Day 4 - It was a good day to kill a ram

Chipper. We had named him when we saw him on the mine. We actually thought he was not all that big. But we found him outside the mine this morning. And it felt like a good day to kill a ram. As I was walking up a sheep trail, I was enjoying every step, feeling good that I was here, on a high windy ridge, and thinking "I don't care if this is going to take ten days; I'm ready to take on whatever the mountain throws at us".

And it's almost like the hunting gods were waiting for that revelation. I wasn't going to quit. So they sent a group of rams our way, and Chipper was in it. And it felt like I needed to shoot him. The stalk was easy, the shooting too. He turned out a lot heavier than we had thought, a beautiful, beautiful ram.

As we were admiring our ram, the wind stopped blowing, and the sun came out. Someone was telling us we did good, and granted us gorgeous stable weather to cape and butcher and carry the heavy load down the mountain. It was a good day to kill a ram.

"...because while you think you could maybe face dying, you can't deal with the idea of one day becoming too old and weak to ramble among these summits any longer." Douglas H. Chadwick - The Wolverine Way