Terror in the night. Last night after I blogged, we were in our ger around midnight and all of a sudden there was a bunch of yelling outside and we couldn't tell what was going on; it was a male voice, yelling and screaming and then all of a sudden he came in the door of our ger. At that point I had my flashlight, so I flashed him in the eyeballs, and then the two women from the other building grabbed him and pulled him away, he was yelling and screaming, so I went out with my flashlight. The guy screamed and yelled, I actually had my gun. It turns out he came in on horseback. Apparently our guide went out dealt with the guy ... and the guy is some drunk from who knows where and he was looking for alcohol and cigarettes. It was a pretty haywire situation in the middle of the night. Eventually the guy left about an hour later ... Anyway, we got up at 4 a.m. went out, got on the horses, went all day up and down the mountains. Worked like dogs. The local nomad guys are fantastic, hard-working guys. We spotted a wolf, too, this morning a great, big, huge wolf, and I got him about 100 yards running shot. Did not see any rams today at all, so it's been a tough, tough day. We have one more spot to look, if they're not there it looks like there's no rams around because they told me today that's the last spot.

The Next Day ...

We just got back in; we're done. Hunted the last bit of the mountain that we had to hunt and there's no rams, so we had a long chat me and the guide and decided that it's just time to move on to the ibex part of the hunt. This Argali, there must be rams around, but we just had three great days of weather, we've gone through the whole mountain and never found any decent rams at all, just a few small ones, so we're going to move on. Also the horses are just about done in, so we couldn't hunt tomorrow anyway. We'd have to go and try to catch six more horses from the herds that are running around virtually wild around here. Plus, the weather, I'm standing out here right now; thunderstorms are rolling in so. We're done. The Argali hunt is over. We tried our best. The guys worked hard. The local guys here are fantastic and the guide had his troubles falling off the horse; got hurt badly. We agreed it's time to move on. Going to try for ibex and gazelle, so that's that. We did our best, can't find an Altay Argali. The wolf skull went 16 13/16, so I think that's pretty big. It was ancient.