American Wilderness

In this documentary, the wilds of Baja California, Mexico, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska are shown as big gamer hunter Arthur R. Dubs tracks horned sheep and a polar bear in the North American wilderness, along the way seeing wild stallions, frolicking bear cubs, herds of elk and mule deer. Between adventures, Dubs, who is described in the film as a "bachelor father," is shown rafting and boating with his three daughters on the Rogue River near his home in Southern Oregon, an area that inspired many of the popular stories by American novelist Zane Grey. The first part of the film follows Dubs and his colleagues on four hunting trips to remote areas of the continent. Abiding by a code of conduct and ethical hunting standards developed for sportsmen by The Boone and Crockett Club, Dubs sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream of collecting trophy heads of four subspecies of sheep found on the North American continent: the Desert Sheep of western United States and Mexico; the Big Horn of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada and the Northern U.S.; Stone's Sheep of the Rocky Mountains; and the Dall's Sheep, found in the Yukon and in Alaska. The film documents Dubs's activities over seven years and on four separate trips as he pursues his prey, showing the dangers he and his colleagues surmount and the sights of animals and natural beauty they encounter. Dubs succeeds in his goal of shooting animals of record-breaking size, while being careful to select only mature animals near the end of their life, killing them quickly and saving them from a slow and painful death caused by other animals or weather. After each trip, the animal is measured by game officials, according to Boone and Crockett Club procedures, and compared with the specimens of other hunters over the years in order to determine its score and rank. Having placed the trophy heads of the four sheep on his wall, Dubs goes on other hunts. In the Great Sandy Desert of southeast Oregon, Dubs and his colleagues see antelope, stallions and bald eagles. They fish in a beaver pond, tell yarns around the campfire and one of his colleagues shoots a four-point trophy buck. Upon returning home, after reading about a thirteen-foot high bear that has been terrorizing Eskimo villages, Dubs makes arrangements for a new hunt. He and his friends fly to Anchorage and from there take a small craft flown by a bush pilot past Mount McKinley, where they fly into a snowstorm. Needing a place to refuel, they land near the