These Hunters Are Also the Hunted : Bighorn sheep: Third annual hunt begins Saturday amid protests and high emotions.

It’s a strange, three-way confrontation: hunter armed with rifle, protester armed with air horn, bighorn sheep armed only with agility and wariness.

There is little respect between the human principals, except that which they share for the animal.

The Nelson (or desert) bighorn sheep is a magnificent creature. “Especially when you catch ‘em on the horizon line in that ‘Bambi’s dad’ pose,” says Tracy Bartlett of Del Mar.

“One of the ironies is that there is an overlap between hunters and people like those from EarthFirst! There have been times when environmentalists or anti-hunters have ended up in coalitions with hunters because they are some of the few people that appreciate wilderness.”

But that won’t be the case in the eastern Mojave Desert the next two weeks, not during California’s third annual limited bighorn hunt after a moratorium of 114 years. If anything, the battle lines have been hardened and the emotions embittered by what has gone before.

When the hunt starts Saturday at dawn, Bartlett will be back with EarthFirst!, the Hunt Saboteurs and others who go into the field to exercise their objections to trophy hunting.

Wardens from the Department of Fish and Game will be ready for them, determined to protect the rights of eight hunters who are authorized by the state for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take one bighorn apiece.

They are seven men and a woman. Their names were drawn from more than 2,500 applicants. One is an archer. One is from Michigan, the hunt’s first non-resident who was picked from 81 out-of-state applicants.

A ninth hunter, Robert Senter of New Hampshire, has already killed his ram. He bought his permit in a $40,000 auction and was privileged to start hunting two weeks ago. The $40,000 will go to help restore the species he killed. Irony, indeed.

Two years ago, when the protesters were loosely organized, all nine hunters got their sheep. In the process, two protesters--Lyn Dessaux and Christie Bricknell--were detained by Loren Lutz, who claimed he had made citizen’s arrests. Lutz is past president of the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep that in concert with the DFG has worked to restore Nelson populations to historic California ranges.

Dessaux claimed that Lutz struck him with a lariat from horseback and that Lutz’s son Kennis punched him and broke his nose, then locked both in a horse trailer for about 11 hours until DFG wardens arrived to take them to jail.

At the start of last year’s hunt, Dessaux and Bricknell filed a $1-million suit against the Lutzes for assault and battery, false arrest and imprisonment (in a horse trailer), violation of civil rights and other complaints. Just last week, an arbitrator for the Sacramento County Superior Court denied the claim.

But the anti-hunters had already taken a measure of revenge. Last year they came with two-way radios and a better game plan. Two of the eight lottery hunters failed to get their sheep.

Vern Bleich of the DFG said: “The two hunters didn’t get their sheep because the freakos were there.”

Bleich, an associate wildlife biologist based in Bishop, worked with Bob Vernoy and the retired Dick Weaver to compile much of the DFG’s research data that persuaded the state legislature to allow a limited, experimental hunt until Jan. 1, 1993. The sixth and final hunt is scheduled for December of 1992.

Bleich has data to show how the bighorns have thrived through improvement of habitat--primarily, the construction of year-round water holes, or “guzzlers”--in the hunt sites among the Old Dad Peak-Kelso Mountains area southeast of Baker and to a lesser degree in the Marble Mountains farther south.

Since July of 1983 the sheep population there has grown to about 500 despite hunting and the capture and transfer of 198 animals to other historic ranges where hunting is not allowed. The law allows the DFG to offer permits to hunt up to 15% of the population--75 sheep--but only nine have been offered each year.

Statewide, Nelsons have grown in numbers from a DFG estimate of 2,371 in 1972 to 3,764.

Bleich doesn’t think the anti-hunters would be impressed.

“You cannot reason with those people,” he said. “They’ve got a mind-set and nothing that anyone says is gonna change that. By God, they’re on a mission and they are right, regardless of facts.”

Terry Mansfield, assistant chief of the DFG’s wildlife management division, said: “I would challenge them to put their time and money and effort into bighorn or elk research projects. We get people on a bucket brigade carrying cement up a hill to build a little guzzler for the desert wildlife. Where are they when we are doing that?”

The anti-hunters say that the DFG’s projects artificially inflate populations, and that advocates only want to have more sheep so they can kill them. The DFG answers that only older rams past their prime at 6 to 11 years are taken because of the “legal sheep” rule requiring about a 270-degree curl in the horns, and the older sheep would soon die of attrition, anyway.

“Uh-huh, sure,” Bartlett said. “If they want to follow it around until it dies of old age, and then take the horns, they can do that.”

Scott Young of Orange County hunted last year and took a ram with California-record horns. But his satisfaction was tempered because he was unable to do it with his preferred weapon, a bow, because with the protesters dogging him he wasn’t be able to get close enough--about 50 yards--to get a good shot.

“I switched (to a rifle) on the third or fourth day when (the activists) actually ruined the hunt,” he said. “Part of hunting is being able to watch the animals in their natural environment . . . the birds and other things that live in the desert. The kill isn’t the hunt, especially with a bow and arrow. The hunt is everything up until the point you get the animal.

“But these people are running through blowing off their horns and disturbing the entire situation. You lose everything. The hunt is stolen. The chances of getting something with a bow and arrow under those circumstances would be just blind luck--one in a million.”

The first year the activists tried to follow the hunters from their camps. Last year they waited for them.

“They’d get up on the high ground in the early mornings and look for the hunters coming up, and then they would dog the hunters,” Young said.

At an orientation for this year’s hunters, Young advised patience. He didn’t take his ram until the 11th day.

“The hunt will be harder because of these people, but by no means impossible,” he said.

Last year the DFG and Bureau of Land Management wardens cited three protesters but made no arrests.

“They didn’t want to get involved in taking positive action because . . . it’s a political hot potato,” Young said.

This year may be different, but not because of a new state law prohibiting the harassment of hunters. That calls only for a citation on the first offense and doesn’t become a misdemeanor until the second offense, by which time the hunt is over.

Instead, the Fish and Game Commission has designated the two hunting zones as wildlife-management areas, meaning that protesters could be immediately arrested and jailed on misdemeanor charges of disturbing wildlife, demonstrating without a permit, disorderliness, refusing to obey a law officer or behaving in an unsafe manner--such as getting between a hunter and his prey.

That tactic wasn’t used during the recent Cache Creek tule elk hunt in northern California, when seven of 15 permit hunters got their elks but four or five others indicated that they were foiled by protesters.

Bartlett said: “It will be interesting to see what strategic games go on this year. There are different plans for interference--also new capacity for legal action. They didn’t know what to do with us because there wasn’t any specific statute on the books. Now there is.”