2023 AWARDS

The story begins with a conundrum: What if you won the lottery, only to discover no one had funded the jackpot? McTee reveals the answer in a gripping, reflective and conversational style reminiscent of Jack O’Connor’s chronicles.

Recounting his uncanny luck at drawing the one and only 2021 Rock Creek, Montana, ram tag, McTee takes readers not only on his sheep quest but also into the tumultuous history of the Rock Creek herd’s tenuous existence. A century of Rock Creek die-offs, punctuated by hunt closures and sheep transplants that temporarily rekindled population numbers and expectations, made McTee’s draw highly unlikely. Sparce rams and private landowners skeptical of granting access were among McTee’s struggles, but chief among these were doubt. Doubt that a good ram still roamed Rock Creek. Doubt that he should shoot if one crossed his path.

With sharp observations and engaging storytelling, McTee brings us on his journey through wild sheep purgatory, searching for an elusive and perhaps nonexistent mature ram in a fragile herd while hiking past the bleached skulls and decaying curls of the fallen: “The mountains were littered with ghosts,” he writes. Despite waves of bighorn deaths caused by respiratory illness, predators, wildfire, disease-spurred culls, habitat competition from livestock, and deer and nutrientparched forage, McTee finds the diamond in the ashes.

While the author’s ambivalence, sorrow and exhilaration in the culminating moment are unique and heart-wrenching, his experience echoes in the soul of any reverent hunter who has ever torn themselves to pieces across a forbidding expanse to grasp a ram’s rugged majesty in their own battered hands. Jack O’Connor would have understood completely. WS