billrquimby

Congratulations on a great hunt and a beautiful buck. I don't know exactly where you were, but it looked like no fewer than a dozen places that I hunted in the past. Your video brought back some wonderful memories and made me want to return to all of them. Unfortunately, it will never happen. I will be 74 in just a few weeks, and am no longer physically able to hunt these wonderful whitetails in such places. My advice to all: Never turn down a chance to hunt. You are not getting any younger. Bill Quimby

I'm fairly sure buying a second hunting license isn't a violation, but what about a second tag for the same species? Anyone know? Bill Quimby

Agreed! Bill Quimby

He also has been in on the killing of more big game animals than any dozen hunters on this forum. Bill Quimby

Things certainly have changed since I left Yuma and moved to Tucson to attend the UA in 1954. I spent the first 17 years of my life in Yuma and never heard of javelinas being seen any closer than the mountains near Gila Bend. Years after I left, I heard that the game department had released some near Cibola. There were mule deer around Yuma, of course, but they were few and far between and as far as I know, none got into the agricultural areas until they started farming around Welton. We did see a few stray desert bighorn rams hanging out with domestic sheep when herders "wintered" their flocks in the Gila Valley, though. There also were no mountain lions in the Kofas. The so-called Yuma puma subspecies was believed by all to be extinct. Bill Quimby

"Its not the size of the kill, but the thrill and enjoyment of the hunt that matters." "My choice, my success, my trophy. Your choices, your successes, and your trophies can be different. That's how it should be...America." Amen. If I were king, every hunter would be required to recite the words above from memory before being issued a license. Bill Quimby

Glad to see you're home and that the surgery went well. Obey your doctor's orders and you'll be good as new in no time at all. Bill Quimby

Best wishes, Amanda. I hope the surgery is being done laparoscopically, as mine was fifteen years ago. If so, you'll be sent home the next day with a couple of band-aids, good to go for just about anything except lifting and driving for the next two weeks. Bill Quimby

Lark: Saunders Cabin rang my chimes. In the late 1960s there was a major winterkill of deer in that portion of Unit 27. I hunted elk from horseback in the Strayhorse, Chitty Creek/Baldy Bill,/Rose Peak area that next fall and there were skeletens of whitetails and mule deer literally every 200-300 yards down every canyon. My friends and I climbed off and grabbed the best heads and carried them until we found better ones. We then hung the discards in trees all over that unit, and I came home with three or four whopper heads. One of the mule deer I found is listed in the AWF record book as a pickup. Bill Quimby

No photos. But it is a Czech-built Mark V action with a Winchester 70-type 3-position safety and a stock I made from a piece of walnut I cut in Texas. My favorite ammo is handloaded 175-grain Nosler partitions pushed to about 2,750 fps. I've made one-shot kills on six bulls in Arizona, New Mexico and Mongolia with that load. With three rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, the rifle weighs more than 9 pounds, which is fine with me because I'm a wimp when it comes to being kicked and slammed around and its recoil is quite bearable. I used the same ammo and rifle on everything from 15-pound duikers to moose and eland with excellent results. Bill Quimby

You are not supposed to tell them what it is until they've already eaten it and are coming back for a second helping! I've killed two lions now and our family loves it! In fact my wife won't eat deer or antelope steaks, but she loves lion steaks. She thinks lion is better than elk. I don't know if it's that good, but I sure like it. As mentioned it sorta looks like pork and has a somewhat mild flavor. We had a big family and friends party for one of my boys birthday about a month ago and we roasted a lion roast in the crock pot and did the pulled pork thing with it. We didn't tell anyone until they started asking. If you ever get one don't let it go to waste!!! I've eaten mountain lion, African lion, bobcat and caracal. All of the meat was tender and white and had a similar taste. I won't say it was better than elk, but it all was good. Bill Quimby

Tony: Were you aware that AZGFD maintained a herd of bison at Fort Huachuca for a while? Here's what I wrote in my book, "Sixty Years A Hunter," about that herd and the way the hunts used to be held on House Rock: I drew an Arizona bison tag the first year I applied. By then, I had graduated from the University of Arizona and was working as the advertising manager for Levy's, Tucson's largest department store at the time. My boss was the sales promotion manager, a man named Ulysses Charles Drayer, a short, gruff man and my mentor. I had been a student in the marketing course he taught at the University of Arizona and he'd hired me to assist him under the university's work/study program. I'd attended classes with Charlie's son, Gary, who was more interested in learning about hunting than in following his father's footsteps in business. When I drew my tag to hunt a bison on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon I invited Gary to accompany me. Coincidentally, the turkey season was scheduled to open on the same weekend as my hunt. In those days turkey hunters could buy their tags at sporting goods stores, which Gary and I did. I was only only twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and no one had told me how Arizona's bison hunt was conducted before we arrived at the corrals in House Rock Valley on the date and time specified in the letter that arrived with my tag. I expected to have to spend a day or two, just trying to find a herd. What I hadn't known was that this was a shoot and not a hunt. Game and Fish Department employees rounded up the buffalo they wanted removed from House Rock Valley and drove them into a corral. Two tag holders at a time were positioned in the middle of a large enclosure and a chute was opened, releasing two bison into the arena. The first shooter (selected by a coin toss) chose an animal and shot it. The second shooter got to shoot the remaining animal. The dead bison were hauled to a skinning shed and two more shooters were brought in. I was horrified, but I was young and wanted to collect a bison. I now wish I'd refused to take part in what was happening. The game department required tag holders to attend a pre-hunt indoctrination lecture on site where we were told that we would ruin too much meat if we shot our bison behind the shoulder. Instead we should aim for a two-inch spot below the ear and behind the base of the horn. If we hit that spot we would break the animal's neck and drop it instantly, a Game and Fish Department employee claimed. “Bless the Beasts and Children,” Glendon Swarthout's book* about Arizona's bison shoot, had been released a few months earlier. It told about a group of juvenile misfits who ran away from a summer camp and attempted to stop the “hunt.” I'm ashamed to say that at the time I sided with the Game and Fish Department and the state's major sportsmen's groups in believing this was the most efficient and humane way to manage the herd. Besides, bison could be seen and enjoyed by the public in Arizona only because hunters paid to keep them around. I was young and foolish enough to believe that if the “experts” at Game and Fish said the best way to “hunt” bison was to shoot them in a pen then they must know what they were talking about. What they meant, however, was that it was easier for them to manage the “harvest.” Because of the furor the book raised, and despite the fact that House Rock Valley is a long way from anywhere, Life Magazine and at least one other national publication and every large newspaper in Arizona sent reporters and camera crews there to cover the shoot that year. When it was my turn in the arena I walked out slowly. I didn't want to screw up with thirty or forty people watching and photographing me. I'd retired my lever-action .303 Savage and now was carrying a J.C. Higgins .270 Winchester with a 4X scope. I'd bought it and two boxes of ammunition on sale at Sears for $80. Since then, I'd had written and designed a brochure and an advertising campaign for a Tucson gunsmith named Harry Lawson, swapping my work for his. Harry did some minor metal work on the FN Mauser action and restocked my Sears rifle with what he called his “Cochise Thumbhole” stock using a highly figured blank of curly maple. My bison would be my “custom” rifle's first victim. When the chute was opened two bison dashed out and ran around the perimeter of the arena. They stopped suddenly when they reached a spot where several other bison had died that morning. I was the first shooter, so I shot the one with the largest horns when it dropped its head to smell the blood in the sand. A cloud of dirt erupted where I'd aimed below and behind the horn as instructed, but the bison only shook its head and didn't go down. I could hear the gallery say “Ooooooooh” while I worked the bolt, brought another round into the chamber, and quickly shot again. More than half of the people watching from outside the corral applauded when my bison collapsed without kicking. Gary photographed me with my “trophy” before a truck drove into the corral, winched up the animal, and drove it to a shed where Game and Fish employees gutted, skinned, and quartered it. I was allowed to keep only the head and hide and one quarter of the meat. The remainder was sold to raise funds earmarked for maintaining the herd. I was not proud of what I'd done that morning, and I'm still not. "Bless the Beasts and the Children -- the book, film, and song -- did what hunters should have done years before Gary and I drove to House Rock Valley. It put pressure on the Arizona Game and Fish Department and Commission to make our buffalo hunting a true hunt. Hunters who draw tags on House Rock Valley now go out by themselves and search for bison that are roaming vast unfenced areas. They may draw only one bison tag in their lifetimes. If their hunts are unsuccessful (as some are) they cannot apply again. • Gary and I left House Rock Valley the afternoon I shot my bison, drove to Jacob Lake, and then on to a place called “Turkey Springs.” Neither of us had been on the fabled Kaibab Plateau before that day but we'd found the springs on a topographical map and figured that any place with a name like that had to be a good spot for hunting turkeys. We were about six hundred yards from the springs when we parked our car and loaded our shotguns. We'd walked only a few yards when we saw the heads of a hen turkey and her nearly grown poults moving rapidly through the grass in front of us. Gary and I shot at about the same time, and then ran to where our birds were flopping. As I would learn over the next half century, turkey hunting is seldom that easy. • Arizona's bison were brought here by a remarkable man named Charles Jesse “Buffalo" Jones, a flamboyant former buffalo hunter, showman, and wild animal capture expert. Jones rode in the Great Land Rush, and was appointed the first game warden at Yellowstone National Park by President Theodore Roosevelt. He also roped a lion, rhino and various antelope in Africa, and captured several young muskoxen in Canada, but he was best known as one of the saviors of the North American bison. Arizona's herds are descended from animals he bought from private owners in Texas and Canada and shipped to a railhead in southern Utah, where he and two cowboys on horseback drove them overland from the railhead at Lund, Utah, to his ranch in House Rock Valley on the North Rim of Grand Canyon. His attempt to cross bison and domestic cattle to create a hardier meat animal was a failure, however. Some of his animals wound up at Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army post on the Mexican border about ninety miles southeast of Tucson. The post was closed when the bison were released there, and when it was reactivated the army asked the game department to remove them. Some were rounded up and shipped to the agency's two bison ranches, and a few were shipped to Mexico in a wildlife trade, but all the others were shot by hunters chosen by a lottery -- all but one bison, that is. That animal, a big bull, escaped and wandered around the San Rafael valley and into Sonora, Mexico, for a couple of years until nearly everyone had forgotten about it. When it reappeared, ranchers again began complaining about the beast destroying their fences. Alex Jacome and I were among those who went looking for it when the Arizona Game and Fish Commission declared it to be an unprotected animal, but it wasn't a hunter who found it. The bull walked into the courtyard at the Little Outfit Guest Ranch, fell into the swimming pool, and couldn't get out. The Game and Fish Department was called and the waterlogged animal was rescued and shipped to the commission's Raymond Ranch near Flagstaff. Bill Quimby

I had a great visit with Peg and TJ (see, I did it again!) and really enjoyed meeting them. The Frosty Bottom is a sandwich wagon owned by a young lady my wife and I would like to see do well. I highly recommend her food, especially her malts, made exactly like the old-time drug stores used to sell. To those who have emailed and sent PMs to ask why I've been off the forum for nearly three weeks, my wife and I got stuck in Tucson (ugh!) when we went down for appointments with doctors. We have our Tucson phone shut down in the summer so there is no internet access there. I went on line only one time, and it was at a library. There were so many emails backed up I never had a chance to open the site during the hour alloted to me. We finally made it back to Greer today (Tuesday 27 July), which means we missed getting together with Amanda again. Bill Quimby

Congratulations! Hope you enjoyed my friend Henri van Aswegen and his family. I believe the waterhole where you shot your warthog is the same one where I shot a blue wildebeest on my last trip to South Africa three or four years ago. Henri's daughter Priscilla was only about four or five years old then, and she actually tracked it for 100 yards before finding it dead in the brush behind the dam. A couple years later, Henri e-mailed me to say she had shot her first animal, a trophy impala ram with a .222. It was her sixth birthday gift from him. Bill Quimby

Hi Tony: The Will Rogers quote I liked best was, "Buy land. They don't make it anymore." Bill Quimby

Happy birthday, Lark. It must be quite wonderful to be so smart, good-looking and smart, and to have everyone around you know it! Glad you had a good week. Bill Quimby

You've asked for opinions, and here's mine. I have no problem with wolves being reintroduced as long as they will be managed as we do other large wildlife. That includes regulated recreational hunting whenever state wildlife managers deem it necessary. Unfortunately, there are people who would like to see predators strictly protected and eventually used to replace hunting by humans. I draw the line at that, as well as the dumb proposal that pops up every few years to reintroduce grizzly bears to Arizona/New Mexico. Bill Quimby

Amanda: If you read the introduction in my book you'll see that I spent nearly three decades having to produce two to four photos for the Citizen each week. That works out to a minimum of 2,800 published photos, but the actual number probably is closer to 4,500. As Doug will tell you, to get one photo worthy of publishing, you very often must take at least a roll of 36 shots, which means I took somewhere between 100,000 and 160,000 photos during my 27 years of employment by a daily newspaper. As a result, I absolutely hate everything about taking photos. My wife buys those disposable things for family snapshots, but I refuse to carry a camera. It's too much like work. In fact, I no longer own a camera. I gave my last two Nikon bodies and four Nikon lenses to a friend's daughter who was pursuing a journalism degree at the university in Hermosillo. I did buy a used trail camera at an excellent price from someone on this site and mounted it on a ponderosa overlooking the trail that elk use when they cross our land here in Greer. Dumb me, though. Before I loaded it with film, I pulled on something I wrongly assumed was a broken-off piece of old film that was stuck inside and broke the darned camera. I may buy another trail camera if I find one at a good price. But maybe not. The jury's still out. Bill Quimby

Elk regularly move past our cabin here in Greer in the evenings on their way to spend the night grazing in the meadow across the road from us, but we've never seen more than five or six at a time. I'm sure there are more, but most of them move through after dark and we don't see them. Last evening, though, we counted 34, including maybe 10 small calves just before sundown. They walked down our driveway and then suddenly stopped when they saw two wolves waiting in the middle of the road. I didn't see any collars on them, but they definitely were wolves. There was a Mexican standoff for a couple of minutes, with the wolves and the elk staring at each other, then one of the wolves moved into the brush and began to try to circle the herd. The other wolf, simply sat on his rump and watched the elk. When this happened, the elk turned around and walked briskly back up the canyon. The wolf in the road followed them, but I never saw his companion again. Those wolves obviously were after the calves, but did not seem to be truly serious about it. Not much happens in Greer, and this certainly livened things up for us! We watched everything from our living room window, less than 50 yards from the action. As far as I know, this is the first sighting of wolves in the Little Colorado River valley at Greer. I saw a pair over the hill near White Mountain Reservoir a couple of years ago, and my wife and I saw three along the side of the road near McNary that same year. Bill Quimby

If they're back in the McNary area, I would suspect they won't be there long. I read somewhere that those my wife and I saw there were "removed" by the White Mountain tribe soon after we saw them. Bill Quimby

Pine Donkey: Our cabin is on Becker Lane, reached via Osborne Road. Badger Creek cuts through our property and the forest service's path to Badger Pond starts at the edge of it, where Becker Lane turns sharply to the right. If you're a "stone's throw" from the Circle B (I have trouble calling it the Tin Star), you know the meadow that is across from us. Someone bought it a few years ago and started to subdivide it, then stopped. The elk come down canyon past Badger Pond at last light, move across our land, and either spend the night in that meadow or follow the Little Colorado and cross the highway in the willows below Circle B and hang around River and Tunnel lakes before moving back into the canyon above our cabin at first light. It's the first I've seen wolves here, too. I don't think they're moving west. I suspect these came from the bunch they've been releasing near Green's Peak and Carnero Lake. In air miles, neither is very far from us. Someone is grazing sheep in the forest land next to Herb Owen's place neart the junction, and that may have brought the wolves over here, too. Bill Quimby

Nearly all of the legal kills of jaguars in Arizona are listed in the Arizona Wildlife Federation's record book. My copies are in Tucson and I'm in Greer, but I would suspect this cat in in them. "Caught" to me means it was hunted with dogs. Bill Quimby

"We are loosing the fight guys" If that's so, it's time we loose our big guns before we lose the war. Bill Quimby

Yep. Sure did. Thanks. Is there a reason that the first letter in your name is the only upper case that you ever use? Bill Quimby

I hunted with Bruce Tucker only once, and he called a coyote (and a big mule deer buck) in for me sometime in the late 1980s. A photo of the first coyote that I personally called in, in about 1955, is the only mention of varmint calling in the book. PM me before you order the book. Bill Quimby