billrquimby

"This is a cool thread. I have all 13 big game animals in AZ. Elk, Coues deer, mule deer, desert bighorn, rocky mountain bighorn, antelope, buffalo, javelina, Merriams turkey, Goulds turkey, rio grande turkey, bear, mountain lion. Of the 13 I have harvested 10 with a bow. I have been very fortunate when it comes to the draw. I completed this by the age of 33." AZCOUESFANATIC: Congratulations on your success. You obviously not only are lucky in the drawing process, but you also must be a very skilled hunter. Taking ten of those thirteen animals with a bow is quite an accomplishment. However, as I pointed out years ago in this thread, there are only ten big game species in Arizona. We have three subspecies of sheep -- desert (Ovis canadensis nelsoni and O.c. mexicana) and Rocky Mountain (O.c. canadensis), but these three represent only one species. The three subspecies of turkeys (Merriam's, Gould's, and Rio Grande) you mentioned are all the same species, Meleagris gallopavo. My point is, if you were to count all subspecies of big game mammals and turkeys in our state, you would need to also include our two subspecies of mule deer (desert and Rocky Mountain) and two subspecies of mountain lion (North American cougar and Yuma puma). This gives us 16 types of big game animals. As you know, a hunter cannot collect all 16 at present because he/she cannot take both of the desert sheep subspecies. Bill Quimby

At 78, I've reached the age when I am surprising myself by living longer than some of my seemingly healthier and fitter friends. A case in point, someone I'd known for more than fifty years suddenly died last month after one of his daily two-mile jogs. This guy was a health freak, and skinny as a rail. He ate only healthy foods and had never smoked. He took an aspirin each day, drank only an occasional glass of red wine, visited his doctors for regular checkups, and should have lived to 100, instead of dying at just 71. His family has no idea what killed him. His heart, lungs and arteries were in good shape, no cancer was present, and despite an autopsy, no cause of death was determined. It is a downright shame that he had to die from nothing at such an early age. Bill Quimby

It has been many years since I tried annealing, but I didn't do it for long because I wasn't shooting that much and cases were cheap then. More importantly, I saw no difference in accuracy of my rifles. As others were doing then, I merely stood my cases on their bases in a shallow pan of water and heated them with a propane torch. When the mouth and shoulder of a case began to turn red, I tipped it over in the water to quench it. Bill Quimby

Wow! I hope he recovers quickly. He is lucky that he is getting the proper treatment. I was bitten on my inner thigh by a tick in Zululand, and suffered similarly – very high fever (104-105º), weakness, vomiting, etc. I also had a huge, target-shaped wound, and my flesh was rotting in its center. After being treated for a week by a doctor who was wrongly convinced I had been bitten by a brown spider, I changed doctors and got the proper dosage of the proper antibiotic. I felt better virtually overnight. I was told that surviving the bite made me immune to South African Tick Fever. I haven't heard whether the same applies to Lyme Disease from North American tick bites. At any rate, you and Paul have my best wishes. Bill Quimby

If it had been a real headline, C.L.I.T.T. would not have had periods . The Associated Press Stylebook, used by nearly every newspaper, drops them in acronyms. Bill Quimby

Paving isn't the worst of it. Look at what happened to Sheep's Crossing. Continuous steel rails now block the view and parking is banned everywhere except in a designated area for path walkers far upstream from the good fishing spots. Before they "improved it," there usually were 15 to 20 carloads of people fishing or having picnics on the river every day throughout the summer. No more. Bill Quimby

How things change. I haven't hunted with a muzzleloader in at least 25 years, but when I did, 75 yards was the outer limit of my self-induced range. I built my own rifles (barrels and locks came from mail-order catalogs and not from kits; stocks, triggers and hardware I made myself) and tried to make them look as much like 18th- and 19th-century Pennsylvania long rifles and Hawkens as I could. Two were flintlocks and three were percussion guns. Round balls and cast bullets on top of black powder accounted for maybe two dozen Texas whitetails, a Colorado bison, and one mule deer and several javelinas in Arizona. I wanted to give my homemade guns to my daughter and grandkids, but cannot. All of my firearms were stolen by burglars a couple of years ago. Bill Quimby

1ugly dude and deserttacoma84: I cut down the stock of a 600 Mohawk .243 for my grandson a dozen years ago, and would like to restore it with a factory stock. I shortened both ends of its stock, planed off the pistol grip, added a rubber buttplate, and removed a lot of wood everywhere. It turned out nice and made a good rifle for a youth or small woman. I shot it a few times after I shortened it (I have 36-inch arms) and had no problem with it. If I were younger and still had horses, I'd keep the rifle the way it is now and use it as a saddle gun for deer and javelinas. Incidentally, the factory barrel on a Mohawk seems clunky and it appears (at least to me) that a lot of metal could be removed from it. Bill quimby

"I don't think Harry Reid will be an issue for the Sportsmen's bill amendment. If I remember correctly he sponsored it when USO was causing all that grief. The Sierra Club has actually polluted and desecrated the portion of AZ that I travel. The Salt River rest area was closed by threat of lawsuit from them because they said it was to close to the river. This rest area was/is as eco-friendly as any place in the world with solar lighting and a Swedish septic system. Now because of the threat of a law suit by the Sierra Club go to any pull out on either side of the Canyon and check out the filth and human waste. Looking at that you can honestly say the Sierra Club is not for the environment." One of the Show Low radio stations announced this week that the rest area in Salt River Canyon was being refurbished and should reopen in 2015. Also, I read somewhere that a sportsman's bill died in the Senate recently when someone added gun control provisions to the bill. Don't know how accurate either report is. Bill Quimby

Glad to be of help, LawDog, and glad to see that you took your family. South Africa is a good introduction to hunting on that continent. I predict you'll go back more than once, and when you do, your wife and daughters will want their own rifles. Bill Quimby

Congratulations! You obviously not only are an accomplished hunter, but you also are one lucky son of a gun. Drawing all the required tags, especially the two sheep tags and the Rio Grande turkey tag, is an accomplishment in itself. Bill Quimby

Am I alone in finding it interesting (maybe even ironic) that the people featured in this story are named Sterling and Silver? Bill Quimby

Mulepackhunter: Congratulations on your choice of mounts. In my view, there is no better animal for hunting than a gentle mule. I'm convinced that the one I used to own was a lot smarter than I was. I could almost fall asleep while riding her, and she would find a deer or javelina for me. When she stopped suddenly, I knew she had seen something. All I had to do was look where she was looking. You may enjoy the following paragraphs from one of my books, "Sixty Years A Hunter." (If you'll pardon a crass commercial, the book is available from www.safaripress.com) Bill Quimby I had more experiences with black bears in Arizona after that, and two involved a mule I once owned. Jenny was a huge animal that looked as if she should have been pulling a plow in Missouri instead of wearing a saddle. I was told a ranch owner used Jenny when she was younger to carry steel fence posts and barbed wire to places that couldn't be reached by Jeeps. Later she carried tourists up and down the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail. She was old, but a bet- ter animal for hunting in our rocky and steep terrain would be tough to find. I built a trailer to transport her and she would readily walk in and out of it -- until the day when Alex Jacome got impatient when she stopped to look inside the trailer before stepping on the ramp. When she stopped, he hit her rump with the knotted end of her lead rope. From that day on I had to coax her into that trailer. The thing about mules, or at least that mule, was they will not do anything they think might hurt them. As you've seen in a dozen movies you can ride a horse over a cliff. You would have to blindfold Jenny and shove her off the cliff with a tank to get her to do that. I gave Jenny her head when I hunted with her. I'd point her in the direction I wanted to go and she would find the best way to get us there. I remember our getting hung up in a patch of manzanita on a steep and rocky slope. A horse would have panicked in such a spot but that mule simply backed up and found a way around the brush. Jenny paid no atten- tion when I tied the rear legs of javelinas together and hung them from my saddle horn. I'd ride back to camp with the “pig” flopping against her belly and shoulder. I packed out a whitetail by cutting slits in its belly skin to hang it from the saddle horn, and riding out with it on my lap. Nothing seemed to bother that mule until I asked her to pack out a bear. I was hunting a whitetail near Stockton Pass between Fort Grant and Safford when I rode up on two young men who wanted me to help them get a bear they'd killed to a road. Because she'd carried my deer and javelinas I expected to have no problems. Was I ever wrong! Jenny started behaving strangely when I rode up to their dead bear so I got off and led her around it, and then had her step over it. Eventually she seemed to calm down. I'm not a cowboy and I had never packed out a bear, but it seemed to me that the best way to do it would be to drape the bear over the sad- dle and tie its legs to the cinch rings on each side. Jenny kept shying away every time the two hunters tried to lift the bear up on the saddle so I took off my jacket and used it to blindfold her. That worked for a while. She stood still while the bear was loaded and its front legs were tied to a ring. The two men had started to tie up the bear's rear legs on the opposite side of the saddle when the mule shook her head vio- lently and knocked me down. One look at the bear on her back was all it took. She spun around, bucked, and took off running with the bear hanging off one side of the saddle. A hundred yards or so later the bear fell off when its paws slipped out of the ropes. I chased that mule for at least a mile before I found her with a stirrup caught in a tree stump. Her eyes were as large as baseballs, her teeth were bared, and her ears were folded back against her head as I approached. Somewhere along the way she had bro- ken off a rein. (I can't explain why I didn't find it when I followed her.) I was holding the remaining rein when I unhooked the stirrup and found I could- n't control her with just one rein. There was nothing to do except jump on and ride her back to camp. It was a terrifying ride I will never forget. She was an old mule but she didn't stop running until she reached her trailer. She was her gentle self again the next morning so I jerry-rigged a rein from a piece of rope and rode out again. Every time I pointed her toward the canyon where she'd seen the bear she danced sideways. I don't think I could have dragged her there with an eighteen-wheeler. My other experience with Jenny and a bear took place a year or so later. I was hunting on Chitty Creek, a roadless area under the Mogollon Rim not far from the New Mexico border, when I rode up over the dam of a large, nearly empty waterhole and spooked a big bear on its opposite shore. I jumped off, yanked my rifle out of its scabbard, and used the saddle as a rest to shoot from. Jenny was never bothered by gunfire. Honest to gosh, that mule held her breath and didn't move while I aimed at and shot that bear. The bear roared when the bullet struck it, and then it ran into the brush. I followed the blood trail for at least a mile before getting off Jenny and looking for that bear on foot. I eventually lost its trail. I've wounded and lost very few animals, and I felt badly each time, but I don't know how I would have packed out that bear if I'd found it. Jenny certainly would not have carried it, even if I could have loaded it on her back by myself.

Tucson John is correct. Those of us with cabins on the northeast slope of the White Mountains are living among wolves. Three or four years ago, my wife was vacuuming our cabin's living room when she asked me to come look outside. Our cabin is on a low ridge and our driveway is below us. There were 34 elk cows and calves (we counted them) in our driveway, moving single-file downhill toward our gate. When they saw a wolf waiting for them, they stopped and stared at the wolf. A second or two later, another wolf appeared out of the willows along our little creek and started to move toward one of the calves, and the herd bolted back up the canyon with the wolves right behind them. That herd of elk (and numerous mule deer) spends the day in the timber above Badger Pond one-quarter mile upstream from us and crosses our property every night to feed in the meadow across the road from us, but we seldom see them in the daytime, and this was in the middle of the day. I'm guessing those two wolves had been harassing those elk for quite a while that day. I've also seen wolves in the big meadows by White Mountain Reservoir and crossing the state highway between Horseshoe Cienega Lake and McNary. Bill Quimby

The photo in this thread shows the heads of mountain lions that a rancher and his hounds (and not a federal animal control employee) were suspected of killing and not reporting. The guy also was suspected of killing a lot of bears illegally in the Galliuros and Pinalenos, but was never prosecuted as far as I know. The photo was taken at a dump site by a AZGFD wildlife manager and created a firestorm of criticism from hunters and anti-hunters alike when it first surfaced in the 1980s. Bill Quimby

I, for one, hope the Apache-Sitgreaves doesn't lift fire restrictions until after the summer rains start. A little storm like this one hit in early spring a couple of years ago, resulting in forest officials easing restrictions -- and we got the Wallow Fire! We just came through the driest winter in the White Mountains that I can remember since I started coming up here with my parents in 1946. Yesterday's snow didn't do much to ease the fire danger. Bill Quimby

Thanks. I don't recognize any of the three guys, but the way each of them turned up the bottom of their jeans to make cuffs is something lots of us did in the mid-1950s. Bill Quimby

Don't think Wes is in the photo. Any chance of improving the quality of the photograph. It's really flat and washed out. Incidentally, those bucks could have come from anywhere north of the Gila. There was a time when big bucks were regularly coming off Mingus Mountain, the White Mountains, the San Carlos Reservation, the Mogollon Rim country, and other places in addition to the Strip and the Kaibab. That was pre-1970, back when 90,000 to 100,000 hunters were buying their deer tags at hardware stores and hunting anywhere they wanted in a single three-week deer season. Bill Quimby

Tony: Steve also was involved with the opening of Mearn's quail to hunting. A longtime game commissioner from Tucson, Jack Mantle, was opposed to hunting what he (and many others) called "fool's quail," and would gather support on the commission and vote down every proposal to open a season. One of Mantle's complaints was that there weren't enough birds to hunt and they were so dumb that they could be quickly "wiped out." Steve, and the Levy brothers, did extensive surveys and found plenty of birds everywhere there was suitable habitat. Mantle eventually allowed approval of an experimental season, and then went out and personally attempted to prove his prediction. He once bragged to me that he had taken at least a dozen limits that year. Incidentally, Arizona's hunters who are enraptured with restrictive permit-only, unit-by-unit deer hunting with multiple seasons can thank the late Mr. Mantle. Despite opposition from various sportsmen's groups at the time, he led the charge on the commission for today's system. Bill Quimby

Can your shotgun safely handle a 3-inch shotshell? It was my understanding that the older Savage .22/20-gauge guns were only chambered for 2 1/2 inch shotshells. Bill Quimby

BigLakeJake: None of the three men look like Steve to me, but I easily could be wrong. The photo appears "washed out" on my monitor. Incidentally, Steve is still with us. A friend visited him in Phoenix this past week. He's 89 years old and is as sharp as ever, my friend said. For those who don't know Steve's history, his landmark study of Gambel's and Scaled quail proved precipitation during specific months was the primary factor in quail reproduction and survival, and that hunting has little influence on quail numbers in Arizona. Steve and the Levy brothers of Tucson, Jim and Seymore, also located populations of masked bobwhite quail -- thought to be extinct at the time -- still remaining in ungrazed areas in Sonora, and this led to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service creating the Buenos Aires refuge southwest of Tucson. Steve also had much to do with Arizona's ban on using bait for bears, the switch from firearms hunting to bowhunting for elk during their rut, and the HAM hunts for javelina. Bill Quimby

I have spent a lot of time in that unit, and killed a small 6x6 the only time I hunted there. Went back twice with friends and saw only one bull one year and zero bulls the next. Be prepared to go for days without seeing even a cow elk. Scouting doesn't help much, other than to learn the roads. As someone said, the elk move around a lot in 2B. One day they are somewhere, and they're someplace else the next. Add to this, much of the best elk country is private land and it's locked up. There's a reason why it's called a "limited opportunity" hunt. It's a good unit for varmint hunting, though. You'll see more coyotes than elk. Bill Quimby

Nice work, and something you should be proud of. I hate to say anything, and I hope you don't take it as a personal attack because it definitely is not. However, more and more people on the internet have been talking about something called "SCI National." The convention held last week is the major fundraiser of Safari Club International, a worldwide organization with its international headquarters in Tucson. It has 200 (plus or minus) chapters scattered across six continents. SCI National was the name of its local chapter in Washington, D.C. for many years. It now is called SCI Washington Metro. Bill Quimby

I'm glad someone posted the Wikipedia link. Without it, I would have had no clue as to what you were talking about. Kids my age in Yuma listened to "The Shadow" and "The Green Hornet" on radio and rode our bikes downtown every Saturday morning for the "Square Shooters Club" at the Lyric Theatre. A ticket, a bag of popcorn and a Coke cost only a quarter, but it would take most of the week for me to earn it. Black and white western films were serialized and we had to wait for the next installment to see how Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or Hopalong Cassidy escaped death from (take your pick) gunshots or arrows, bombs, fire, falling off a cliff, stampede, a runaway train or wagon, or poison. Television didn't reach Yuma until I was in eighth grade, and my parents didn't buy a TV set until after I left to attend the UA in 1954. They spent a lot of time watching roller derbies and the Howdy Doody Show in black and white on a round 12-inch screen in a huge cabinet. Bill Quimby

I was hoping you had some once-fired cases for sale. You might try Midway USA. I bought 200 new, unprimed Remington cases a couple of years ago. Bill Quimby