Rog's Rod & Nimrod

I couldn’t get to sleep. It probably had to do with too many football games in one day. I climbed out of bed and grabbed the January/February 2020 issue of the Sports Afield magazine I had received in the mail that day. I eased back in the recliner and read two excellent stories before heading back to bed.

The first story was about a man who was obsessed with taking a Marco Polo sheep – an animal he considered to be the world’s number one hunting trophy. He endured brutal temperatures and the nausea, headaches, and loss of rational thinking that come when climbing through Tajikistan mountain passes at 14,000 feet elevation. It required five days of bone-jarring travel to get there, and we haven’t even considered the cost, let alone the proximity to the Afghanistan border. He also had to work at getting into the same shape he enjoyed as a high school senior.

The second story was about a man who had to have a Kenya mountain bongo – an animal considered the most difficult animal in the world to hunt by fair means. By this he meant tracking. No pygmies and their dogs. He would go to the Mau Forest. He endured continuous rain, wet clothes and boots, excessive heat, and no sleep.

When I went back to bed, I tried thinking about what I would write about for this week’s column, but those two hunts kept creeping back into my mind. This thinking led to a startling personal realization. I would not endure the suffering and discomfort these guys did for any trophy in the world! It just isn’t that important to me. For the first time in my life I came to the full realization that the hunting experience, the being with friends, the surroundings, were far more important to me than the trophy. Does this make me a bad hunter? A bad outdoor writer? I hope not.

I still couldn’t get to sleep. I then began thinking about what, exactly, I had endured over the course of my hunting life to fill a tag. There were some grueling hunts that I couldn’t repeat today for lack of strength, stamina, and agility.

I’ll put a January 1982 Clark County reduction deer hunt at the top of my list. Dave Isebrands and I were on the road at 3:00 A.M. We faced minus twenty degree temperature, deep snow in cattails, and a twenty mile-per-hour north wind. The wind-chill factor had new meaning. My right ear lobe froze solid. We truly earned our bucks.

In 1999 Doug Koupal and I went on a Newfoundland moose hunt. In deep snow we forded streams, climbed up and down the Long Range Mountains, and climbed over forests of deadfalls. We began before first light, and ended our daily hunts in darkness. I barely had the strength to eat supper. I filled my “bull only” tag, the only bull I saw in six days, on the last day. Doug bagged his a day earlier.

November 2004 found Doug Koupal, Ed Kniffen, and me in northern New Mexico’s San Jan Mountains for an elk hunt. On the second last day of the hunt, Vern, the guide, left me at a bridge east of Chama in total darkness and told me to follow the stream to the top of Cat Mountain and back so I wouldn’t get lost. It was an exhausting day of stream crossing, steep banks and ledges, dead falls, and a Snickers bar for lunch. During the final hour of the day I snuck up on a herd of forty elk and put one down with a single shot.

You know what? That buck, moose, and elk mean as much to me today as that Marco Polo ram and that bongo mean to those magazine hunters – and I had fun on top of it.

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I’m facing what I call a necessary ordeal. Through January and February I’m having three phase Deep Brain Stimulation surgery for the debilitating tremor in my left hand. It will be done at the UW hospital in Madison, WI where I will enjoy much family support. I’ll need March for recovery. I’ll spend much of my time writing my new book, The Dakota Nimrod Grows Older, an anthology of hunting/fishing stories. Willing to share a great hunting or fishing adventure? Let’s put it in my book!

See you next week.