Horny and the Big Game Hunters:

Every July, with almost mechanical regularity, dozens of private jets descend upon the Friedman Memorial Airport 15 miles south of Sun Valley. The planes come in all sizes and colors, clustering like migratory butterflies in and around the deluxe hangars of the small-town landing strip. But what these butterflies are carrying is far more valuable than nectar. They carry America's leaders of industry and entertainment, instantly recognizable names like Turner, Eisner, Gates, Geffen, Murdoch, Buffett, Winfrey and Schwarzenegger, to name but a few. For almost 25 years, they've arrived in good weather and bad, bull markets and bear, to attend an annual tycoon conference hosted by famed investment banker and Sun Valley resident Herbert Allen.

Few reporters have been allowed to enter this exclusive cabal, but those who do come back with almost unbelievable stories that mix big business and high leisure. Billionaire CEOs crafting mergers while mountain biking, for instance, or movie moguls taking a break from green-lighting a picture to go whitewater rafting. Simply put, this is "star power" at its most exclusive and enigmatic.

But the real star of this year's summit is far from Sun Valley, or even sunlight. He lives in a tiny 10-foot by 10-foot fenced pen, deep inside a windowless brick compound in remote Central Idaho. Rather than caviar or Cristal, he dines on a precisely calculated blend of native Idaho grasses and potent nutritional powders. And as for his name, it's anything but instantly recognizable. Among the scientists who tend to him, the first-ever successfully cloned Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, he is known fondly as "Horny."

Horny doesn't look much like other members of his highly endangered species. He's bigger, first of all, clocking in at a hefty 436 lbs-almost 23 percent larger than the average male bighorn. His name, partially a joke by a community of lonely lab technicians, also refers to his super-sized full-curl horns, just one of several controversial "adaptations" to help Horny's descendants survive in the unforgiving wilderness. Other changes, carefully crafted using several decades' worth of gene-isolation research, include increased resistance to disease and to intense heat and cold. To top it all off, Horny matures almost twice as fast as wild bighorns, and requires a fraction of the food. He is, in almost every way, the first ever super-strain of bighorn sheep.


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