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FAIRBANKS — After finally getting his mountain goat, Jackson Fox made a point of reminding his friend and hunting partner, John Wisniewski, that they had to keep their wits about them.

“I told him before we hiked down to get the goat, ‘Hey, we’re excited. This is my first goat. Let’s go slow and steady. We need to be cautious,’” Fox said.

Five minutes later, the 27-year-old Fairbanks hunter was lying on a pile of rocks with a mangled leg.

Fox fell 100 feet and broke his leg Sunday as he climbed down a rock ledge to retrieve the goat he had just shot on the north side of Zachar Bay on Kodiak Island. The U.S. Coast Guard was called in to hoist him off the island.

“I slipped backward and free fell 20 feet off a ledge and landed on my back,” Fox, the environmental manager for the City of Fairbanks, said from a hospital bed at Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center on Monday afternoon. “Then I slid a little ways and went off another 10-foot ledge.

“I spread my legs and arms out, as if I was going to do a snow angel, as I was going down the hill so I’d always be feet first,” he said. “I never did a somersault or flip. I was always able to stay on my back.”

As he was sliding down the hill, his left boot caught on a rock and his leg snapped.

“It was a pretty loud pop,” Fox said. “I saw my toes come up and kick my kneecap and I thought, ‘This is bad.’”

Actually, it could have been a lot worse.

While it took Wisniewski an hour to reach Fox by a less-treacherous route, he was able to use a two-way radio to contact two other hunters in the six-man party. The other two men were deer hunting in the area. They in turn called for help, and a Coast Guard helicopter showed up less than two hours later to hoist him to safety. Fox was lying in the hospital only about three hours after his fall.

“I shot the goat at 12:15 and the chopper picked me up off the mountainside at 3,” he said. “I was back in Kodiak by 3:30.”

As for the mountain goat, Fox’s friends and hunting partners — he was part of a six-man party — were searching for it on Monday.

“It was a beautiful goat ... the biggest goat I’ve ever seen out there,” said Fox, who had made two previous trips to Kodiak to hunt goat without success. “It had the biggest horns I’ve ever seen.”

But Fox is more worried about the meat than he is any kind of trophy. There is no better meat than mountain goat, he said.

“I really hope they can find the goat and can salvage it,” he said. “The only reason they wouldn’t get it is if a bear picked it up, I think.”

Fox shot the goat on the first day of the hunt. He had seen it Saturday, shortly after they had flown into Zachar Bay Lodge. He and Wisniewski set out in the dark at 6 a.m. on Sunday to find it.

After a brief but uneventful run-in with a grizzly bear an hour into the day, the two hunters climbed to the 1,000-foot level and spotted the goat above them. They decided to climb above the animal and work their way down.

“It was the perfect stalk,” Fox said.

They located the goat, which had moved upward, to about 3,000 feet, and Fox got within 80 yards before the goat presented him with a downhill, broadside shot.

“There wasn’t any opportunity to wait for him to get to a better spot where he would fall and stay,” Fox said.

The shot hit the goat in the chest, and Fox could see the entry and exit holes as the animal rolled 500 feet down a grassy hillside.

“It was an absolutely perfect shot,” he said.

The story has another twist that only a hunter can appreciate.

The rifle Fox was using is a 1958 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight he inherited from his grandfather, Jimmy Fox. The gun’s nickname is Old Meat In The Pot, Jackson Fox said.

“I bought a new rifle this year, and this was going to be the last hunt with this rifle after 50 years in service,” he said. “My last animal to shoot with it was mountain goat, the only species it hadn’t got.”

Doctors told Fox his leg will require surgery and the compound fracture is “pretty wicked looking,” he said, but it should heal. Both the tibia and fibula are broken in half, he said.

“It hurts much, much more today than yesterday,” he said Monday.