, Skagway still has a very magnetic attraction to tourists wanting to learn of the intriguing history of the region.

Roy had been moaning for quite some time about how he’d been wanting to hike the Chilkoot trail for twenty years and no one would ever go with him. I was a city slicker at this time and very naïve about hiking in the mountains—that’s why I volunteered to go with him. I didn’t know about the pain involved then. Now this hike is about thirty-two to thirty-four miles long and goes up the Golden Staircase into Canada and over a glacier and then on down to Linderman Lake (where the prospectors had holed up until spring so they could raft down the Yukon River to the gold strike at Dawson); then you hike on to Bennett Lake and catch a rail car up to a highway where you can catch a bus back to Skagway.

We drove out of Skagway to the old location of the little settlement of Dyea and parked our motor home in a parking lot there at the beginning