Swallowed by the Great Land: And other dispatches from Alaska's frontier

Author:Kantner, Seth [Kantner, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2015-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Finding Caribou

ON MY SNOWGO, miles out on the ice, thirty below, east wind drifting snow, getting dark—finally, I find caribou this winter.

Forty animals in a line, plodding into the wind.

After months of roaming the tundra, I’m excited, although my chances of getting meat are still slim. My machine is old—the odometer broke at sixteen thousand miles. Riding it is uncomfortable to begin with. The front undercarriage spring is busted, the rear idler bearings shot, and the limiter strap just a piece of rope I had handy on the trail when it broke. A few miles back I took out the aluminum foil I use to make my headlight work—so as to not scare the animals—and now each of the ice-hard drifts from this week’s blizzard hit me blind.

I stop and, with fogged binoculars, glass into the falling light. The herd bunches and races away into the wind, disappearing in the dust-cloud of snow and ice-fog from their breath. I feel disappointment and some relief. All winter here hunters have been searching for caribou, and more and more I’ve heard mention of an old tradition: don’t shoot the leaders.

Well, I didn’t, and now the leaders are gone into frozen darkness.

As usual, there’s more to the story.

Earlier today I headed east on the tundra. I was surprised to run into drifting snow at such cold temperatures. A few ptarmigan flew and quickly resettled. My .22 was iced up, so most of my shots were misfires, the firing pin sluggish in the cold. I got four of the white birds, saw no caribou, no sign. Back in town, I dropped three ptarmigan at an elder’s house and came home with one. I’d taken off my heap of warm gear when the phone rang. It was Andrew Greene, a friend and fellow hunter. He was stuck at work for the Department of Transportation, clearing the runway. A pilot had just radioed—caribou on the ice.

I was thawing out, making coffee. “What kind of Eskimo are you?” I teased. “Taking advice from airplanes?”

Andrew shot back: “Hey. We Eskimos know how to adapt. That’s how we survive.”

The funny thing is, people have been blaming “airplane hunters” for the shortage of caribou here on the coast. These last few Septembers we’ve been invaded by what locals have nicknamed Cabela’s Army—trophy hunters. Hundreds of big camo-clad white guys with guns get off Alaska Airlines, climb into Super Cubs and Cessnas, and fly north to meet the herds, something most of us landlocked locals can’t do. If an animal has big antlers, they have no taboo against shooting it, even if it’s a leader of the migration.

I don’t have an airplane, don’t want one, don’t like to fly. But I jumped back into my gear, grabbed my long-range rifle, and snowgoed out on the ice—feeling trapped between the pride of years of finding animals on foot and the reality of spending midwinters in town lately and how much gas it can take to even locate caribou. We eat caribou or moose every night, and like a lot of people here, we need meat.

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