Extreme Huntress finally gets her goat

Squinting through her binoculars as the last glimmers of twilight faded from the cliffsides in the northern Cabinet Mountains, Angie Tennison finally spotted her goat.

“All I remember thinking is, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks like a polar bear!’” Tennison said. “He walked out and you could see him for a split second and then he went back into the trees.”

With darkness falling on their camp, reached via a five-hour hike into the wilderness area earlier this month, the 38-year-old Libby resident and national “Extreme Huntress Contest” winner said all she could do was pray the massive animal stayed overnight in the same drainage.

Born and raised in Montana, Tennison works in Kalispell as an MRI technician and has been hunting since she was 12. In each of the intervening 26 years she’s unsuccessfully submitted her applications for a coveted mountain goat tag, as well as the state’s annual drawings for moose and bighorn sheep.

The odds for those three species are notoriously slim, but Tennison said despite the 0.66 percent success rate for goat tags in the Cabinets, she had a premonition that this would be her year. Of the 903 applications submitted for the district in 2015, only six hunters received a tag, according to statistics published by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Tennison’s positive attitude was validated this summer when she logged onto the FWP website and read the good news.

“After that I called just about everyone I could think of,” she said. “The area where I got him, a good friend of ours who’s been on a lot of goat hunts said he’s seen a couple nice billies in the area.”

On her first attempt to hunt the area, she said her party was met with pouring rain that switched to hail once they set up camp, followed by a fog that precluded the use of binoculars or scopes to scour the surrounding mountains. The rainy fall weather finally yielded during her next trip.

The morning after spotting the goat, Tennison said she found him sunning on the backside of the same mountain. She laid back into a crevice near a rock ledge, set her .300 Winchester Short Magnum on a tripod and took a nearly vertical, 450-yard shot. It hit him in the chest, and her next two shots hit the animal in the front shoulder and again in the chest. Finally he went down, tumbling down the slope before coming to a rest in some brush.

“I’d say five minutes after he was down you’d still see him kick,” she said. “I can’t believe how tough those animals are.”

Tennison’s “polar bear” comparison might not be too far off the mark. She said the animal’s green score puts it easily in Boone and Crockett Club’s record-book territory, and her taxidermist said if it doesn’t dry too much, she could snag third or fourth place for Montana.

“Even the taxidermist sent me a note that said he was a stud mountain goat and up there with the best you’re going to find in the Cabinets,” she said. “I was totally blessed on that hunt.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.