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Jim Shockey

On the Other Side of the World

On the other side of the world is a place called Quinghai. Never heard of it? Neither had I until I talked to Bob Kern, famed hunting consultant and owner of The Hunting Consortium, a company that specializes in organizing top quality international hunts.

"You'll be hunting in Quinghai province, on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, close to the headwaters of the Yellow River." Bob explained.

"Huh?"

"We'll fly you into Xining and from there we'll drive you to the Dulan International Hunting Ground."

"Huh?"

"You look confused." Bob finally noticed the "you-lost-me-a-long-time-ago" look on my face. "It's in China. You'll be hunting blue sheep and Tibetan gazelle in China."

"Oh China! Of course I know where China is! It's on the other side of the world right?"

On the other side of the world turned out to be exactly right, it took three days travel just to get to the camp. It was an amazing three days though, we visited the Forbidden City in Beijing and crossed high over the Great Wall of China and drove for a day across the lands that the Great Kahn conquered back in the 13th Century. We passed yerts and yaks and the odd devotee, supining themselves on life long pilgrimages to find their God.

Somewhere along the trip, at about 9,000 feet above sea level, we left the lowlands and oxygen behind. Sandstone turned to granite and suddenly, as we rounded one final bend in the trail, I had the oddest feeling, the feeling of insignificance; the snow-covered peaks towered over our colorful yert camp. It was spectacular, ancient and very wild. Like so many silent children of the "great mother" of the Himalayans, the peaks jutted skyward; adventure their promise.

We rode upon the descendants of the Mongol ponies, passing at a jarring trot through the thin air of the Tibetan Plateau; we glassed hundreds of blue sheep, striking blue, black and tan creatures that seemed to dissipate over distant ridges as we approached from below. Finally my itinerant Mongolian guide by the literally translated name of "Stone Soldier" spotted a lone ram, an old ram, my ram, and we began the lung searing uphill stalk. The ram stood magnificent, looking over the realm that it had controlled for much of the 15 years of its life. It failed this one time to see danger. BOOM! The one shot from my Thompson/Center muzzleloader fractured into a dozen faint reports as the "boom" echoed back and forth…the ram never heard the first echo.

Later that same day we made an even longer stalk on one of the diminutive Tibetan gazelles that ghosted in and out of the less forbidding mountain folds. The shot was much longer and the animal much smaller, but the result was the same. BOOM! One shot, a dozen fading echoes and then silence in a place that defines both solitude and forever; the mountains around me hadn't changed in the last 10,000 years and wouldn't in the next 10,000 years. My adventure into the wild lands on the other side of the world was over.