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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 2 5 stroll steadily up and over the top. Such an ascent by a seasoned mountaineer with technical gear would have required a full day and good weather. But on that cold and drizzly morning the goat needed less than ten minutes. At that point, I'd never hunted goats, had never even been drawn for a tag, though I'd been trying for years. C onsidering where they live, the difficulty of hunting them, and that they wear one of the most luxurious snow- white coats on earth, why isn't a big billy the world's top trophy? The only reasonable answer is that they are not crowned with 40 inches of spiraled horns and lack the dashing good looks of a stud ram. The greatest goat ever will sport arched spikes not much bigger than a ten dollar cigar. The trophy in a big billy is not the size of his horns but the strength in his heart. After nearly a lifetime of waiting, I finally drew a tag for mountain goat in my home state of Colorado. In preparation for the hunt, I scouted all summer and by early autumn had covered countless miles in search a really big billy. I saw plenty of goats but no gnarly old males worthy of that precious tag. The realization hit me that I needed to scout harder and hunt deeper into areas I had not looked into before, areas so rugged I wasn't sure I could penetrate without climbing gear. Still, I somehow knew the hunt would lead me to one of these remote and hidden spots. Two days before the hunt I heard that a family of five had been killed in a rockslide 40 miles from where I had scouted. The news hit me hard because I planned to hunt alone. In this country, the area above timberline is generally unstable and steep. Combined with rain, the loose scree in the high country can be very dangerous. Hunting in the mountain always has an element of risk, but the rewards can be great as well. The day before the hunt I drove in as far as I could, then took to walking a high ridge. Far below me, the valleys were insane with fall color. It was a good day to be alive and a great way to begin a two-week chase. t he next morning, in the still black before sunrise, my small stove hissed and spit while heating some coffee. I had spent an hour hiking in the dark to a vantage point where I could scan the mountains that loomed around me. Any step beyond this point would carry me farther than anywhere I'd scouted. The coffee burned bitter sweet and the chill from the sweat I'd worked up had me shivering. The blush on the eastern horizon and the blacks of the night surrendering to shape and form told me my wait was almost over. I said a prayer and my hunt was on. I scoped several vantage points, and at midday I saw two goats bedded just below the top of a 13,500-foot peak. They rested miles from where I stood—a distance that made judging their sizes difficult. Still, I could see their blocky bulk and horselike heads and knew that a goat or two without kids in this kind of country was likely a billy. I moved on to another area conducive to glassing but drew a blank. I decided to check on the goats I had spotted earlier and arrived just in time to see a white speck moving downhill through a series of slate-colored crags into a secluded valley. I cinched the backpack and began a two-hour hike to the distant drainage toward the goats. I arrived at the foot of a mile-long amphitheater of crumbling stone and flint-edged cliffs that looked like classic big-goat heaven. The north-facing, dark side of the valley featured loose- rock ridges that funneled down through massive stone fingers. It also was a dead-zone, void of any foliage and so steep that ten months out of the year the sun never touches it. But wandering through the far end on this dark side was a lone goat—it just had to be a billy. If he kept moving he would soon reach the cliffs beyond the valley and be impossible to follow. I needed a break and got one: He bedded down on a stack of stone at the head of the basin. He had picked a good vantage point, but I could see enough play in the land to make a stalk and keep hidden as long as he stayed put. In the belly of the valley I found and used a small lake surrounded by scrub trees. Moving through the low brush, I bumped a big covey of ptarmigan that exploded around me, curling and cutting and sailing back down-valley, their winter white flickering in the blue sky. It was a stunningly beautiful sight that I took as a good omen. Past the lake, the basin opened, and I looked for any available cover while banging elbows and knees on the T he business of packing out meat slows down as the author surveys the vast, desolate, and beautiful wilderness where his grand mountain goat adventure had unfolded. ted schnack