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Wardle beats the odds Thursday Sep 15, 2005 at 2:00 AM Dec 18, 2010 at 4:22 PM MARK FREEMAN,Mail Tribune Already 11 hours into her sixth day of chasing bighorn sheep through ruthless eastern Oregon terrain, Brenda Wardle stared up the next mountain between her and the wayward rams without feeling very lucky. I didn't think I could do it, says Wardle, 30, of Central Point. We'd been hiking for days and that's sure mean stuff over there. But I kept trucking. After finally scaling the steep hillside, she crossed a flat corner and found the object of her obsession standing broadside just a football toss across a ravine. With her one best shot facing her, Wardle paused her once-in-a-lifetime sheep hunt for one very motherly thought. Man, here it is, in front of my face, Wardle says. I thought about how excited my son, Christopher, will be. Then I thought, oh, man, I better not miss. I don't want to disappoint him. Wardle made her 7-year-old son proud when she shot the respectable bighorn ram across that ravine Sept. 25 in the Beatys Butte area. And in the process, Wardle's feat beat enormous odds for a woman hunter taking a bighorn in Oregon's outback. It's not that women can't shoot or don't belong in the harsh High Desert . But having Wardle with a bighorn sheep tag in her pocket in today's America is almost as big a statistical upset as the events that turned Goliath into a rock head. Just 1.2 million, or 9 percent, of the country's 13 million hunters are women, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Survey, which most recently sampled hunters nationwide in 2001. Among the general public, just — percent of American women call themselves hunters. Already with few peers, Wardle found herself in tough odds just to draw the East Beatys tag, where roughly one in every 300 applicants win their hunt opportunity each year. And even worse, this was Wardle's first try to get a tag, which escapes most Oregon hunters in their lifetimes. The chances of me doing this are so rare that it doesn't even seem possible, Wardle says. But I won the hunting lottery. I did something people only dream about. I'm still glowing, she says. The fact that Wardle is more rare than the animal she shot is a glaring example of how hunting remains an overtly testosterone world. National programs like Becoming an Outdoors Woman have gained success in providing opportunities to try hunting in women-only settings. Paula Booth, who coordinates the BOW program in Oregon, says a male-dominated outdoor industry and a lack of female hunters as role models makes inroads difficult. One of the big problems is (women) not seeing other women in that role enough to think it's accessible, Booth says. Our lives are so busy that I think it's a lot of work to get involved if you don't have that easy-in. There was no easy-in for Karen Smith. A single mom trying to break into the elk-hunting world in the 1980s, she wasn't allowed to sleep or eat in men's elk camps. Instead, she was banished to her own tent 100 yards away. Women were considered too sensitive to be hunters, she says. I really thought I needed them that badly, says Smith, a Rogue Valley nurse living in Bend. I did learn by listening. Eventually, I gained respect by being out there. Now, Smith takes women hunting whenever they ask. And the gender barriers are dropping ' slowly ' she says. If you don't marry into it or have family and friends who hunt, how do you get the information on where the deer are or how to trail them? Smith says. That's how Wardle found buck fever, getting infected by her husband-to-be, Aren, seven years ago. Aren introduced her to quail hunting, and they remain a favorite target. They're so sneaky, Wardle says. You can hear them everywhere, but you just can't see them. She's also heard plenty of chatter about why more women don't hunt. I think it's the way they look at killing something, Wardle says. I look at it as putting something on the table. But that meant birds and bucks. Bighorn sheep have been the Holy Grail of two generations of Wardles. Aren's dad has tried unsuccessfully for a sheep tag for more than 40 years; Aren himself is 0-for-19. Brenda believed she would join the family tradition and plunked down & 36;4.50 in May expecting to go 0-for-1. She almost blew a ventricle when she read her controlled-hunt postcard in June. Instantly, the couple went to the ODFW's Central Point office for information, scouted the Beatys Butte area and hired veteran Adal guide Chuck Messner. I didn't want to leave anything for chance, she says. Co-workers at Sherm's Thunderbird pitched in with extra shifts so Brenda, a checker, could take off the first week of the two-week season. The hunt turned more grueling than Wardle expected, but the exhaustion was exhilarating. One day she crab-walked through the brush within spitting distance of a herd that included one very large ram. But she tilted her head a little too high for a peek, and the sentinel rams that guard the old ram spotted her and the group fled. Until you get up there and actually get in with them, you don't realize how orderly they are, Wardle says. When she got into the herd again on her sixth day, she traversed ravine after ravine from sunup to 4 p.m. when she finally shot her ram. I was so nervous, Wardle says. I didn't want to disappoint anyone. Nervousness turned to elation with one shot, and Wardle hasn't come down to earth quite yet. After bucking big odds as a woman with a sheep tag standing on an eastern Oregon ridge, Brenda got her bighorn. There's a lot of people, let alone a lot of women, who will never have a chance to see one, see how they can climb those mountains, Wardle says. I got to hunt them, and I got one. It was priceless, like one of those commercials. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail Wardle beats the odds"[email protected].