I've been watching a lot of decent goats. I had set a personal goal for a 10" goat. In the end I chose character and massive body over horn length. By my tape, he is a respectable 9-5/8" and a broomed 8" with 5-7/8" bases and enormous glands. This goat's body is massive! His abodomial girth is 64" and I believe was over 300 pounds. It was all my brother and I could do to move him without the assistance of gravity.
This goat's sheer mass lured me to this area after one last scouting trip the day prior to the opener. After losing him for a day I was a little worried. Wednesday we located him in the early afternoon and covered the 3 miles of single track and 1 mile of bushwacking. To get to his last known location. We got in the cliffs above the last place we had seen him. Unfortunately we couldn't locate him. After much searching we resigned ourselves that today wasn't the day.
So we positioned ourselves on the cliff face to watch a grazing area. A 8-9" goat feed out and I left my brother watching him while I checked another grazing area from the cliff top. After glassing the new ravine I looked up to see an 8" goat standing on the ridge line not 50 yds from me.
After making eye contact the goat bolts back over the ridge blowing out any other animals that normally cross there in the evening. Feeling like a failure I make my way back to my brother. He has moved from the top down to a goat bed. He is actively working his spotting scope. I get his attention and he signals for me to move to him now!
I dropped the SG Approach pack at the top of the cliff. Taking only my gun, scope, and camera adapter. At this point my brother motions for me to ditch the scope as there is not room for two in the goat bed. I leave my scope on the ledge and crawl over. His spotting scope eye piece is rotated over to me. As I peer through the scope, I see the massive broken horn goat. I watch him for a few minutes and take some pictures. Almost as if the broken horn goat read my mind, he stands and shows just how big and majestic he is. I have watched him from a distance before. Now, I'm under a hundred and fifty yds. This goat has the biggest body I have ever seen.
I'm a sucker for unique things and prefer non-typical animals. It didn't take me long to make the decision to harvest this magnificent beast. I crawled out to and layed down on a thin ledge below my brother. The whole time I had been watching the goat I surveyed the terrain for shoot no shoot locations. The whole shelf the goat was now grazing on appeared nearly flat from my birds eye view.
I know that this goat is well within the mean point blank range. I don't range him, I do physically hold low to account for the sharp shot angle. I get a surprise break at 6:40pm on the 338WM. The goat drops like a rock at the shot. Then begins to roll and is picking up speed. My heart sinks as he drops off a shelf and is now no longer visible. Unfortunately we can still hear him rolling. We pack quickly and are picking our way down the cliff. I'm about to work my way around another rock outcropping when my brother calls out here he is.
What I see next can only be described as devine intervention. A small stunted mountain mahogany has literally snatched this majestic spcimen from the jaws of a couple thousand feet of horn breaking cliffs and hide cutting shale and ryolite. This mighty little bush was literally the last possible item between the goat and utter destruction. In the end the goat broke 1/8" off the long horn and also scratched and nicked the horns.
The goat was now perched in the mountain mahogany hanging over a rock outcroppping twenty feet in the air. For the next hour and half we dig a shelf below the outcropping and belay the goat down to the pre dug shelf. At one point the belay line breaks. Thankfully we made the decision to keep a static safety line on the goat.
Once the goat is as safe as it's going to get for the next several hours. We do pictures, measurements for the taxidermist and start to cape for a full body mount. Working with multiple Havalon knives in the tight space and unbelievably steep and loose ground was nearly as dangerous as juggling your piranta. Caping and butchering went at a snails pace. We are not able to move him because of his size, the limited space on the shelf we made, and because he is kept tethered, at two points to the mountain. By 5am we are finally shuttling loads. Just as the sun starts to come up so does the lightning. We decide to stop shuttling and get the loads on our backs out. Planning to come back in when the lighting stops. Finally at 4pm we are on the way back out with the second and last load.
In the end this has been a dream come true. The hunt was far from perfect, but the oposition is what makes the success so much sweeter.
