Master Hunter charged, loses, wins, loses

The hunter insists he did nothing wrong. A district court dismissed the charges against him.

But Art Tabert remains a cautionary tale for participants in a state program that affords special privileges to hunters willing to be held to the strictest of standards.

He’s the Master Hunter who didn’t do everything right.

Art Tabert is 68 years old, a lifelong Yakima resident who literally wears his love of hunting. A tattoo of a bear claw spans his right shoulder. He’s got one of a cougar over here, an elk inked over there. A fourth tat depicts two geese apparently mating in midair over the words FLY UNITED.

Tabert’s physical limitations are significant enough, though, that he carries a state-issued disabled hunting license. He’s heavy-set with a prosthetic right knee that gives him grief and a gimpy left knee that may be next in line for surgery. Straining up or down a single flight of stairs will leave him short of breath.

Still, he loves hunting and everything associated with it — right down to, he says, gathering up and hauling out the empty beer cans and discarded tires he sees whenever he’s on state wildlife land. And five years ago he went through the rigorous certification process to earn his Master Hunter card.

He still has that card. Well, actually, he has it again.

Last November, it was taken from him by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife — which had issued it to him in the first place.

In exchange for serving as the standard-bearers for ethics in hunting, Master Hunters are invited to participate in special, WDFW-sanctioned “damage prevention hunts” in areas where are prone to grazing on private croplands, orchards and vineyards.

Those antlerless-only hunts don’t take place during the general seasons, so the hills aren’t filled with hunters and the elk become less wary. That all but guarantees a successful hunt, especially in Elk Area 3911 in eastern Kittitas County, home to the Colockum herd’s 4,500 animals.

The 3911 was where Art Tabert was last Nov. 8, hunting an area at the base of the Wild Horse Wind Farm, near a bluff the locals call Chinamans Hat. In mid-afternoon, he shot a cow elk and called a fellow Master Hunter from Yakima, Jack Dilbeck, who was on the other side of the ridge with his son for help getting the elk back to his camp.

“Because I can’t bend down very good,” Tabert said, he asked Dilbeck’s son if he’d mark and affix to the deer’s ear the state-issued elk tag, which has the dates of the month listed down one side and the months of the year listed along the bottom. Hunters must notch out the correct day and month when they tag the elk.

“He said, ‘What’s the date?'” Tabert recalled. “And I said, ‘the eighth.’ I didn’t say Nov. 8, I said the eighth. And so he marks the eighth.

“But he fails to mark down here, November.”

Tabert, though, didn’t know that until two days later.

He was at the camp, the elk still hanging in plain sight to further cool the meat in the cold winter air, the elk head with the tagged ear sitting on a log next to his pickup. WDFW Officer Brent Scherzinger stopped a routine patrol circuit through the 3911, stopped by and checked the tag.

Scherzinger told Tabert he had a violation.

“I said, ‘What violation? I mean, I’m completely out in left field here,” Tabert said. “He goes, ‘The tag.’ And it’s going through my head, the tag? I asked (Dilbeck’s son) to tag it.”

Tabert looked at the tag and saw that the month had not been notched. “So I went like this (making a little tearing-off motion), thinking — I mean, he’s standing right there and watching me — I’m thinking we’ll just fix this, you know, and it’ll be done. So I just tried to tear it.

“Well,” he added, laughing, “he put that in his report, that Mr. Tabert tried to tear it. I was just trying to make it right — I thought he was just going about his way and that was that.”

But it wasn’t as simple as that.

Scherzinger called the WDFW South Central Region’s head of enforcement, Capt. Rich Mann, to ask how he should proceed.

Mann doesn’t remember the specific conversation, but, he said, “I know what I would say.

“The guy’s a Master Hunter? Give him a ticket.”

Mann’s frustration comes from years of seeing Master Hunters — trained to be the best — behaving no better than the worst. While the vast majority of the program’s 1,700 participants strive to live up to those standards, some are clearly in it for the wrong reasons.

In Kittitas and Yakima counties alone, Master Hunters have been charged with hunting in a state park; trying to herd elk across a state park (Ginkgo) and into the adjacent 3911; firing across a public roadway to take an elk; not tagging elk within the required time; shooting bull elk during antlerless-only damage-control hunts; shooting a second elk while holding only a single permit; and what Mann calls “flock shooting,” firing into a group of elk and, upon not seeing an animal immediately fall, continuing to shoot.

That those basic hunting ethics would be violated by anyone trained to be above all ethical reproach burns at Mann.

“You represent every other hunter out there. You’re supposed to be the next level up. The stance we’ve taken here,” he said, “is that there are no breaks when it comes to Master Hunters.”

That hard-line attitude isn’t just Mann’s; it’s mandated. When the captain went to the statewide Master Hunter Advisory Group’s April 24 meeting to ask if his approach was what the group wanted, he got a resounding yes. Twice.

“It was a 15-0 vote (at the April meeting) that we were in total support of there being no quarter for anybody who makes an error, whether innocently or whatever,” advisory group chairman Jim Fitzgerald of Kenmore said on Monday. “They need to be aware that there is no gray area when it comes to being a Master Hunter.

“We reaffirmed it while at a meeting last Friday in Ellensburg. Does this body feel like they need to be held to a higher standard? And the answer was unequivocally yes.”

So Scherzinger wrote Tabert a citation for “unlawful transportation of wildlife,” noting the failure to properly notch the elk tag. The maximum fine for such a charge would be $500, an amount that might be halved with a court appearance.

The charge being a criminal misdemeanor, though, meant Tabert would lose his Master Hunter card permanently. And while it’s possible such a conciliatory court appearance might earn him a “stay of proceedings” — essentially, be good for a year and the charges go away — Tabert was adamant about his innocence.

So he opted to fight the charge.

“I didn’t know what the consequences could be,” he said. “Jack (Dilbeck) even told me, ‘Art, just go up there and plead guilty.’ And I said, no, I’m not pleading guilty to something I’m not guilty of.”

Tabert’s argument is simple: Per Washington state law (WAC 232-12-828), a disabled hunter can have his designated hunter companion tag the elk for him. Since he hadn’t tagged the elk himself, Tabert said, he hadn’t tagged it improperly.

Why, in the next two days, didn’t he check the tag himself?

“There’s no reason for me to check,” Tabert said. “It’s like asking somebody to go out and check the mail, and then going out and checking the mail to see if they checked. Why would I check the mail?”

When Tabert went to court in the hopes of having the charge dismissed, the judge told him if that was his intention he would need an attorney to help him navigate the legal processes. So Tabert got one — at the hefty price tag of $2,500.

That was in December. On March 12, the Lower Kittitas County District Court dismissed the charges against him.

With the charges dropped, Tabert got his Master Hunter card back. The $2,500 he’ll never get back.

“It’s preposterous,” he said. “Now, people cheat, I know they do. They’ll cheat to get another elk.”

But, Tabert said, why would he need to cheat? He had already been drawn in one of the WDFW’s lottery drawings to be able to harvest a second elk. And if he’d left the month unnotched in order to use the tag to harvest another antlerless elk on, say, Dec. 8, why wouldn’t he take the first one home?

“I hung that elk there for three days,” he said. “Any warden can come by and check it.”

For Tabert, who lives on a fixed income of Social Security benefits and a minor disability income, paying the attorney’s fee in installments is proving difficult.

“I’m squeezing here, trying to make it, and these (WDFW) guys are the reason I’m in that shape. My wife, holy mackerel — we’ve been married almost 50 years, and she’s 100 percent for hunting, but she’s wondering, ‘Hey, how much is this going to cost us?’ And when it did come out, I mean, that was pretty tough.

“If I went out and poached or did something wrong, she’d be, ‘You did the crime, you do the time.’ And I’m all for that. But, doggone it, I’m not guilty of anything.”

Tabert does have his Master Hunter card back, even though in one way he was guilty — not of what he did, but of what he didn’t do.

“This guy may be the best guy in the world,” Mann said. “But he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain.

“He didn’t uphold the standard.”