Reports

Musk deer.

I was hunting in the KCR in the Arkhyz area. It was the fast hunting, that took just one day. We got up in the morning and went back down in the evening. I shot  from 338 Lapua Magnum at 468m. I am happy with the trophy. Organized by Eventus. Guides were Mikhail and Andrey.

It was a hard walking on the loose, dolomite-covered slopes of the Balkan spurs of Macedonia. It was interesting and sometimes I had to make efforts to get to the distance of a confident shot to numerous, but no less cautious from that Balkan chamois. Moreover, the rented weapons were the Yugoslavian Zastava carbine. It  was tested and started to shoot well with great difficulty  only at the place. The trophy was obtained from a distance of 270 m

In December 2002, I read  the Alexander Khokhlov's book "The Peaks of Hunting". When I had finished reading, I applied to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for a license for the rifled weapons. After getting a license, I purchased a Heym 21 carbine in caliber 30-06 and Schmidt-Bender 1.5*6 optics and traveled to  my first hunt in my life - to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. I won't describe in detail my first-ever experience of hunting with a carbine, and even in the mountains. I was lucky enough to get right into the ass of a ibex from the sixth shot at a distance of 360-380 meters and got it. There was no limit to my joy. Well, then it started that I can't stop for 20 years already.

The hunt took place in March 2004. The sheep was captured after two days of hunting. We hiked and horseback rode along the tract of the Kara-Sai Valley in Kyrgyzstan from a distance of 370 m.

I've got the sheep  on 2.10.2006. The shooting was conducted from a distance of 420 meters. It took 6 days of hunting at altitudes from 4200 to 5600 m to get the trophy . Very hard work.

My hunting for the Czech mouflon took place on the principle of "Came, saw, shot"  as well as the absolute majority of European hunts. We hiked not for a long on forested slopes, in a private hunting farm near Brno. We came a clearing with a feeder where a herd of mouflons was, then  a short target selection and a simple shot at 200 meters.

As one of the actors sang in a movie about a babysitter: "Changes in nature occur from year to year!". He's sung about bad weather but, now we all talk global warming. It's a new trend. Otherwise, how else could we explain the July heat that settled in mid-September 2020, in the Altai Mountains, and the temperature at noon sometimes reached the thirty-degree mark? And that was in the conditions of the middle mountains, where the altimeter showed heights from one and a half to two and a half thousand meters.  That was the reason why the deer, which has already gathered a harem of females, did not show its nose from the foliage. It stood in the shade, scratching its trophy horns and looking at the females with an erotic haze in deer eyes, but refused to bring out love roulades. It happened all eight days of my mountain safari. Therefore I had to concentrate on the Altai ibex hunting, which did not run along the roads. All ibexes climbed on the rocks, on which there was practically no snow left.  It was then that the real mining work began with daily horizontal exceedances from six hundred to a thousand meters, liters of sweat and a pound of salt. By the evening of the fourth day, I was able to get close to this powerful old male at a distance of three hundred and seventy meters and made a shot. Telling the truth, I fired three times and got it only with the third shot finally. The goat was eleven years old according to the annual growths of horns and its body looked like a dwarf hippopotamus. So, we had to work when laying it out for a short photo session because it was getting late, and none of us was inspiring the prospect of descending at night. Moreover, all of the above happened on the very eve of Rosh Hashanah, the next one, for 5781 years since the moment when the Eternal creation of the Universe and the Sublunary world with a man in addition. Then he finished, and sat down to rest under the Altai cedar, or maybe under a fir. Nobody knows! All rabbis forbid categorically to light candles later than eighteen minutes before sunset on holidays and Shabbat, but I ignored that instructions when we returned to the hut deep after the evening dawn and had lit the candles, pronounced traditional blessings over them. Then I poured red wine for himself and the guys who accompanied me, dipped an apple slice in honey and wished everyone gathered in koshar a good and sweet New Year.

It was an honest hunt.  There was a long ascent on foot along the slopes of the Caucasus spurs of Karachay-Cherkessia, which were difficult to walk. The hunt began at dawn. The tur was already taken at the end of the evening, after sunset, from a distance of about 400 meters at an altitude of about 2600 meters.

That sheep was recognized by GSCO and  I finally closed the Orvis Super 40 Slam  according to the version of this club when got it.

I hunted in August 2021. The weather was very changeable. We arrived to the hunting lands through Chukotka. I found the sheep with the very rare horns’ camber and I couldn’t help but got it. It was medium size.

The hunt was organized in the north of the Yaroslavl region in February 2017. It was a classic cover hunt with flags. There were two wolves' groups inside  . Being in my haste, I forgot the magazine for my carbine and was limited to only one cartridge. I had a terrible headache after celebrating a friend's birthday and I  sat down  quietly under the Christmas tree inside the flag line. About 10 minutes passed after the start of the roundup, when I noticed two wolves slowly walking towards me. She-wolf was a in front, and a little further away from her  a seasoned one went. Since I had only one chance, I let the animals get as close as possible, especially since the wind was from them. I wanted to wait for the wolves to cross so that I could take both of them with one shot. But about 15 meters away from me, the wolf stopped, which was the signal for me to shoot. A little later, a seasoned one was also obtained on another hunter.

The hunt took place in the Tver region. Huntsmen were looking for fresh lynx tracks in the snow in advance, after the discovery  they reported the possibility of a successful hunt.  It took us  five hours to get there from Moscow. We arrived at a hunting farm in the area of Lake Peno. That hunting farm belongs to Leonid Nikolaevich Eshchenko. After finding traces of lynx, the huntsmen and I got on hunting skis, released the dogs on the trail and began the trail. Already 500 meters later, we heard the active barking of dogs. It became clear that they quickly found the lynx up a tree. The first shot dropped the defeated animal on the snow.

My first hunt in Kamchatka took place back in 2005. We hunted in the area of the Icha River. The weather was rainy and the river level was quite high. Hunting took place from the approach in the spawning grounds, where bears were used to fish. I got the bear with one shot from a distance of about 30 meters, after which the male fell into the water and we had to  pulled  it out of the water with great difficulty. 2 meters 80 cm was quite a good result.

That was my first attempt at moose hunting during the rutting season. It was conducted by my friend Sergey Uspensky at his hunting farm in the Tver region. Sergey lured the big male very professionally  even on a bright day. The moose confidently walked towards the beckoning hunter and I took it with the first shot from a distance of no more than 30 meters. A wonderful trophy of 9 and 9 appendages.

Two factors apparently worked positively on the growth of the number of roe deer in the lands of the Ryazan region. African swine fever, after which the number of wild boar and proper biotechnologies for roe deer significantly decreased. There are noticeably more animals and the accounting carried out for several years have allowed us to allocate a quota for hunting for roe deer. The trophy was obtained from a distance of about 300 meters.

That was my fourth attempt to get a trophy of this subspecies of red deer. The previous hunts developed differently. Somewhere there was no deer at all, somewhere the weather made its own adjustments, because the animals turned out to be very weather-dependent and stopped roaring at the slightest change in weather conditions, and somewhere hunting luck turned away from me, although the deer was already practically in sight. That year I hunted at the hunting farm "Malta", the hunting faculty of Irkutsk Agricultural University at the invitation of Yuri Vashukevich and Dmitry Medvedev. I got the trophy early in the morning from a distance of about 400 meters. It happened to be a classic Manchurian deer with five appendages and thin horns. I would like to note that in the same Irkutsk region there are also hybrid maral-izyubrin individuals with more powerful horns.

I bought this hunt at a charity auction, which was held as part of the New Year's Eve party of the Club of Mountain Hunters. The lot was put up by HIGH HANT and Elson Makhmudov. My friends have already had the honor of hunting with Elson and all spoke very kindly about him and his team. The trip took place from October 19 to 22. I was lucky to have sunny and warm weather. The mountains in the Khryug hunting farm, which a few years ago Elson rented as a hunting user, as well as everywhere else in the Caucasus, are difficult and steep. It took a little over three hours to climb from the road to the base camp. The horses helped a lot, for which they are very grateful. Elson made a pretty good base camp in the last season. I was always used to prefer to spend the night in my tent, but in our free time we were going to have tea in a cozy house with pleasure. We had done a reconnaissance on the first evening after our arrival, it became clear that there were a lot of turs there, if not to say too many. We noticed eight separate groups of turs, females and males separately, as it should be during that period of the year. The groups of males were also different, both in age composition and in number. The largest numbered about 50 individuals. In the morning of the next day, we got up to the so-called mobile camp, it took us more than an hour. We rose 3100 masl. To our disappointment, that large group noticed us and began to leave in an organized manner from us, although we had done everything to remain unnoticed. A second group of old males followed her. Perhaps something scared the animals and they began to cross the ridge at the height of 3400 meters. We made an attempt to catch up with them. I shot at the running animals from a distance of 540 meters. I was surprised but the bullet landed a meter above the target. It was the first time when I took a new 6.5 Creed more carbine with a DS2 electronic sight from Swarovski. That shooting complex showed itself perfectly on the plain, but something went wrong in the mountains. I shot confidently but the bullet went higher. A little later, we detected several more groups of turs below to the left of the main peak. We made an attempt to crawl up to them from above, but the animals noticed us from a distance of 800 meters and began to go down the slope. Elson and I rushed down the steep slope in an attempt to catch up with the animals. We had descended 300 meters in height and noticed a group of males leaving far below. I shot from a distance of 560 meters at an angle of 30 degrees, was able to get a 12-year tur. Then a hard climb up followed and return to the camp.        At the end of my brief report, I want to say a few words about the wonderful outfitter and person Makhmudov Elson. You can say as much as you like that the hunting economy of the country and the Laws are in poor condition, you can rely on the lack of development prospects and conditions for this. But there are examples of people like Elson. He rented hunting grounds through an auction just three years ago. He is actively engaged in their development and development, works with the local community of former poachers, forces them to treat the animal world in a new way. He has also formed an excellent team of young guys who got a new opportunity to earn a living in these remote and hard-to-reach areas of Dagestan.  In a relatively short time, Elson has already earned himself respect and authority among many mountain hunters who had the opportunity and luck to hunt with him. A person knows and loves his job and I would like to wish him that all plans are realized, the animal world is under reliable protection, populations develop and multiply, and that there are more such professional outfitters in Dagestan, the Caucasus and Russia as a whole.