Hunting Memories, Treasures of a Lifetime

In the first week of June we parked my pickup camper high in the mountains beside the North Fork of The Shoshone just across the river from Pahaska Tepee. Pahaska Tepee means Long Hair's Lodge in the Lakota Sioux language. Buffalo Bill originally built it for a hunting camp, hence the name. Dark comes late at that time of year, and it was about 9 o'clock before we got our campfire going after we arrived. A big game guide from Pahaska strolled over and joined us. He was a wiry character who looked like he had just stepped out of a Zane Grey novel. With an old, black Tom Mix styled hat, worn Levis shoved in to high heeled, stove pipe boots, and a graying, Sam Elliot mustache, he could have been a card carrying cow poke in good standing from the silent movie era. "Name's Jack," he told us. He pulled the makin's for a roll-your-own cigarette out of his shirt pocket, shook some Bull Durham tobacco into a trough of paper, rolled it between his fingers, stuck his tongue out between stained teeth and licked it shut, lit a kitchen match on his thumbnail, sucked in a lung full of smoke, coughed, spit, and began to talk. More gently reared people, I suppose, might have been appalled by his manner. I was captivated. One of the stories he told us was about a grizzly hunt he'd made with a man from Chicago just two years earlier. "We was settin on a dead horse bait in the wilderness five miles up river from here," he began, staring into the fire. "Me and my dude had snuck in thar before daylight. We was hid beside a big log on the edge of a jackstraw mess of blowdown, cross-wind and down from the stink about 30 steps. Shortly after sunup, my dude went to sleep. After while, I hears a little tick of noise just off my left shoulder. I froze, but cut my eyes in that direction, and see a big, boar grizzly ah walkin just on the other side of our log. I could have retched out and touched 'em, but we had the wind on 'em, and he never knowed we was thar. 'Gawdamighty, I thinks to myself. Don't let the dude wake up now!" That ol' griz walks up to the bait, looks around, and starts to feed. I let's 'em get settled, and then I reaches out real slow and puts my hand over the dude's mouth. He wakes up, eases his .300 up over the log and 'Ka-blowie!' Kilt that griz deadurn Hell." During his visit, Ivan and I mentioned a rumor we had heard about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's plan to make it illegal to kill grizzlies - put them on something called an "Endangered List." The old guide stiffened, "I God," he exploded. "I'll hunt them big, sons of bitches as long as I live. And if I have to, I'll kill 'em here in Wyoming and check 'em in up in Canada." Ten years later the rumor became law.