RENO, Nev. –  A big-game hunter from Montana is suing a Canadian outfitter and a world-renowned hunting guide in Tajikistan he accuses of turning his once-in-a-lifetime adventure of bagging a rare, wild argali sheep known as the “Marco Polo” into a nightmare.
Rick Vukasin said in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Reno last week that he spent more than $50,000 pursuing the animal in the Pamir mountains of northeast Tajikistan near China’s border in December 2012.
The 65-year-old electrician said he felt like he was literally on top of the world after he tracked, shot and killed a 400-pound, big-horned ram with the coveted, spiraling horns at an elevation of 14,000 feet. But he was mortified two months later when he opened up the box shipped to his home in Great Falls to find the horns were not the 58-inch-long ones from his trophy animal.
“I could tell right away,” Vukasin told The Associated Press. “I was sick.”
The native Montanan who grew up hunting deer on the eastern front of the Northern Rockies had stalked moose in Saskatchewan and red stag elk in New Zealand.
“But the thing I really wanted to do was a Marco Polo sheep hunt,” he said. He poured over books, guides and websites before settling on the excursion halfway around the world.
Read more: Fox News
