After my Esfahan hunt in Iran I flew over to Uzbekistan to hunt the Severtzov Argali. This was another one of those hunts that took years to put together and with the help of Jo Verni from Natura Sport out of Montreal I was finally able to obtain all the proper legal permits to hunt. Getting my rifle through customs in Tashkent proved to be easier then I had imagined. After our government mandatory stay in Tashkent we drove 6 hours to the hunting area to begin the hunt. Lucky for us, 3 days earlier the area had a huge early snow storm, which was thought to of pushed a lot of the sheep down out of the park and into the outer areas. On day one we only saw a total of 3 sheep which typically they said would have had many sheep at this time of year. On day two we hiked 6-8 kms further up the valley and started seeing sheep right at day break. After turning down a couple smaller rams, the guys finally found two rams travelling together 800 yards away, one was a young ram and the other appeared to be a good mature ram. We started the stock and after two hours we finally were above the rams, but couldn’t see them. The local guide and I slowly started working our way down the mountain towards where we had last saw them, part way down I saw two rams running off to my left in the bottom of the valley and thought we had blown them out and it was all over. The local guide kept pointing down as if our two rams were still below us, so we kept moving down. As we stopped to glass the ravine below us, the small ram jumped out in front us at 35 yards and stood there looking at us, as we stood there waiting for the big ram to jump out we could hear snoring directly below us over the ledge at about 15 yards ! The guide motioned that he was going to throw a rock over the edge to wake the ram up and that to be ready, the rock woke him up and the two rams took off running straight away from us, I took a quick off hand shot at 72 yards and luckily hit the ram in the back ! The ram turned out to be 7 years old and was 33”-34” and had close to 11” bases. Uzbekistan is definitely an adventure style of hunt and not for those looking for a hassle free hunt!
By Daryll Hosker
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