Endnotes ...

As it turned out the goats did come into camp.  Our camp was at a serious game crossroads where animals would come from the south and southeast, cross between the two lakes, and go up into the basins to the north and west.  And vice versa.  Dan's job in general was to keep the game from going west up the drainage or from crossing and getting into the limited but fairly dense timber at the bottom.  As the goats came into camp, Dan was worried they'd start getting into our stuff, and actually threw rocks at them to get them out.  The nanny with kid confronted Dan.  I had taken my bow on the hunt, but left it in camp ... and here they were, within easy bow range of Dan ... and my bow.  While we were up high with the rifle.  That's big game hunting.

In all we saw two dozen goats, more or less, in the pre-season scouting and first weekend: eleven billies, seven nannies, four kids, and two juveniles.  The nanny I took was a beautiful animal, healthy six or seven years old, and probably birthed and raised some of the other goats we saw.  She had a horn length of 8-5/8 in., supposedly respectable even among billies.

I spent a lot of weekends during the summer scouting.  I wanted to get the goat early.  The road into where we launched is some years only open two months a year.  Plus, the fall semester was in full swing and it would be hard to pry away.  As it turned out, the weather did decompose pretty early up there, not long after our hunt ... I may need to wait till next year to go in and grab the food we stashed.

Summer, 2003, was the year we got goat.