RUBBED RAW

ome say it’s superstition, but many of us believe in the power of talismans, those trinkets said to carry us good fortune. For some, these take the form of medicine bundles to protect us or even grant magical powers. For others, it’s a religious medallion or four-leaf

BY ASHLEY MCENROE

clover. As for Glenn Smith of Valley City, Ohio, it is a silver dollar whose president on the heads side is, like Glenn himself, rubbed raw from sheep hunting.

He will turn 82 years old this May, but the good luck charm in his pocket will only be 51. Though

Eisenhower’s profile on that 1972 coin has long since faded away, the dollar has never left Glenn’s side. Over half a century and six continents, 36 wild rams from 24 species and 22 wild billies of 20 species, his talisman has been along for every adventure. Retracing

Glenn’s steps into impossible places, majestic feats and daredevil brushes with calamity, it seems that silver dollar in his pocket was the ounce of providence that made all the difference.

The Journey To 700 Begins

Sheep hunting was not on Glenn’s mind back in the early ’80s, when a buddy asked him if he would like to invest in a new outfitting business near Atlin Lake, BC, at a place called Indian River Ranch. In exchange for guided trips, Glenn got in on the action and went on an Indian River fishing trip with his dad and some friends. As he was casting, he gazed up to glimpse a few rams.

“I don’t think I’d ever seen a wild sheep, but I’d read a lot about sheep hunting,” he says. The guide advised him to come back and get a Stone’s ram.

The instant when someone succumbs to sheep fever is a lot like falling in love at first sight, which is what happened to Glenn, but not when he had his first heavy set of curls in his grasp. On that return mission to BC, he climbed the mountain, peeked over the edge and found a young Stone’s ram standing broadside with his front legs poised on a flat rock and his gaze fixed on the northern horizon and the Yukon beyond.

“That memory stuck with me forever. Something happened in me from that moment—a moment with God, some might say.” He would take his first wild sheep, an old broomed Stone’s, on that 1988 voyage, but it was the ram he left on the mountain, on that rock staring into the boreal wilds, that captured his soul and defined the rest of his existence. His silver coin back then seemed freshly minted, smooth with clear details— images, numbers, the president’s facial features. Its journey had merely begun. Fast forward four years to 1992 in the Highlands outside Butte, Montana. Glenn had the state Governor’s permit in his pocket as he nervously buffed the coin while waiting an eternity for his Rocky Mountain ram to offer him a shot. The dollar got even more wear in the Highlands when Glenn’s hunting buddy, guide and outfitter Tim Magness, narrowly escaped getting struck by a rattler, and then as bird hunters in the distance started shooting, scaring the band of sheep away.

Jack Atcheson, Jr., of Butte- based hunting consultant firm Jack Atcheson & Sons, Inc., had advised Glenn to purchase Montana’s Governor’s tag at the Sheep Show® auction if he really wanted to get a huge bighorn in this lifetime. Though no confirmed reports of a monster Treasure State ram were rumored at the time, Glenn decided to buy it. As the Governor’s permit was put on the block, Glenn was at home calling his friend and Indian River Ranch outfitter Jammie Schumacher, who was in the auction hall to bid for him. After Glenn put in for $75,000, his phone died and the bidding rolled on without him. Sweating and scrambling, Glenn got back in touch with Schumacher just in time and won the tag for $88,000. That was the last time the Montana permit would go for such a bargain price.

It was the only special sheephunting permit Glenn would ever purchase, and it proved to be a solid investment. He set his sights on Montana’s Highlands. While on a scouting trip in the area, Atcheson had spied what appeared to be a dead ram in the cliffs. It was later christened “The King,” the largest Boone & Crockett ram ever recorded in the lower 48 at that time, later garnering an official score of 203 5/8. The big question on everyone’s mind was whether another giant lurked in the vicinity.

The answer soon arrived. Scouting with his two daughters, Magness photographed a big boy they would later nickname “#1.” As opening day neared, this was the ram Glenn and Tim decided to go after.

A sharp crew was in the field helping them scout, including acclaimed hunter-author Duncan Gilchrist. While glassing from a ridge, they found 84 rams grazing in a meadow. “We were looking at literally a ton of horns,” Glenn remembers. One would end up in his backpack.

After the heartache of a missed shot, a less-than-ideal shot, a harrowing four-mile chase and a victorious finish, the Highlands gave Glenn his second ram and the biggest he would ever collect, taping out at 196 5/8 in the B & C record book.

As a tip for guiding him to #1, Glenn offered Magness a chance at a BC Stone’s ram. In 1995, Magness, Glenn and his silver dollar flew to Indian River Ranch for two hunts with Schumacher. Magness found success early on, and Glenn would later get his second B & C ram with a score of 171.

Almost three decades later in

2022, Glenn was still burnishing the faint remnants of Eisenhower’s profile when he completed his fourth FNAWS in Sonora, Mexico, and finally achieved his decades-long dream of entering the 700 Club. It should have been a done deal many years earlier, when Glenn was in Alaska’s Tok area with master guide Jeff Burwell looking for a 157 Dall’s ram to make the 700 Club. Instead of a big white sheep, he got two massive kidney stones. Despite the agony, he rode horseback searching in vain for rams over five excruciating days before calling it quits.

“But, I never would have gotten my 2022 desert ram, a ram of this caliber, if I had succeeded on that hunt,” Glenn says.

He also had a 2021 chance at making the 700 Club, but Glenn cancelled his desert hunt that year because his wife Peggy was fighting cancer.

“She needed me more than I needed a sheep.”

To enter the 700 Club and finish FNAWS number four, Glenn required a 181 or better desert ram. In February 2022, he and his best hunting friends Tim Magness and Marc Hansen traveled to Sonora’s Rancho El Volteadero to join Wade Lemon Hunting and guide Lance Scoggins in search of something spectacular to cap his epic career. Prior to Glenn’s arrival, local guides had seen an impressive ram. It was all flatland glassing, no hiking gear required. His last sheep hunt turned out to be the easiest, possibly a bit of cosmic payback for all the suffering inflicted by all the previous ones. The ram was a dandy, scoring 190 2/8 B & C and receiving the WSF Gold for a rifle-harvested desert at the 2023 Sheep Show® RAM/FNAWS Awards. Racking up his FNAWS measurements to 714 inches, that desert bighorn easily swept Glenn into the 700 Club at last. And with him all the way was that old silver coin, its symbols and dates now mere ghosts, barely perceptible.

Silver In The Sawdust

Finding that lucky piece was akin to discovering a diamond in the rough, or silver in the sawdust, in Glenn’s case. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm, where among his chores Glenn hauled sawdust from a local door manufacturer to use as bedding for their 500 Jerseys. If there was more sawdust than the Smith farm could use, they would give it to their neighbors.

“A lightbulb went off in my head,” Glenn says. “I asked my dad if I could get a truck and sell the sawdust.”

The enterprise sounded promising, and on September 15, 1961, young Glenn, fresh out of high school, sold his first load for $3. Smith Bros. Inc. was born and would become one of the leading landscape supply companies in the eastern US. The silver dollar entered the story about a decade later, in 1972, when a lady paid Glenn for a sawdust delivery with two paper dollars and a silver one.

“I put that silver dollar in my pocket and kept carrying it. It’s been all over the world, on my first sheep hunt in 1988 to my last in 2022,” Glenn explains. “That silver dollar had to travel, and it took brass and lead with it.”

While some of that brass and lead never returned home, the silver always did, often with meat and horns. That silver charm has also been his romance wingman, at least once. Back when he was between marriages, Glenn went on a date and noticed the woman eyeing him oddly as his hand was plunged in his pocket. She asked what he was doing.

“Rubbing my lucky piece,” he smiled and, after pulling it out, “Here: You want to rub it, too?”

Looking For The Silver Lining

According to Glenn Smith, his toughest hunt would have used up eight of his nine lives, if he was a cat. It didn’t happen in Central Asia’s airless extremes or Siberia’s frigid storms or among Kamchatka’s menacing brown bears—all of which Glenn has encountered over the decades. The bruising endurance test was a Dall’s quest in Alaska. Any day of the week, chasing after snowy white thinhorns abounds with obstacles and danger, but Glenn’s hunt was more a survival reality show before that was even a thing.

It started as he and his guide Chad were being flown into camp. All Glenn could do was watch helplessly as the landing Super Cub’s wheels caught the edge of the gravel bar’s vertical bank. Had the wheels been just a few degrees of an angle off, the Cub’s nose would have slammed into the ground. This time, the plane merely bounced back up.

Swiftly forgetting their first brush with death, the two men hiked up three drainages for a rendezvous with three rams Chad had previously scouted. Walking was smooth since the river and creeks were running low and gentle. They would later realize this was temporary. After making camp in the dark, they hunkered down for a nearly two-day wicked downpour.

“Lying in our tent, ears next to the ground, we could hear booms like thunder,” Glenn recalls. “Chad said it was boulders moving around in the river. At night, we heard a roar like an airplane engine. It was a landslide.”

Emerging from his tent in the daylight, Glenn found water creeping toward the entry. They quickly packed up and bushwhacked up a slope to escape the flood. Five hundred yards from where their tents had been staked, they discovered the landslide with a 50-foot-wide terminus.

“Had we camped there in the dark, we would have been buried alive,”

Glenn says.

They stopped at a lazy waterfall, where Chad plucked out a chunk of green fiberglass. “This is a piece of airplane,” the guide announced, then tucked the evidence in his pocket while saving the waypoint in the only GPS available at the time: his memory.

Continuing their march ever upward into the vertical, they found no sheep but made a new camp and plan. With Glenn glassing from yet a higher peak, Chad ventured out and returned with good news. The chase was on, but their morning stalk began to get demoralizing when cliffs barred the way several times, adding more miles, altitude and exhaustion to the mission. Resting in the afternoon, the men turned their spotting scopes toward their distant campsite and watched a black bear making himself at home.

“Sitting on his rump, this funny bear had Chad’s down sleeping bag,” Glenn laughs. “He sat and squeezed it and watched the feathers fly like snow.”

Meanwhile, Glenn was reaching his limit. “I told Chad that I’m out of gas. Either we kill a ram today, or I’m done.”

Darkness was falling, so they decided to stay there and wait for daylight and, hopefully, rams. Armed with drinking water and rainsuits, they hunkered down behind a Volkswagen-sized boulder on the mountainside. It was so sheer that they had to dig in their heels to avoid tumbling tail over teakettle. Shivering through the night to stay warm, they feasted on a candy bar. Their restless vigil got suddenly more exciting when the ground started shaking and a freight-train rumble shattered the silence. Boulders went bouncing by like basketballs tossed by the gods. Earthquake!

“We were lucky our rock shelter held,” Glenn says, adding that at least they felt no aftershocks.

Under a blue morning sky, they reached a spot littered with sheep droppings. The three rams had to be nearby.

“Suddenly, 30 yards away, a ram appears!” Glenn exclaims. “I racked in a round, and the sheep stood there dumbfounded. It couldn’t believe what it saw.”

At the shot, the ram toppled over, right into a chute and out of sight. With no ropes, Glenn and Chad braved two dicey descents to reach his sheep 500 yards below. While Glenn was certain the drop had shorn off both curls, only two chips were missing from the horns. After the men stood up from taking photos, gravity stepped in, and the ram renewed his getaway, rolling down the dizzy incline until he slid to a stop nearly at the base.

Heaving into camp with laden packs, Glenn and Chad were expecting the bear had done his worst but were relieved to discover only the one sleeping bag mauled and some otherwise minor damage. Yet, when they attempted to call the outfitter, the radio’s batteries were dead.

All the while, a glacier in the area had been melting, and water was rising. On the following day’s hike out, the men played the tide to cross the creeks. That night, they enjoyed