"Which?"

"Hunt 956, whatever that is!"

The number sounded familiar, but I didn't dare hope. Could it really be? I'd accumulated maximum bonus points for desert bighorn, but I'd had them for a decade. I sat at the computer, crossed my fingers, and punched up the hunt number. Desert bighorn! Kaiparowits East! The toughest unit in the state, but who cared? At long last, after collecting nine North American and four Asian sheep, I would finally complete the Grand Slam-the hunter's Holy Grail. But I assumed too much.

Fast-forward to September and the new obsession.

"You're pacing in lecture again," Katie, a pretty English major, told me after class. Another student nodded agreement. I knew exactly why.

For six weeks I'd scouted for desert rams-sleeping in caves with scorpions and packrats that danced across my face in the dark, enduring 113-degree heat, making six drives from the north end of the state to the south end and back again at night-without seeing a mature ram. I'd scaled cliffs fit only for technical climbers, awakened in the dawn with a rattlesnake curled six inches from my nose, and bathed in flashfloods the color of Dijon mustard to escape the heat. All for nothing. Not only didn't I have a desert ram all figured out for the opener the next weekend, I hadn't even seen a ram over three years old. A once-ina-lifetime failure loomed over every waking moment and stalked through my nightmares.

I became intolerant of routine. I shook my fist at rush-hour traffic, swore at barking dogs, and snapped at Cheri. I slugged the heavy bag so hard on workouts I jammed a thumb.

On the opening eve, I drove south again ten hours through the night. I tried feverishly to figure out where to hunt. Predictably, the three-day excursion ended in failure. I found tracks in the aptly named Burning Hills, but you can't hang hoofprints on the wall. That week's classes were torture. I avoided friends, couldn't sleep, and obsessed. I locked myself in offices and ignored phone calls and e-mail. The results of nineteen days of scouting and three days of hunting: zero.

To get more hunting time, I met with all of my students individually the first three days of each week, and in return, gave them Fridays off. I didn't teach Thursdays, so after my Wednesday evening class, Cheri and I drove all night, wired on caffeine, and hunted until Sunday evening, then drove all night to arrive back in time for my Monday-morning classes.

We trekked twenty-nine miles, pitched three camps, and climbed then descended thirty-six hundred feet that weekend. We spotted a distant band of sheep from Harvey's Fear Cliffs six miles and a thousand feet below. The Palomar telescope couldn't have told if one was a ram, and you'd need a hang glider to reach them.

The same drill next weekend, only we boated up Lake Powell and fingered-and-toed up cliffs to the plateau. A thunderstorm forced us to siwash under a ledge four miles from camp with a handful of raisins and no bedrolls. We found eight sheep, one a six-year-old three-quarter-curl ram, the largest I'd seen. But I wasn't tempted. I would settle for nothing less than a fully mature ram, and in most populations, that's at least an eight-year-old. The score after nineteen scouting days and eleven hunting days: zero.

That week I picked a fight with Cheri, made an obscene gesture at a motorist who didn't signal, and dreamt of jeering bighorns. We did it all over again that weekend with similar results. So far, nineteen scouting days, fifteen hunting days, zero results.

I'd arranged for all my students to take three-hour midterms in the campus testing center, and that gave me the week off. That and other schedule-juggling, combined with weekends, gave me two weeks of hunting time before the season closed. I might get fired, but I'd get that desert ram or slide into ruin in the attempt.

We drove all night and arrived in the Burning Hills. We planned to camp there for some days before trekking east with backpacks. We considered renting a $200-a-day motorboat at Page, Arizona, then climbing to the more remote parts of the Navajo Bench, but somehow a motor cheapened the once-in-a-lifetime hunt.

As the eastern horizon blanched, we shoved water jugs, jerky, and optics into a backpack. I shouldered the off-the-rack but accurate Remington Model 700 Magnum, and we staggered, punch-drunk with lack of sleep, to the canyon rim. I left Cheri on a pinnacle on the rim of the miniature Grand Canyon with her 10x30 Zeiss binocular and a spotting scope, and trekked south.

When I set up my Swarovski 15x56 binocular and adjusted the tripod, the biggest ram I'd seen in thirty-five days afield filled my view. My pulse double-timed and pounded in my ears like a jackhammer. I wouldn't shoot it, but suddenly the hunt had taken a favorable twist. The ram was six or seven years old.

By arrangement, Cheri was to hike along the rim and meet me after she'd glassed her section of the gorge. I hoped she'd arrive in time to see the ram. She didn't. The ram stepped behind a cliff and disappeared. What had taken her so long?

Then I heard a strange wail, something like an arctic loon. It didn't surprise me-if sheep danced through my mind, why not weird noises?

"Wa-a-a-al,"it went. I listened more closely. "Wa-a-a-al."

Either I'd gone completely batty with the tension-an alternative I didn't altogether reject-or it was the call Cheri and I used to locate each other in the arctic willow bottoms years ago. It came from the trail back from the rim. I heard it again farther down the trail, then saw Cheri walk onto a point half a mile away, in the opposite direction of where I'd left her. Her body language said instantly she was excited about something. That something could only mean a ram. I sprinted for the trail.

"A big one, with broomed horns," she gasped as I jogged up.

She'd found a band of desert bighorns in the talus and blackbush directly below just after I'd left her. Two ewes, one lamb, a young ram, and a big fellow browsed their way farther down the cliffs until they finally bedded in the shade. Then she sprinted off to find me.

When I focused the binocular on the band, I saw the largest ram I'd seen in thirty-five days of glassing and trekking the Kaiparowits country. At seven hundred yards, I could tell its horns had plenty of annular rings, but I couldn't count them. It wasn't a monster, but it was mature. The season ended in fourteen days, and it had taken thirty-five days just to spot a fully mature ram. Could I afford to take the chance and pass it up in hopes of finding a bigger ram, where the Utah record is only 170 B&C? If I did, was it too much like betting on a 15 in blackjack? I might never get another chance at a desert bighorn or the Grand Slam. I watched through the 15X binocular with the 2X doubler-30X magnification-and obsessed. I'd waited a quarter century for a permit, I'd hunted too long, and the trophy had become too important. I'd gotten too obsessed to think clearly. I'd stalk closer and think about it.

Cheri stayed on the rim and watched. She'd sit hundreds of feet directly above the bighorns with a perfect view of the entire drama. I loped half a mile down the rim, wedged my way down a fracture in the bluff to a ledge sixty feet below, then crabbed through brittlebush and sandstone slabs toward the snoozing sheep.

When I'd finger-and-toed through two boulder-choked ravines, picked my way across a jagged lava slide and along a hip-wide ledge to where the sheep were supposed to be, they weren't there. I edged along the ledge, carefully scanning below and ahead. I slid into a ravine, then scrambled up a scree slide and behind a bungalow-sized boulder. I peeked from behind and spotted a ewe bedded below in the shade of a tiny butte. During the stalk, the sun had moved and so had the shade, and the bighorns had followed it.