Had a big disaster yesterday. We were heading up into the whitetail area out of Cusco, Peru. Drove two hours on gravel roads heading up into the higher country. The roads were getting pretty steep, and we stopped to video down a switchback. Todd, the cameraman, Todd Bissenden, a rock went out underneath him. He wasn't even starting to video yet. It slid, it was like volcanic rock, real slidy. And he went down 60 feet onto the road down below. Hard. He was unconscious.

By the time I got down to him ... he hit twice on the way down rolling. He was totally unconscious. One big rock had cut his whole ear up and then cut into his head, and then on the other side he had a great big gash and also a big cut on his forehead and the skin on his whole face was all scraped away. After about three minutes he started coming around. He didn't know what happened. His first question to me was was the camera OK? Tough, tough, tough kid. If it would have been me, I would have been dead. I didn't know if it was neck or anything broken.

We got him into the back of the truck onto the foam mattresses. And I was washing the blood trying to get as much blood off his face as I could just to see how many gashes and cuts he had. We got him into a little village that just happened to have a doctor and two nurses. We got him all cleaned up after 2 1/2 hours on the table there sewing him up. I don't know how many stitches, 40 anyway, a bunch inside and bunch outside. They only had big horse thread and no novocaine. They ran out; they went through all their materials. So he had to get all stitched up without it and he was in great great pain, but got through it.

Then we got him all the way back into the main town of Cusco and found a private clinic and a doctor who is a neurosurgeon there. They had an MRI, a traumatologist and a plastic surgeon all right there waiting because we radioed. So they took him in and undid all the stitches and re-did them all, got him restitched and MRI. There is a little swelling on the back of the skull, but he's all stabilized and they got iv's into him. He went into shock when we got him there. But he's stabilized now. So I came out this morning again. Louise is staying with him in the hospital. He'll be there for at least another day. When I went back past that spot today I got the heebie jeebies again. And we went about four hours past that.

Sometimes fate works in fine ways. He fell in a spot where it's 60 feet down. Where I've been driving today four hours past there is the worst roads I've ever seen in my life. I can spit 1,000 feet out the window. We made it up to the camp. We're sitting here in top of the Andes Mountains with the horses packed and just about to head off to the spike camp for the whitetail deer. Wish it was better news. But that's the way it us. Just rememeber, it's extreme hunting ...