The following information comes from the Foreword of Hunting Our Biggest Game by Clyde Ormond. Hunting Our Biggest Game is also available to purchase in print.
The hunting of our biggest game is a post-graduate experience in the art of hunting. The objectives of, preparation for, and the techniques of such hunting differ from those involved in the pursuit of medium-sized game. Most often the hunter will discover that the skills he has developed on smaller game will not suffice in successfully hunting the really big species.
Sheer size makes our biggest game attractive to the red-blooded hunter. Size, coupled to an element of potential danger, their relatively few numbers, most rugged habitat, and difficulty of access, all add to the challenge for the true and imaginative sportsman, proportionately increasing the ultimate desirability of his quarry.
Hunting our biggest game is, basically, trophy-hunting. It is not a sport for the purely meat-hunter. As compared with the pursuit of deer-sized game, hunting for the big ones is expensive in time, preparation, physical effort, and actual cost. The hunter’s prize should be, in some way, commensurate with his anticipation, often years of waiting, and his effort.
This factor adds to the overall challenge, and is an important consideration in the hunter’s final choice of an individual animal. Beasts of the largest species did not attain their size, elusiveness, and desirability as trophies through being stupid. Rather, the most prized of each species are those animals which have survived for many years in a constant battle against predators, disease, the elements common to a rugged wilderness habitat, and their mortal enemy, man.
Such animals at their physical prime represent the tantalyzing, hard-to-attain prizes of the sportsman big-game hunter. They do, and will play the hunting game for their lives, while man plays the game for its sport. They are the rewards which make his dreaming, his pursuit, and his resultant memories worthwhile.
There is, however, more of value to the hunt than just the trophy. The real opponent of the big-game hunter is not his quarry. His basic antagonist is a combination of rugged terrain, severe weather, unfamiliar equipment, altitudes and modes of wilderness travel for which the remaining fifty weeks of the year have not conditioned him, exhausting physical exertion, and the hazards of gravity. His trophy is but the reward for having successfully overcome such opposition.
Similarly, there are allied satisfactions to the hunt in addition to the taking of a noble game animal. The hunter of our biggest game travels in the company of admirable and hardy men. His experience is amid the remaining and unexploited grandeur of those areas of Nature which are largely as Creation left it. In a measure, he accepts the challenge of the unknown to determine for himself, his status as a man.
Because of this, the hunter’s greatest thrill and satisfaction will come in direct proportion to his personal code of sporting ethics when he accepts the challenge of the hunt. The hunter who sets for himself a high standard in the matters of meeting game on its own terms in its own bailiwick, with every advantage tipped in favor of the pursued, and who then outwits his quarry—this is the man for whom the real rewards of the hunt are greatest.
For many, the hunting of any species of the biggest game will be a singular experience. Not all are fortunate enough to hunt year after year. Often one single trophy, from literally the trip-of-a-lifetime, must suffice.
To such hunters, especially, the memories are as vital to the overall consideration as the prize. These memories will be, and become, good to the extent that the hunter has played the game with honor and on a lofty plane of sportsmanship while he had the high privilege of being in the big-game field.
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