This story initially ran within the 2021 No. 4 Concern of Outside Life. Learn the way to learn extra tales from that concern right here.
You may name Dennis Dunn a romantic pragmatist. His romantic facet fuels a lifelong love of pursuing wild animals with solely a stick and a string. It has motivated his unreasonable quest to reap all 29 species of big-game mammals in North America. His sensible facet, although, reckoned that, at 79 years outdated on the time, he possible didn’t have sufficient years left to efficiently draw a restricted bison tag in one of many 5 states that provide them. So two years in the past, Dunn minimize the road of unsuccessful candidates and acquired at public sale what is named the Arizona governor’s bison license, which matches to the best bidder and provides the holder 12 months to hunt.
Final yr, Dunn spent 71 of these 12 months in a floor blind on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, just some yards outdoors Grand Canyon Nationwide Park. That is when his romantic facet numbed him to the tedium of spending 12 hours each day inside a darkish tent, in a straight-backed chair, peering out on the similar changeless view for greater than 10 weeks.
He learn the Bible—the entire New Testomony and about half of the Previous Testomony.He examine Abraham, who at 100 years outdated begat his son Isaac with the previously childless Sarah. He examine affected person Job, whose religion was rewarded by twice as many riches as had been taken from him in a problem of his resolve. However he didn’t learn solely about assessments of endurance and religion. Dunn additionally learn concerning the Kaibab Plateau bison herd, and about how the older bulls have change into nocturnal since searching was initiated as a population-administration software.
He knew that any likelihood to take one along with his recurve bow within the sunlight hours can be sudden and fleeting. So for these 71 days he by some means remained vigilant and prepared, though he noticed bison on solely seven of these days.
“I describe it as my 71-day COVID quarantine,” says Dunn, whose pursuit of the North American 29 with instinctive archery gear—no sights or releases or poundage-amplifying cams and not one of the pulleys of a compound bow—is detailed in his 2008 e-book, Barebow!: An Archer’s Truthful-Chase Taking of North America’s Massive-Recreation 29.
On day 71, simply as he was packing as much as depart the blind, Dunn sensed an animal’s strategy. An historic bison bull was strolling instantly towards his blind, headed for a salt block 9 yards from his conceal. The bull was dealing with instantly towards Dunn, however when the bison lifted a hoof to show, Dunn drew his bow, a Whitetail Hawk recurve drawing 60 kilos at his 31-inch draw.
“I had realized from watching bison that you’ve got a cut up second once they flip to slide an arrow between their ribs.”
The bull went solely 18 yards earlier than he went down, his life taken by an 800-grain picket arrow driving a single-bevel two-bladed broadhead.
Dunn had solely three extra days earlier than his tag expired, however he had achieved his aim, including another North American sport animal to the Pope and Younger Membership’s e-book of archery data.
His subsequent, and ultimate, Pope and Younger critter can be an Alaska barren-ground caribou. So he was again at it final August, now 81 years outdated however with the drive and ambition of a person half—or perhaps a quarter—his age.
An Intentional Life
Dennis Dunn has lived a singular life that’s been dedicated to achievement of 1 kind or one other. He was born in 1940 to a household of nonhunters. Dunn’s mom borrowed from her expertise as a Stanford College undergrad who had taken formal archery instruction for her athletic exercise.
“After I was 5 years outdated, my mom introduced dwelling a toy set of bows and arrows with rubber cups on the ends of the arrows,” Dunn remembers. “At age 7, Mom despatched me off to summer season camp, the place they’d actual bows and arrows with metal suggestions. There I grew to become hooked on the game of bowhunting. Over the subsequent few years, I spent my time fantasizing over how American Indians snuck by the forest with bow and arrow in hand, in quest of a deer or elk.”
An early friendship with Glenn St. Charles, the pioneering founding father of the Pope and Younger Membership, intensified Dunn’s curiosity in archery. His first two bows had been recurves, one with an aluminum riser, the second a 50-pound fiberglass mannequin.
Dunn did loads of searching with compounds, albeit with out sights connected for aiming. However in 2006, he returned to his traditional-archery roots and primarily carried his Whitetail Hawk, constructed by Steve Gorr’s Cascade Archery. At Dunn’s 31-inch draw, the bow pulls 60 kilos, a considerable draw weight for archers even half his age.
Searching may be Dunn’s life calling, however he’s had a profession in politics—he served as a high-rating officer of the Republican Nationwide Committee (for a time he was married to six-term Washington congresswoman Jennifer Dunn). He additionally had a profession in public coverage, serving as director of worldwide commerce organizations. He’s labored as a securities dealer. He writes poetry in addition to books and is a faithful patron of the opera. He now lives in Solar Valley, Idaho.
Bowhunting has been the throughline in his life, and he displays on his accomplishments with a way of each achievement and restlessness. Why does he pursue it with such depth and function?
First, his audacious achievements didn’t essentially begin as lifetime targets. As an alternative, “My searching profession has consisted of a collection of smaller targets, used like stepping-stones to progress from one to the subsequent,” he says. “With every success, my confidence would develop, and I might focus my sights on a brand new aim, a special species, or an even bigger buck or bull. Finally, as my goals started to coalesce round ever extra bold targets within the bowhunting world, I lastly got here to appreciate that there was nearly nothing I couldn’t obtain offered I used to be keen to work onerous sufficient, be affected person sufficient, and make the sacrifices essential to get there.”
That pursuit of private development is the true, intangible trophy of his profession as a hunter. However Dunn acknowledges that the world is constructed on expressions of overt achievement—trophies—and his assortment of record-e-book, traditional-archery kills has elevated him to the highest of the bowhunting pantheon. This truth hasn’t modified his perspective on what a trophy animal means.
“A trophy is a really private factor for me, as it’s for anybody,” says Dunn. “For me, the expertise is the trophy, the chance to hunt essentially the most exceptional landscapes on Earth. However the first animal I ever took with a bow was a squirrel, and that was a trophy. My first mule deer—a doe that I shot after I was 24—was an ideal trophy.”
Pursuit With Objective
Dunn doesn’t meander within the mushy margins of defining a trophy. For him, the definition is easy: an animal that’s higher, as outlined by dimensions of antler or cranium, than these of that species he beforehand killed.
In different phrases, it’s a measure of private enchancment, regardless of the way you quantify it. “My father was a excessive jumper on the College of Washington,” says Dunn. “I can’t recall what he cleared—one thing over 6 ft—however I bear in mind him speaking about what a problem it was. How he skilled, and each day he tried to enhance his private finest. For me, that’s what searching is. It’s concerning the problem and hope that I can clear the bar that I’ve set for myself.”
As soon as he achieved his aim of killing all 29 North American big-game species with conventional archery tools, Dunn set about elevating the bar for his subsequent aim: taking specimens that make the Pope and Younger report e-book.
When Dunn arrowed that huge Kaibab Plateau bison—which simply misses the Boone and Crockett report e-book however simply makes the Pope and Younger e-book—he was nicely on his technique to “upgrading” all of his North American critters. His final remaining “improve” is that Alaska barren-floor caribou.
“All animals had been taken utilizing purely instinctive taking pictures,” says Dunn. “No archer has but completed that aim. Solely 5 have carried out so with compound bows and yardage sight pins for aiming.”
Dunn’s accomplishments are memorialized in his 504-page e-book, which weighs greater than 9 kilos and is equal elements pure historical past overview, chronicle of searching from 1964 by 2004, and ruminations on what it means to be a trophy hunter.
Extra particularly, Dunn is a trophy hunter who enormously limits his deadly vary. That is, as pioneering bowhunter Howard Hill put it, “searching the onerous manner.”
“The stickbow hunter is aware of that the percentages are stacked in opposition to him, however he embraces the hardship,” says Dunn. “You study to benefit from the problem of willfully limiting your self to a weapon of restricted vary with the intention to make the competition extra equal. And if you settle for that you’ll solely launch an arrow at a specimen that’s a minimum of bigger than the earlier one you killed, then you definitely perceive that you could be be on the lookout for an animal you’ll not discover, or when you do, it won’t be killable.”
However Dunn counts shut encounters as almost equal to kills. Given his unimaginable bowhunting success, most would anticipate Dunn to be an elite archer, however that’s not essentially the case.
“I’m not an excellent shot with a bow, so I’ve honed my searching abilities to the extent that I’ve change into an excellent stalker,” he says. “After I voluntarily restrict myself, I give my quarry all the benefits, and an outdated male on the finish of his life has vital benefits, of eager odor and listening to and sense of motion in addition to intimate data of their terrain.
“All I’ve are my wits and intelligence, however utilizing them to get so shut, and to date inside an animal’s fight-or-flight perimeter, makes it attainable for me to attach with my Paleolithic ancestors, and to look at Mom Nature in a manner few others can. I thus change into a part of that pure world.
“Even when I don’t discover the standard buck or bull I’m trying to find throughout a whole week of searching, if I expertise a really shut encounter with a doe deer or cow elk or moose or caribou, that produces almost as huge a thrill for me as arrowing the mature male animal I used to be searching for.”
Dunn’s a long time of searching each species from musk ox and brown bears to Coues deer and tule elk have taught him that cautious hunters have one weapon that may be simply as lethal as a contemporary firearm: endurance.
“I’ve time, endurance,” says Dunn. “The most important distinction between a profitable and unsuccessful bowhunter is endurance.”
However Dunn, who turns 82 in Could, is conscious that whereas he has expertise, assets, and endurance in spades, he’s working out of mortal time.
He has another aim to realize earlier than he can flip his consideration to different benchmarks, which could embrace extra publications detailing his exceptional experiences touring the continent searching huge sport.
That trophy Alaska barren-ground caribou eluded him final August. As he was homing in on candidate bulls over the course of 25 days within the bush, he tore his calf muscle. For a number of days he shrugged off the harm, hobbling across the muskeg. However the torn muscle stored him from getting inside stickbow vary of a goal bull.
Dunn lastly conceded and flew dwelling for medical consideration. However he intends to be again on Alaska’s tundra within the fall of 2022, his eyes firmly mounted on the bar he has set for himself.
“I intend to hunt till I drop, with the intention to have lived the fullest life attainable, as near Mom Nature as I might get, and in order that I would higher perceive and extra totally respect the limitless variety of miracles that God Almighty has created on this planet. However I notice that I’m now very a lot in a race with Father Time.”
Learn the 2021 No. 4 Concern of Outside Life
In the event you’re a subscriber and have accessed the digital version, the most recent concern is prepared so that you can get pleasure from on our iOS, Android, or desktop apps.In the event you subscribe to Apple Information+ in your Apple machine, you possibly can learn the most recent concern right here.In the event you’re a subscriber however new to the digital version, head over to outdoorlife.com/digital to activate your account.In the event you’re not a subscriber, however you’d wish to be, go to outdoorlife.com/subscribe to get arrange with a subscription.
