Antelope Hunting

Hunting deer was a Sampson family ritual, but in about 1963, the State of Oregon offered a lottery for a limited number of antelope tags, as well. Milly won one, so we loaded the camping trailer and headed for southeastern Oregon.  Besides Vake, Milly, and four kids, the party included Vake’s sister and brother-in-law Buck and Sylvia Goodman, and a family friend, John Stoner.

    At the time, John was very ill with ulcers. That was before the discovery of helicobacter pylori, so ulcers were thought to be induced by stress. In John Stoner’s case, that was the stress of being the chief deputy of the Lane County Department of Public Health.  It was also believed that migraines were caused by stress, before the discovery of serotonin uptake receptor blockers, and it was believed that no person would get both ulcers and migraines. John was living disproof of that theory; he suffered horribly from both. The trip was supposed to give him some R&R. When we stopped for lunch at a burger joint en route, the only thing that he could find on the menu that he could tolerate was cottage cheese; and when it arrived with a dash of paprika on top to make it pretty, he scraped even that off.

   Our destination was in the Oregon desert about 10 miles north of Nevada and 12 miles west of Idaho. It was a long, long drive from the coast over the Cascades through Sisters and Bend, then to Burns, then onto an unending, unbending road past Glass Butte,  into the desert. We stopped at the last outpost for miles to refuel. Out of an abundance of caution, Vake bought an extra fan belt in case of a breakdown on the road, and complained that it cost many times more than what he would have paid if he’d bought it at home, but that’s what the market would bear.

As we pulled off the highway, our vehicles stirred up a cloud of fine alkali dust. We  had no air conditioning, but we rolled up the car windows anyway. Unfortunately, we forgot that the overhead vent in the trailer was open, so everything inside got a pretty good dusting.

     The campsite was a rockhound’s treasure trove. The ground was littered with rocks that John Stoner identified as a low-grade opal. We saw plenty of horned toads and jack rabbits. I had my 11# target rifle along, but after wasting a couple of jack rabbits, I quit hunting because they were too easy to hit; there was no sport in it.

    In the mornings, the adults would drive some distance looking for antelope (pronghorns, actually). By high noon, most people would take a siesta, but three of us were too restless to be bothered with naps: they were John Stoner, Mark and me. I yearned to see a rattlesnake, for the excitement, for the danger of it. One day during others’ siestas, the three of us took off on foot across country until we came to the rim of a small canyon. We saw likely rock-hounding places below, but as we looked at the rubble around our feet, we realized that it was littered with shed snake skins. We backed off quickly, and as soon as we figured we were out of striking range of any snakes, we threw rocks at the rubble where we had seen all the skins. However, we were not able to rouse any snakes.

     One morning Buck returned to camp with an antelope, with Milly’s game tag attached to its horn. The tag was not transferable, so the fiction was maintained that it was Milly’s antelope. However, even the kids could figure that one out when Buck got the horns mounted. We all shared in the meat. It was very lean and very dark red, like venison, only darker. Much of it was made into sausage.

     On our trip home, when we pulled into a rest area beside the highway, I saw a rattlesnake that somebody had killed.  I was surprised at the needle-tiny size of its fangs. I had envisioned something more like a bear would grow, big enough that you could make an ugly necklace out of it.

     I saw my first real, live rattlesnake in the wild in 2010, only after I had moved to central WA.  It made its presence known at once, and crawled off into the sagebrush, shaking its booty the whole way.