EDWARDS, COLO., OCT. 8 The bride wore a tablecloth (her grandmother's, made into a dress) and the bridegroom a hunting knife.
By LOIS SMITH BRADY
Published: October 24, 2004

Anni Mitchell and Tred Barta

EDWARDS, COLO., OCT. 8 The bride wore a tablecloth (her grandmother's, made into a dress), and the bridegroom a hunting knife. The rope was for the knot.

TRED BARTA is a big-game hunter and fisherman who wears a knife on his belt as habitually as some men wear a tie. He is unapologetically macho. He kills most of the food he eats.

"I'm a manly man doing manly things," said Mr. Barta, who lives in Southampton, N.Y., in a house filled with stuffed animal heads, bows, arrows and camouflage. "My world is 100 miles offshore or 80 miles in the woods, hunting and surviving."

He cannot be an easy guy to date. An owner of Barta Iso Aviation on Long Island, which sells corporate aircraft, Mr. Barta has in the past picked women up for dinner in a turboprop, then turned the engine off in midair just to test their nerves. He doesn't shop at Tiffany's. "My idea of a romantic gift is a pair of waders or a hunting knife," Mr. Barta, 52, said. "To me it's a gesture of love."

He tells others to live victoriously, not vicariously. "Tred and I would go fishing when no one else would, when it was blowing 35 knots with four- to seven-foot seas," Martin Landey, one of his best friends, said. "We would get on our radios and say to each other, `Grace in crisis.' "

Two and a half years ago Mr. Barta went through a personal crisis. "I loved my wife very much, and she left me for another man," he said. They had been married 17 years earlier in a goose blind and had two children, Lauren, now 17, and Hunter, 13. A few months after the breakup, he ran personal ads in The Southampton Press and The Big Game Fishing Journal with a photo of himself in a camouflage suit beside a moose he had just killed. His ads said he was looking for a woman who "loves the smell of wet gun dogs," had all of her teeth and shared his vision of romantic nights at home, skinning deer in the kitchen. (He got 200 responses.)

He also called Anni Mitchell, a former sweetheart who had been on the University of Colorado ski team with him in the early 70's. "Anni was a dynamite blond bombshell any man would die for," he said. "She skied like a man — still does. She drives a car like a man. When women do things like men, they're extremely sexy to me."

Ms. Mitchell, 57, is definitely an outdoorswoman. After college she started a ski-clothing company in Boulder, Colo., Anni Fanni Racer Chaser, and lived there in a chicken coop with no electricity or plumbing. "I'd have people over for dinner, and it would be all Coleman stoves and candlelight," she said. "It was magical."

By the time Mr. Barta called she was living in Vail, divorced for the second time, and working in sales for Obermeyer, the ski wear company. She recalled: "I hadn't talked to Tred in 14 years, and I pick up the phone and he goes: `I'm on a mission. I'm looking for my life mate.' Then he started a diatribe about how it was me."

Feeling jinxed when it came to relationships, she replied, "Oh, Tred, it's not going to happen."

He became only more determined, visiting her in Vail and leaving love notes around her house: signs of himself like tracks in the snow. But he really won her heart after she told him one night she wanted to remain single and independent. "He was not hung up on his own loss or pain," said Ms. Mitchell, who has a son, Ian, 19. "He said, `You need to live the life you've always wanted to live.' I realized, that is love."

On Oct. 8 they were married by the Rev. Randy S. Immonds, a Baptist minister and elk hunter, at a friend's hunting-lodge-style house in Edwards, Colo.

Mr. Barta, who has a new hunting and fishing show, "The Best and Worst of Tred Barta," beginning next month on Outdoor Life cable television, wore bluejeans, cowboy boots, a blue blazer and a hunting knife. The bride had sewed her knee-length dress out of a lace tablecloth inherited from her grandmother. "When people ask me what size I am, I tell them I'm half a tablecloth," she said.

More than anything the wedding was about hope, for old true loves calling in the middle of the night and for great catches of all kinds.

"I was really guarded after my two bad marriages," the bride said. "I was afraid. I didn't believe anymore. Then Tred came along and brought back that youthful energy, that hope, that optimism, that feeling of going for it once more. No fear."