Another Caribou Hunt

If you read last year's story of our yearly caribou hunt (see note below) you'll guess why I had concluded that our caribou hunting days were over. Too much of a challenge for aging bodies. But I forgot to factor in the never-say-die hunter. It isn't that I didn't have a clue. Dan had been regularly checking the Dept. of Fish and Game hot line for updates on the movement of the herd but I dismissed it as just his curiosity. That is until just 2 days before the winter open when he got off the phone all excited and said "There's an update. Hundreds are crossing north of Sourdough. We can drive up tomorrow, stay overnight at Glenallen, and be there at first light." 

"Wait a minute," I said, "I still have tomatoes to can and beets to pickle and all those apples for sauce and apple butter and apple pie fillings. And I thought we were done with caribou hunting."

He ignored that last part, "But we got the cider pressed, so we can take a break."  Dan thinks going hunting is taking a break. He forgets all the work.

So I quickly put up another 6 quarts of tomato soup and the next day we got on the road by noon for a beautiful ride along the Matanuska River valley, passed the ever shrinking Matanuska Glacier, around the Caribou Creek crossing and on into Glenallen. All the time I'm thinking of Don Quito tilting at windmills even if the idiom doesn't really fit. Its the element of delusion that I'm stuck with.  The folly of imagining that we are twenty years younger than we actually are.

By 6 in the morning we were driving up the Richardson Highway and with first light around 7 began to see hundreds of tracks of homeward bound caribou where they crossed the road and headed into the woods going back to Canada. Hunting  caribou along the forested Richardson highway is a bit different than the open plains of the Denali highway. A hunter has maybe a ten minute window at the most when a caribou comes out of the trees and crosses the road and  maybe ten to fifteen yards of openness where one can get a shot before they disappear back into the woods. The trick is to guess correctly where they might come out of the woods. One can not shoot across the road and obviously should not shoot if cars are coming or people are in the way.

In the section of highway where the caribou were crossing there are few options for parking the car which doesn't put you rubbing elbows with dozens of other hunters who had showed up in the same place. We found a good spot all to ourselves and settled in to wait. After a few hours and no caribou to be seen Dan decided it wasn't such a good spot after all. We turned around and went back up the road. In minutes, just over a mile, two caribou came strolling out of the woods, even stopped for a minute to look up and down the highway like they were checking for traffic before going on their way. Dan wasn't positioned for either one of them but at least now he knew this was the spot. He decided he would get out and wait for one to come along so I left him on the side of the road and went to park telling him I would check back in an hour. In very short order he saw a small band coming through the woods. He said it was like watching a movie of a band of Indians moving stealthily through the trees. He was ready to get his caribou when they crossed the road but as he waited, a truck with three hunters also saw them. They stopped dead in the middle of the road, hopped out and all three began shooting oblivious to the illegality and recklessness of what they were doing.

He wan't happy about them when I picked him up an hour later and we went to find a spot to have lunch.

We were heading back to his spot when a fine big bull came out of the trees right where the earlier pair had crossed. Dan hopped out with his gun but he wasn’t fast enough. The bull actually looked at him before disappearing into the trees.

I found a place to park up the road where I could position the car so that I could see him. I had told him to wave if he wanted me to pick him up. He must have been standing there for a good hour when I saw him crossing the road and going into the woods. When he didn’t come back I got on all my winter gear and went to find him in case he had a caribou and needed help. 

There was no sign of him. I walked a good mile up the road from the car and waited where his tracks showed he had entered the road. It wouldn’t be wise to follow them. We pass each other by unseen. When he finally came along there was no caribou. He had followed a nice one with a double shovel but finally decided he had gone too far away from the road to shoot it. It would be too much of an ordeal to get it to the car.

We walked back to the car Dan wondering if he wasn’t getting too old for this after all. In the old days he wouldn’t have hesitated to go after that bull. We had just settled into the car when he saw the bull come out of the woods. 

“There he is,” he shouted. Its the same guy.

He had time to get out of the car and aim his gun as the bull slowly ambled across the road. 

We now had a caribou not thirty yards from the road. Dan kept saying he couldn’t believe it. “Its the same one. I could have saved myself all that trouble and just waited here for it.”

As we went about the business of field dressing the animal a native woman came to help. She said her husband was out looking for a caribou and she might as well help us as she waited. She was part Eskimo, part Aleut and told us she hunted caribou with her father all her life. She knew just what to do and kept giving Dan helpful advice not knowing he was a big game guide and pretty much knew what to do himself. 

Later, after she had gone off with her husband, I was pulling a hind quarter on the toboggan when two young burly hunters pulled up. 

“You look like you could use some help,” they said. 

They made quick work of it pulling the entire remaining carcass back to the car.

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