Here is what I published in the last PBS Magazine:
Arrows into Mongolia
By: Steve Hohensee
How can I begin to describe what it is like to hunt the Gobi Mountains of Outer Mongolia, in the land of Genghis Kahn? I am as of yet, still learning about this hub of Asia, nearly antipodal from my home in Juneau, Alaska. My companion Rick “RicMic” McGowan and I have been blown underground, weathering out a storm of incessant winds that would destroy a ship at sea. We have been sprayed with flying gravel and choked in clouds of brown dust. As of yet we have yet to learn of our success or failure at bowhunting for the elusive Gobi ibex but as of the moment these rock bounders need only fear the abundant wolves, the stealthy snow leopards, and the winds of the East.
For five fays we have labored up and down steep rock outcrops and chutes of loose rock fighting the angle of repose. Dry grass awaits the remnants of snow to melt, to trade the frozen white for the green of life. Life for the plants themselves and the majestic ibex!
My boyhood dream, at least one of them, has been to hunt the ibex of my Bavarian ancestors, the scimitar horned cliff dwellers of the four color National Geographic books given to me by Aunt Trudy as Christmas presents over the years of my youth. My adulthood pragmatism says any variety of ibex will suffice.
Twelve month ago I had laid my weary credit card in front of Dennis Kamstra at the PBS biennial gathering in Salt Lake City. Several of my brothers of the bow were close to my side that day, visiting naively. Larry Yien was the closest and hesitated at my offer of a partner eyeing me suspiciously when I said he could serve double duty as a translator. My occasional partner in adventure, RicMic unknowingly stepped up to see what Larry and I were up to and after one question of “how much?” said “OK”.
A full twelve months later and we were on our way but almost not! Just days before our departure we received a brief e-mail from Dennis saying that the season may be cancelled. It wasn’t clear if it was a trophy import issue or an issue of The Mongolian government canceling the hunting season. Dozens of e-mails and phone calls later and three days to departure and I asked the question one last time to be 100% clear, “is it LEGAL to hunt ibex in Mongolia while we are there, yes, or no?” We eventually received the answer “yes” from the outfitter in Mongolia and we were back on schedule, just hours before pulling the plug on the whole trip.
RicMic convinced me we should take a few extra days in Beijing and for a whopping $303 we had airport pickups, two days of touring Tien-a-men Square; the Forbidden City; including the Emperor’s Palace; the Summer Palace; The Great Wall; etc. and also three nights in a hotel. Perhaps the highlight was a tour of a silk factory with six silk clad runway models showing us what man can do to beautify moth cocoons and the show was done for our eyes only! It was quite interesting to see just how friendly the Chinese people are and it was routine but never tiring to be sought out to pose with them in photos; their camera, our camera, they didn’t seem to care.
We looked out across some very steep and rugged mountains from the Great Wall, the outer of three great concentric rings built to keep the warring Mongols at bay. I stood on the wall squinting to see back into time, at the horse bound Mongols laden with sheaths of arrows, short stout recurve bows at their sides.
Contrary to history this two-man invasion came to Mongolia by way of China armed with recurves and longbows, the same tools that sculpted history by many men in this region, now returning as friends and in peace. Perhaps the first archers with fully man powered bows to feel the stinging sand and stalk the ibex in hundreds of years.
We flew from Beijing to Ulan Baatar in less than three hours and once again played the game of wait and see. We strolled through the town square and learned about the horse-bound man on the statue, “Sukhbaatar”, a national hero that made a contract with Lenin declaring the independence of Mongolia from China. Speaking of horses, I asked Amraa, our interpreter to order horse for me at the restaurant at lunch time. Amraa spoke excellent English, having lived in Ohio for a year and a half of all places, but something got lost in translation, or perhaps RicMic was involved in a cruel joke. The interpretation went from “Steve wants to try horse meat” to “Steve likes horse meat and wants to eat it every other meal”! On second thought, this time RicMic is probably innocent as he was fed horse meat routinely as well. It was ok, just dry and a bit chewy.
The Gobi Desert, the coldest in the World, is interwoven with short yet very rugged volcanic mountains and is our ultimate destination. Nomadic people still drift with the rangeland grasses, packing up their homes called a “ger” (ill-favored Russian term is “yurt”) in a mere hour. Another day, another flight, this one took us south into the Gobi Desert to the city of Dalanstadagad. A three hour drive and through a mountain pass and we were greeted at the village of Bayandalai by the town well, heavily iron-clad to protect it from any runaway vehicles. A coal fired hot water plant constantly belched out smoke so black that a tree-hugger would die of cardiac arrest at the sight. The village is laced with gers and ramshackle Soviet-vintage buildings, at times with satellite dishes or solar panels attached to their roofs. We unloaded our gear into one of the buildings the Mongols referred to as a hotel and which would serve as our base camp.
March is cold in the Gobi as snow hangs on for dear life. We drove up a series of gravel bottom box canyons that first morning before going on foot, slowly climbing up a frozen hillside and tucked out of the wind to glass for ibex. We of course didn’t know what to expect, ibex everywhere or days of searching before our first sighting. We eventually spotted a couple nannies and a small billy before we ran a ridgeline to search in another canyon in which we promptly located a group that included several nice billys bearing in excess of three feet of horn. Several other groups of ibex moved out of an area over a mile away and we soon learned why when a pair of large white wolves appeared.
On the second day we climbed a new ridge overlooking an extremely rugged canyon but we sure didn’t find many ibex. We traversed at the base of a cliff and our guide pointed to the trail in the snow where a snow leopard had run the ridge some days before us, each track being about three and a half inches in length. Later in the day we climbed into a saddle to glass for game after digging out our Russian “jeep” which had become high-centered in a snow filled ditch. The wind screamed through the saddle and sucked tears from our eyes. My bow went airborne as RicMic reached out and caught it before it was blown off the mountain.
We were getting up very early to drive the hour plus to and from the mountains each day so we set up a spike camp at the head of a canyon near a wolf killed camel skeleton. The skull is quite interesting with a couple sets of canine teeth which I pulled for my buddy and future dentist, Benny Pinney.
The ridge above camp provided a nice vantage point and we spotted a small band of ibex including one old billy with a gorgeous multi-colored hide and a scar on his left flank. One third of his left horn was broken off and the Mongols assumed I wouldn’t want to try for this “damaged” billy but he was such a magnificent warrior that I quickly dispelled their assumptions. A common theme for the trip was too many eyes and swirling winds and one of the few stalks of the trip ended quickly. The ibex are very much on the ball and often times one or more animals will act as sentries as the other animals quickly head out into feeding areas devoid of any cover that would conceal predators. The sentries quickly catch up to the main group before a hunter even remotely has a chance to sneak to the next ridge and peer over.
On one set of ridges we followed I found another set of snow leopard tracks and a piece of man worked flint. We located a couple groups with big billys and actually managed to stalk into 150 yards of one of these animals but the swirling wind deceived us again on this attempt. Two of these billys were absolutely huge with horns headed towards the four foot mark and the multi-colored coat of what I suspect are the most dominant of males. The canyon floors are littered with the bones, especially the skull and horns of those individuals that have succumbed to wolves, snow leopards, the ravaging winters, and the effects of gravity. Evidence of horses, camels, yak, ibex, and even the Gobi argali slowly turn to dust in the wind.
I was developing a violent head cold which got worse with each passing day. I stuck it out pretty well for a few days but eventually it fully caught up to me and we headed to the village to regroup and search out some modern medicine. RicMic had been nursing a sore leg and we hadn’t fully caught up from traveling half ways around the World so we really needed a day to catch up. Later in the day I was feeling a bit better as I had located some suspect appearing white powder rolled in little pieces of white paper and labeled as a cold remedy, manufactured in Eastern Europe but hey, it worked.
Earlier in the trip I had told Amraa that I wanted to ride a camel and he had pulled through and was able to make the arrangements. We visited a nomadic family and were offered a ride on their camels. These camels are the Bactrian variety, the ones with two humps and are huge animals with long hair that the nomads use to braid into rope. Riding a horse is kind of an up and down bouncing affair but riding a camel is more of a back and forth rocking motion. It was quite disconcerting when my camel started to stand while I was sitting on its back as it alternately straightened its legs front to back to front again and ultimately ended with me being way up higher in the air than I anticipated. We found these camels to be quite entertaining with their hollow sounding bellows and animated facial expressions.
We were also invited into the Nomad’s home, a beautiful ger framed by wooded lattice works with carved ridge poles all covered with a double layer of thick, colorful wool felt. The visit began with a snort of snuff passed around the room; fine grained tobacco from an ornate bottle. We were also offered food from a large bowl, goat cheese, hard cheese curd, and some elaborate sort of bread with a pressed on pattern.
The following day we were awoken by the sound of jets taking off but there were no run ways for a hundred miles! WIND!!! The wind was screaming across the desert plain and snapped off a utility pole, pelting us with gravel and brown dust as I described previously. RicMic returned from the outhouse we affectionately referred to as “The Slot” and declared that “you couldn’t stand on the mountain today”. Oh well, RicMic is starting to feel sicker and I’m still not back to half speed. Dust is leaking into the hotel around the windows sill and doors and coats our noses and throat. The Mongols said it was the biggest wind storm they had in the past five years.
The following day and we were back in the mountains and saw ibex but nothing too exciting happened. Our ninth and second to last hunting day was April 1 and my journal notes reads: “April Fools Day and we’re the fools!”. The wind is once again howling although not as bad as two days prior, bad enough to blow us off the mountain and keep us in the village. In the afternoon we took a drive out onto the plains, southeast of town where the whitetailed gazelle roam. They reminded us of our own pronghorn of the western states prairies. Our ever intelligent driver comes up with the bright idea that these animals should be chased by the vehicle. RicMic and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes once again. This sort of thing seems to happen all too often on these kinds of trips, perhaps too much testosterone combined with too many “SCI-mentality”, “method doesn’t matter” hunters in the past.
Our last hunting day and we had both pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that the only way that we were going to arrow an ibex was by random chance or shenanigans. These critters were wired tight and had phenomenal senses and the sentries always were on guard. I know several of the compound crowd have killed these ibex but I really suspect something came into play that wasn’t with us on this trip, be it time of year such as the rut, more men/resources put into driving the animals to ambush spots, or just shear luck, which I’m not sure. Similar stories were shared with me by PBS member Rich King from Montana, when he returned from his October hunt.
And so it ended, almost. I awoke early on the start of our return travel day. Amraa entered the hall from the back room and had been in a fight. He said some guy had his jacket and flying fists ensued. Amraa had a fat lip, scrapes, and a couple other marks on his face. Then the truth started to come out. Next I found out that Tsogoo the driver was also in the fight and was bleeding from his lip like a stuck pig. Later I learned that Badrakh, the cook was also in the fight, three against five local guys over some local girls (what else). Tsogoo sucked on tissues for the next three hours in between spitting blood out of the truck window and had stitches in the larger city of Dalanstadagad prior to our flight back to Ulan Baatar.
We had a nice extra day prior to our departure back to the states doing the tourist thing in Ulan Baatar. Although this trip really didn’t turn out to be a dream bowhunt, it really was an excellent adventure but I’d take an awesome bowhunt in a less adventurous destination most any day.
“I like going places where I can actually SHOOT at game” and “I get tired of carrying arrows around ‘til the feathers are all faded” –RicMic, Bayandalai, Mongolia, April 1, 2007.
Topic: trad marco polo and ibex (Read 712 times)
