Patagonia trip pays off |
Mike Carrick of Salem shot his way into the Safari Club International record books in April by bagging a huge red stag in Patagonia, a region in Argentina.
Carrick's accomplishment is probably going to last awhile.
The history buff, antique arms collector and frequent lecturer on the Lewis and Clark expedition shot the animal with a 76-caliber hand-cast ball fired from the barrel of a black-powder, muzzle-loading flintlock rifle.
"It's an exact model of about a 1790 to 1800 Joseph Manton British rifle that they would have made for Africa or India," Carrick said. "Most of the guys down there shooting black powder are shooting these so-called in-line guns with telescopes and all of that kind of stuff.
"It's different with a flintlock. You have a very real chance of a gun not going off, a flash in the pan."
The way it works is that when you pull the trigger on the 10.5-pound brick of a rifle, a piece of rock -- flint -- strikes steel, igniting black powder in a little tray called the pan.
If it goes no farther, that's a flash in the pan.
But if you're lucky, from there the gunpowder powder burns down a small hole drilled in the barrel, igniting -- you hope and pray -- the massive 170-grain powder charge and launching the 1.5-ounce, three-quarter-inch diameter lead ball out of the muzzle.
It's sizzle-sometimes-fizzle brand of slow-motion shooting with a palpable delay between pulling the trigger and the powder torching off in an acrid thick gray cloud and a chunky thump.
"You have to ... the way I hold through the sequence of 'fup,' 'BOOSH' is to think that the gun might not go off," he said with a laugh. "And if the guide or somebody's watching and see you flinch like crazy, it's so embarrassing that I hold it through.
"I think to myself 'this may not go off, so I'm going to hold through,'" he said, then shrugged. "It seems to work for me."
Given everything that could go wrong, Carrick said he was just glad he dropped the animal.
"I'm not a trophy hunter, so I'm really naive," he said. "But it turned out this is the No. 2 red stag black powder in the record books for Latin America.
"It has 17 points," he said about the antlers, pointing to several broken tines in a photograph of the stag. "And if this had not been broken off, and these hadn't been broken off, then it would have been in the No. 1 place, they suspect."
The avid hunter began hunting with flintlocks about five years ago for elk in Oregon as an extension of his love of history.
"I give lectures on Lewis and Clark. And I got started by taking that Lewis and Clark 1803 Harper's Ferry rifle, that fourth one over, to La Grande," Carrick said, pointing to a gorgeous long rifle displayed on the wall of his library.
So when buddy Ken Harrison of Salem, a globe-trotting hunter, suggested a South American safari, Carrick jumped at the chance.
Turned out to be a slow jump.
"Ken and I were going to go down there a year ago, and we had planned the trip the year before that," he said, then shook his head.
"So in the meanwhile, my daughter decided to get married in March, which was when we were going," Carrick said, then laughed, his voice dropping down to a conspiratorial whisper. "Even though I tried to think of some graceful ways to weasel out of that wedding, I wasn't going to do it."
Harrison and his wife, Sheila, made the hunting trip.
Carrick got his daughter, Amy, married, then had to wait a year before going down solo in April to Algar Safaris Coto de Caza, a private hunting ranch in Patagonia.
With his guide, Nahuel, at the wheel of the four-wheel drive Toyota, Carrick set out on what turned out to be a two-day spot-and-stalk hunt.
With the ancient firearm and open sights, Carrick had to make it clear, despite the language barrier, that this wasn't going to be an over-the-horizon kind of shot.
"He didn't speak any English at all," Carrick said about Nahuel, then added with a chuckle, "I learned all the Spanish words for 'That's too far,' and 'Needs to be closer.'"
Late in the second day, they spotted the trophy-sized stag across the rolling knee-high grass plains dotted with taller pampas grass.
"This is not much of a habitat down there; it looks like Vale or Ontario or something," the hunter said about the high desert in Oregon. "It's in the foothills of the Andes."
The two dropped out of the vehicle and began their approach.
"You use whatever terrain you can, like the really high pampas grass, or the little dry gullies," Carrick said. "We were at the last bush, and the guide enthusiastically sign-languaged me to shoot.
"I could see I wasn't going to get any closer, so I aimed a little high, maybe three or four inches. The animals weren't spooked, so I was able to get the crossed sticks (rifle rest) and take a nice deep breath and squeeze it off."
What followed was no flash in the pan.
"Then the big smoke came," Carrick said. "And I didn't see the animal, and I though 'Oh, no.'"
The guide scrambled up the mound behind them and made a hand signal, flat of palm down, and a grin, to show the stag was down.
"At 125 yards, I didn't appreciate the size of the rack," Carrick said. "In fact, the first thing I saw when I got up to 25, 30 yards was the big horns, because he was laying on his side.
"And I thought 'Oh my God.'"
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