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Get your goat
Magnificent animals are worth the effort
By Bob Robb
Anchorage Daily News correspondent
My friend Mike Stitzel and I had climbed most of the morning, and our legs were feeling it. Now we were bumping along the top of the mountain, playing "sneak and peek" as we peered over the edge from time to time in search of the bedded billies we'd spotted earlier. When we found one of them, he was basking in a sunbeam without a care in the world.
I had dumped my backpack and begun the stalk when, for no apparent reason, the billy got out of his bed and moved slowly around the crest of the mountain.
Uh oh! I followed on hands and knees as fast as I could to the edge and carefully peeked over. There he was, downhill about 50 yards away. I quickly nocked an arrow, settled the sight pin low on his chest and released. As the billy rounded the corner, in something of a panic I signaled Mike to follow. He simply smiled and pointed down below his perch, aimed his .300 magnum at a spot I could not see and touched it off.
Oh, brother ... I got up and ran, hoping to spot what I was sure was the magnificent goat I'd just missed high-tailing it up and over the glacier. Instead I found him piled up, not far from where I last saw him. Mike's bullet had also found its mark. Just like that, we had two magnificent Alaska billies to admire.
As we caped them out and boned the meat, we took a few seconds to admire the view. Below us stretched a vast glacier; our camp was at the base of the mountain, at the glacier's edge.
Packing these two back to camp was no easy task. Both were big-bodied critters, each weighing more than 250 pounds, and our packs weighed somewhere close to 100 pounds each as we trudged first up, then down the ridge several hours to camp.
That's mountain-goat hunting for you. It's a tough game that involves a lot of physical exertion and the ability to negotiate some of the state's roughest terrain.
Generally, finding the goats isn't the hard part, as it is in moose hunting, for example. It is being able to make the climb, negotiating the cliffs and glaciers, being patient enough to let the billy get into a favorable spot on the mountain, making the shot, then packing meat, cape, horns -- and yourself -- safely back down the slope. Yet the animal itself, the country in which it lives and the many variables involved in hunting him make mountain goat hunting extra special.
MOUNTAIN GOATS: WHAT ARE THEY?
The mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus americanus) is an enigma. It's not a true goat at all but a member of the antelope family that includes the chamois of Europe and goral and serow of Asia Minor. It lives where no other animal would, or even could, fattening up where other animals would find the pickings slim. Its toughness is legendary, while its sagacity and beauty place high atop many a hunter's wish list.
Mountain goats have a unique, readily identifiable appearance with a blunt, rather squarish body and the humped, muscular shoulders of a weight lifter that are almost out of proportion to the rest of its body. A narrow head features pointy ears and a black nose. Goats are 60 to 70 inches in length and 35 to 45 inches high at the shoulder. Billies are generally larger than the nannies, the larger males weighing upward of 300 pounds.
The horns are relatively short, slender, and shiny black in color, rising up off the forehead and sweeping back in a graceful, parabolic curve. Mature goats will have horns measuring between 9 and 12 ½ inches in length, with nannies tending to have longer but more slender horns than billies. The longest set of horns ever recorded were a nanny's 12-inchers.
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