This story, “A Bowhunter in the Cassiars,” appeared in the March 1980 issue of Outdoor Life. Tommy Frye’s world-record mountain caribou is now the No. 3 biggest bull ever taken with a bow. His No. 4 Canada moose is now No. 44.
My guide, Gene Overton, and I had tied our horses in the timber and walked out on a jutting point of rock that overlooked a small lake, a net work of streams and low-lying brush grown meadows below us. We got our spotting scopes into place and settled down to do some looking.
I hit pay dirt shortly. I caught a flash of sunlight reflected off some thing polished, and when I focused the scope on it I was looking at the wide palms of a bull moose bedded down in the brush below.
“I’ve found a bull, and he looks pretty good,” I told Gene.
He found the moose in his scope. “He is good,” he agreed.
We_took a long look. Two things were certain. The bull was more than ordinarily big, and he carried a spectacular rack.
“What do you think?” I asked Gene finally.
“I think he’s what you came to British Columbia for,” the guide said quietly. “Not much chance we’ll find anything better.”
“Can we get close enough?”
“I think so, if we work things right. We’ve got a good steady wind. If it were shifting around it would probably give us away. But this one will hold, and if we keep it in our faces we ought to be able to put you where you want to be.”
In this case, where I wanted to be was literally on top of my target. I was bowhunting, and I didn’t want to release an arrow at a trophy moose at more than 20 yards.
I had fold Gene that earlier, and he had given me a dry grin.
‘You think now you want to get within 20 yards,” he said, “but once you ‘re there you may have second thoughts. A bull moose is an unpredictable critter at best, but they’re in the rut now, and when that happens they go plain crazy. If one comes for you he looks as big as a freight car, and he gets bigger with every step. I’ll put you as close as I dare, but I’d rather see you try for a grizzly at 20 yards than for a bull on the prod.”
It wasn’t advice I liked to hear, but I knew it was sound.
The guide and I gave the distant moose a final look with the scopes, marking his location precisely.
“Let’s give it a try,” Gene said at last.
We went back and untied the horses, heaved ourselves into the saddles and started down off the mountain toward the brushy meadow.
I was hunting in the Cassiar Mountains in northern British Columbia, Just south of he Yukon border. Those mountains are among the fin est deep-wilderness hunting areas in North America.”
Their rugged slopes and high meadows have yielded some magnificent trophies, but with fw exceptions the trophies have been taken by riflemen. Not many bowhunters have challenged the Cassiars.
In my case, however, it would have to be bow or nothing.
I’m 43 years old, and I live in the small village of Lovettsville in northern Virginia, 40 miles up the Potomac from Washington. My work is right-of-way supervisor for a power company.
A native of Virginia, I have hunted since I was big enough to pull a trigger, and for the last 25 years I have been hooked on target archery and bowhunting. All hunting is good, but for me the challenges of bowhunting, the handicaps under which the hunter puts himself and the odds he gives the game he is after, combine to make it the last word in field sports. I have done almost no hunt ing with a gun since I began to use a bow.
I have taken my share of awards on the target range, both state and sectional. I have captured the mid Atlantic championship in the bow hunters’ division of the National Field Archery Association several times, and the national championship once. My trophy animals include some two dozen whitetail deer, a black bear and two wild boars. And in 1976 I killed a Colorado mountain lion that stands high on the Boone and Crockett record list. I’m a member of the advisory staff of a leading maker of compound bows. All in all, it was only natural that I had dreamed for years of an archer’s hunt in the Cassiars.
I knew the essential first step would be to find the right guide, one who understood the mentality and requirements of a bowhunter and would contribute his share of the extra effort such hunting requires. Guiding a client who relies on a bow rather than a rifle poses some special problems, chief among them the need for shooting at very close range.
I finally picked Gene Overton, on the basis of his reputation as one of the top guides and outfitters in the Cassiar country. Gene was 43, from the town of Cassiar, and everything I heard about him was good.
When I contacted him it was clear that he understood the difficulties of bowhunting, but he was entirely willing to guide me and assured me he’d do everything possible to give me a quality hunt and get me the trophies I hoped for.
I wanted a grizzly, a moose and a mountain caribou, and I wanted good ones. I knew it was a big order, but I thought that with a little luck and a capable guide it could be done. I booked a hunt with Overton, starting in the latter half of September 1978.
I flew to Edmonton, Alberta, on September 13. From Edmonton I went on to Watson Lake, just north of the British Columbia-Yukon border, and on the afternoon of September 15 I loaded my gear into a single-engine aircraft for the hop to Overton’s base camp on a lake in the Cassiars. He was there waiting for me.
Virginia had been hot and unpleasantly humid. Here in these northern mountains the air was clear and brisk, with the temperature in the 40s. At least I was going to like the weather, I told myself.
Gene gave out a single series of low grunts, and the moose swiveled and came crashing through the brush like something gone mad.
That evening Gene and I mapped our plans. He suggested I have a try for a grizzly first, and that suited me, for that was the trophy at the top of my list. Another hunter had killed a moose a few days before, an easy ride from camp.
“Bears are sure to find the leavings sooner or later,” the guide said. “They may have found ’em by now. We’ll ride out there in the morning, and if things look good we’ll build a blind. Your best chance for a grizzly will be at that moose kill.”
When we got to the place the next morning, he was proved right. At least one bear had found what was left of the moose and worked on it. The tracks said grizzly.
Gene picked a thicket 25 yards downwind from the moose remains.
“Close enough?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Just right,” I told him.
It took about an hour to put together the kind of blind I wanted. I needed to be well hidden but have a clear shot at any bear that came in. When we were through we got back on our horses and headed for camp. The bait watching would start the next morning.
It was five miles to camp, and the horses were moving at a walk along a gentle slope when Gene pulled up and went for his binoculars.
“There’s a good bull moose feeding down there,” he said. “In the thick brush next to that meadow.”
I found the bull with my own glasses, and he looked very good indeed. My pulse started to race. Was I going to have the incredible luck to take a trophy moose the first forenoon of the hunt?
“We’ll ride higher and get a better look at the meadow,” Gene said.
“Maybe there’s a way to sneak up on him.”
When we reached the crest of the slope we spotted two cows bedded down not far from the place where the bull was feeding. But the wind was in our faces, and there was no chance of a stalk.
“We’ll leave them alone,” Gene decided. “Maybe they’ll still be there tomorrow, and you can try for him if the grizzly will give you time. Anyway, I think I can find you a better head than he has.”
We rode out to the blind right after breakfast. The bear had returned and fed in the night, and I settled down for a long vigil, full of confidence.
But I’ll confess that waiting in a blind 25 paces from a pile of smelly refuse that you know a grizzly thinks belongs to him is likely to give a bowhunter certain reservations. However deadly his equipment, he knows it has little shocking power and almost never makes an instantaneous kill. Any arrow-shot animal, even a deer hit in the heart, dies from hemorrhage and often covers a fair amount of ground before he goes down. In my situation, if the bear located the source of what had hurt him he’d have to come only 25 yards to be on top of me, and he’d almost certainly live long enough after my arrow sliced into him to do that.
I was carrying a Jennings compound bow with a pull of 65 pounds, and my arrowheads were the razor blade type. I knew I could kill any grizzly I hit. The question was whether I could kill him quickly enough. I reminded myself that Gene was with me in the blind with a rifle, ready to back me in case of trouble, and I put my worries aside.
Just incidentally, when I go after moose and grizzlies again, it will be with a 70-pound bow. Both animals are big and tough, and the bowhunter needs all the power he can handle.
As things turned out, there was no need for me to feel concern about what would happen when I drove an arrow into a bear. The silvertip that had laid claim to the moose leavings did not come to feed in daylight.
Gene gave out a single series of low grunts, and the moose swiveled and came crashing through the brush like something gone mad.
Sign showed that he returned each night, but from dawn to dusk we watched the bait in vain. And finally he stopped coming altogether, maybe because there were not enough scraps left to bother with, or perhaps because of the blind and the man smell around the place. Gene wrote me later that after I left he came back and cleaned up everything.
In the meantime, we were seeing moose almost every day, and another bowhunter in camp, Glenn Hisey from Chatfield, Minnesota, had taken a good trophy bull.
“We’re wasting our time,” Gene told me finally. “I think we better get you a moose.”
I was heartsick at giving up the grizzly hunt, but I had no choice. I knew the guide was right.
Thin ice formed on the lake that night, and when we rode out the next morning the ground was patched with a light fall of snow. But as soon as the sun began to warm the air, the snow disappeared.
We had ridden a couple of hours when we tied the horses and began to glass, and spotted the bull I told about in the beginning. Half an hour later we were back in the saddle, riding down toward the meadow where we had seen him.
We tied the horses again, in thick timber 600 yards from the place where we hoped he’d be waiting for us, and moved carefully ahead on foot. Gene’s prediction of a steady wind was holding up, and it was entirely in our favor.
As nearly as I could figure things, we were almost on the moose when something happened that I had never expected. We saw or heard no sign of him, but all of a sudden we smelled him!
It was an unmistakable animal smell, strong and offensively rank. “He’s not far away,” the guide whispered. “Be ready for him.”
I was ready, with an arrow nocked and every nerve in my body as taut as a fiddle string. We inched ahead, one slow, noiseless step at a time, and then we saw the packed-down grass of the bed where he had been lying.
“We’ll follow our noses,” Gene said with his lips close to my ear.
We moved on a few steps, with the stench of rutting moose thick in the air. Then Gene came to a halt and pointed silently to the right. A cow moose was standing in the open there, about 100 yards away. The bull was nowhere in sight, but it was a safe bet he was not far away.
The guide motioned me silently to get down, and both of us went to our knees in thick brush.
“We’ll spook ’em if we try to get closer,” Gene whispered. “We’ll try to coax him to us instead.”
The wait was short. The bull stepped suddenly out of the willows and alders only a few yards from the cow.
It was the first close look we had had at him, and he took my breath away. He was bigger than anything I had hoped for, and his antlers matched the rest of him. I realized in that first second that an average man could lie across his broad palms and hang over only a few inches on either side.
My guide didn’t give me much time to admire him. “Ready?” he asked. I nodded and brought my bow up.
Gene gave out a single series of low grunts, and the moose swiveled and came crashing through the brush like something gone mad. Rage and lust were written all over him. I had time to notice that the coarse hair on his shoulders was standing on end. At 25 yards he stopped and turned broadside, I suppose trying to locate the cow that had invited him.
I let the bowstring slip off my fingers, and saw my arrow bury itself low in his side, just behind a front leg. He spun away from us and went crashing back the way he had come.
When he chooses, a bull moose can move through thick cover almost as silently as a shadow. But when he is fleeing from danger and doesn’t care who knows it, he makes as much commotion as a freight train. This one broke brush for 60 yards. Then he slowed and began to trot in short circles, and I expected him to go down.
But at that instant one of the cows we had seen with him earlier spooked and bolted in front of him, and he lit out be hind her as if he were unhurt.
One of the first rules of bowhunting, if you get a good hit on an animal, is to give him time to bleed to death before you track him.
Gene and I agreed we’d give this big bruiser half an hour. That was the longest 30 minutes I can remember. The guide thought my arrow might have hit too low, but I had studied the anatomy of game enough to know where the heart lies, and I was confident I had put my shot where it belonged.
Finally, after what seemed hours in stead of minutes, the guide stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.
The find was easy. There was a blood trail a ribbon clerk could have followed, and at the end of it, 400 yards from the place where I had released the arrow, the moose lay dead.
When we put a tape on his rack, it was hard to believe. Green and rough measured, he scored 209 points, with a 58-inch spread. The No. 1 Canada moose on the Pope and Young record list, taken in British Columbia in 1968, stood at 201 4/8. I knew my bull would drop in drying, and I could not be entirely sure of my own measuring. But I was sure I had killed a trophy that would stand close to the top.
The rack has been scored now by an official Pope and Young measurer, after drying. It ranks fourth on the list, at 193 points.
My caribou hunt was next. It took us two days to pack the moose back to base camp and get ready to move to a spike camp in caribou country. When we got there we found two inches of snow on the ground, and during the evening the thermometer plummeted to 15, with a raging wind that made it seem a lot colder. Gene and I gathered wood, and around a roaring fire he told me what to expect.
When he chooses, a bull moose can move through thick cover almost as silently as a shadow. But when he is fleeing from danger and doesn’t care who knows it, he makes as much commotion as a freight train.
“These mountain caribou are different from the barren-ground kind,” he explained. “For one thing they’re bigger, and their racks are heavier. A good bull will go better than 400 pounds.
“They travel in small bands, a dozen or two, and they don’t make the long migrations the northern caribou do. But they are constantly on the move. That makes them hard to locate, and they’re wary enough that they are hard to approach, too.”
We hunted for six days. ln that time we saw only one bull big enough to satisfy me, and there was no chance for a shot at him. He was running at 80 yards, the wind was blowing hard, and the situation was hopeless for a bowhunter. The last thing I was willing to do was risk losing a wounded animal.
On our way back to camp late in the afternoon of the sixth day, fate finally relented. We spotted a small band of caribou a mile away, and one of them was a bull far bigger than the one I had passed up.
“It’s too late to go after them. We’ll try to find them again in the morning,” Gene decided.
That was a long night, and I slept badly for the first time since my long hunt began. Two questions went round and round in my head. Would I ever lay eyes on that caribou again, and if I did, was there any chance I could get close enough for a shot?
We rode out of camp shortly after day light and headed for the spot where we had seen the animals the day before. We were in high country now. Timber ended just above 4,000 feet, and above that the mountain slopes were open, with very little cover. We topped a 5,000-foot ridge at midmorning, climbed off the horses just below the crest and walked up for a look.
The caribou were feeding on an open slope across the valley below us, and the big bull loomed like a pine tree in the desert.
“Can we get up on them?” I asked Gene.
“I think so. Not from this side, be cause the wind is wrong. But maybe we can ride all the way around the valley and come in from the other side. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying. That’s a good bull.”
The ride around the valley took us al most two hours, and I was on pins and needles every minute. At timberline, some 500 yards below the crest of the ridge where we hoped to find the caribou, we tied our horses. I was readying my equipment when I heard Gene cutting a small evergreen.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
He grinned. “Well, when we get up on that ridge we won’t have enough cover to hide a rabbit,” he explained, “so I thought I’d take some with us. If we’re real lucky the big bull will be just over the ridge, and we won’t need these two trees I’m cutting. But I expect the whole band will be out of range down the far slope, and in that case the trees will come in handy. You ever pretended to be a tree?”
“No, but I’d pretend to be a water moccasin if it would get me a shot at that bull,” I assured him.
We approached the top of the ridge very carefully and quietly. We went the last few yards on our hands and knees, lay flat, and rested for a minute before we looked over. The wind was in our faces, blowing up the slope, and the caribou were in plain sight 500 yards away. But there was nothing between them and us except short sparse grass, waving in the wind.
There were nine in the band, five feeding, four lying down. The bull was on his feet, and there was no question about his size.
“There’s only one chance,” Gene told me in an undertone. “That’s to walk right at them behind these two trees. We’ll move slowly.”
“You mean we’ll stand up and walk, holding the trees?” I asked in disbelief.
“That’s what I mean. I’ll take the trees and go first. You keep right behind me and have your bow ready. When I walk you walk. When I stop you stop. We’ll take it real slow, and it wouldn’t hurt to pray a little.”
To my surprise, Gene’s scheme worked, but it worked very slowly. The stalk from the crest of the ridge down to the caribou took 2½ hours. We covered that 500 yards at a pace that would have seemed painfully slow even to a turtle. Frequently we stopped and stood in one place for 15 to 20 minutes before Gene took the next cautious step. The tension of the last 100 yards was almost unendurable.
I was looking at an incredible trophy, one I had come across the continent to take, far better than I had hoped for. If I killed him I was sure he would stand at or near the top of the Pope and Young record list for mountain caribou. I was within comfortable rifle range, but not close enough for the kind of hunting I was doing. Yet if someone had offered in those last few minutes to trade me an adequate rifle for the bow I was carrying, I’d have laughed in his face.
We were within 60 yards of the caribou before they turned nervous.
“It’s time,” I whispered to Gene.
“Can you kill him from here?”
“I can try. They won’t let us come any closer.”
The guide spread the two little evergreens just enough to give me a clear shot, and I brought my bow to full draw and took careful and deliberate aim. There’d be only one chance. If I missed, my trophy dream would pass as quickly as the caribou could flee.
The guide spread the two little evergreens just enough to give me a clear shot, and I brought my bow to full draw and took careful and deliberate aim.
I held my breath the second or two it took for the arrow to make its flight. Then I saw it sink almost to the feathers exactly where I wanted it to. The herd exploded and the bull ran as if nothing had happened to him. Then he lost speed, and at 50 yards he went down.
The rack has been measured now, after drying, by an official Pope and Young measurer. It scored 411 4/8. The previous Pope and Young No. I mountain caribou scored 390 1/8, which leaves mine in top place by more than 20 points. I had set a new world record for this magnificent member of the deer family, and by a wide margin.
Read Next: I Was Mauled Over and Over Again by a Grizzly. I Should Have Died
More important, at least to me, are the vivid memories of my unique hunt and the events that led up to its successful conclusion. Like all good hunting, it was seasoned with patience, luck, skill and an immeasurable amount of excitement.
I’m still disappointed about the grizzly I did not take, but a man can’t expect the impossible. And I’m dead certain there is one of his kind up there in the Cassiars today, with my name on him. One of these falls rm going back and have another try for a bear pelt. After that, I’m looking ahead to what I rate the ultimate in North American trophies, a good Alaska brown. I’ll do it all with a bow, of course.
Anticipation and planning of that kind is what trophy hunting is all about.
Read the full article here
