Bone’s last minute Billie!

Shot with 340 Weatherby 600 yards.

“Bone, you have to take the shot now, there’s not time to measure the horns at 600 yards, once he is the run, you won’t get another chance at a shot”. “Sometimes I think they’re worst then hunting elk.”  “Once spooked they won’t stop until they’re up in The Canyon.”  If one thinks they can track Aoudad’s in these canyons, they have something wrong with them. You do have to glass and look in logical places from previous knowledge and get the jump on them.  Once on the move they will simply disappear.  I have always said that the Aoudad’s have “caves that they hide and live in.”  This was going to be the course taken this weekend with Bone.  Bone was having trouble deciding on whether to take the shot or not on the big Billie Aoudad that we spotted above the Flats. Bone had the opportunity to shoot and kill the “Bell Wanger” as I had named the largest Aoudad Billie that I have ever seen.

The Billie was not going to be hanging on Bone’s trophy wall this season!

It was going to be a grind to find another Billie anywhere near the size of that one.
To this day I do not think anyone ever got the “Bell Wanger” Aoudad.  I had missed him 2 years back while hunting The Ranch.  Dr. Warnock, Jim August, Larry Spring, Chuck Megeske, Darrel Friend, Steve Biggs, Dave Brill, Mike James and Tim O’Meara are just a few that missed the biggest Aoudad that I know of or had ever seen in pictures and in the field.

By now “Bell Wanger” and his spirit roam The Canyon.

“Bone, it’s the witching hour, that’s not a bad Billie on the other side of the canyon”

You wonder why I call an Aoudad male a Billie, when some people call them Barbary Sheep.  One would think that males should be called Ram’s.  The Aoudad is closer to the Goat family, so in my circle, I have always called them Billie’s.