After the deaths of his father, mother, sister, and daughter in a short period of time, Arnold Alward of New Brunswick sold his businesses and spent the next eighteen years hunting, taking nearly all the world's important big-game species, which eventually won him the Weatherby Award.
During the course of his hunts, he shot a Grand Slam and a Super Slam of Sheep and the Big Five as well as all the spiral-horned antelope of Africa. His busiest year was 1988, when he made thirteen major hunts! One of his most grueling hunts was for a desert bighorn in Baja California, which completed his Grand Slam. When he went on safari to Ethiopia, he passed up a 75-pound elephant before taking a 110 x 115-pound tusker on the tenth day of the hunt; then he continued in that country to take a mountain nyala. After Ethiopia, he successfully hunted caribou in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Quebec; a whitetail in Alberta; Columbia blacktails and brown bears on Alaska's Kodiak Island; and Coues deer in Mexico . . . all in the same year!
In Asia, he hunted most of the major sheep species that inhabit the High Altai, the Pamirs, and the Tibetan Plateau. During one of his trips to Mongolia, he slept in yurts, rode Mongol ponies, and took Altai and Gobi argali, Siberian roe deer, and maral stag. On another trip he encountered some of the worst weather possible on the face of the earth. He was not always successful, but he stayed with it and kept his good humor.
Alward's hunts were always full of adventure: His polar bear hunt was delayed when his guide's daughter murdered her boyfriend, and on the opposite end of the globe, Alward landed in Zambia during a rebellion, when dissenters seized a TV station and the government rolled tanks out into the streets. Just before he finally reached his hunting camp on that trip, local wardens killed several poachers. He was also on a hunt when his guide was killed in a car crash. He hunted in Sudan during one of its civil wars . . . all in all, he’s had an adventurous time.
An avid conservationist, Alward has sponsored a variety of youth programs, built lakes and shooting ranges, and planted a million trees around his lodge in New Brunswick, Canada. As you'll see, Alward, the only Canadian to ever receive the Weatherby Big Game Trophy, has packed a lot of living into the eighteen years covered by this book.
