Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting First blood, possession or it depends?

One year that I was sheep hunting on one of Montana's Unlimited tag bighorn sheep units there was an Outfitter with a guided sheep hunter that was camped about 1/4 mile from my camp. My eye doctor was staying in the outfitter's camp, but not hunting with a guide, and I had met the outfitter.

On the second day of the season I knew that the guide was going to take his hunter up the mountain by our camps, so went around the mountain and went up the back side. About half way up the mountain, I found sheep tracks and followed them to two legal rams. I had killed a full curl ram the year before in another unit so I decided to pass on these rams. They were close enough to me that I picked up a golf ball size rock and threw it, underhanded, and hit one of the rams. They both ran up the hill.

A few minuted later I heard a shot from the mountain above me. Then both rams came running down the mountain and one of them had been gut shot and he was dragging his small intestines on the ground, like a rope. The rams split when they saw me (and my dog) with one running south and the wounded one running north.

I didn't like to see the wounded ram suffer, so I went after him and found him standing in the next avalanche chute where I shot and killed him.

I then went up the mountain and found the outfitter, his guide, and their hunter. They had followed the healthy ram out across another wide avalanche chute in the opposite direction that the wounded ram went. I then took them to the fallen sheep and said "Here's your ram."

I then helped them to dress, quarter and pack the ram over the mountain and down to their camp. That was the 9th year that that outfitter had been hunting sheep in that unit and this was the first ram that any of his hunters had shot.

He was so happy that one of his hunters had finally got a ram that he invited me to his camp for dinner that night where he gave me his biggest Porterhouse steak and made sure that my dog got plenty of the steak bones.

As a side note, I went back into that area the next year, by myself and my dog, and shot the other ram.