Thursday, 9:09 AM: Kent who is bald, 5’10, 165 pounds and 35 years old, and who has been guiding for 14 years, and who says things like “I don’t need a watch because I get up when I’m not tired," is currently sitting in the dirt, legs splayed, straddling a cup of coffee and a sheep head resting on an industrial orange trash bag. Kent is caping Brad Pitt, formally Jason’s Ram.1 Every couple of seconds, Kent wipes sweat from his brow with the back of a hand covered in blood viscera, and in which hand he’s loosely pinching a bloody scalpel.
“I don’t like to leave any sausage on the cape”
—Kent
Thursday, 9:41 AM: Today is a rest day. The bugs are bad. It’s warmer. How do they know? Do they get a memo in the morning, expect heat, multiply, be aggravating? We drink coffee after coffee (after coffee) all morning long and eat as much as possible to make room and save weight, and because we earned it. Jason and I spend nearly a half hour calculating the number of calories we burned yesterday during our 16 hour hike and hunt. Total elevation gain 7000 feet, plus it was cold and our packs were heavy—Kent interjects at this point to share his opinion which opinion is that yesterday was mild-to-medium in terms of pace and pretty average in terms of overall effort. I ask him politely to stop diminishing our efforts. He looks up from the cape trimmings and viscera that he is collecting and stuffing into an otherwise empty Mountain Home bag left over from this morning's breakfast, before continuing to talk about how really “it”, the pain of yesterday, was all in our minds. I remind him that he tripped and fell over last night because he was legitimately exhausted. “That was all in your mind too.”
Thursday, 10:15 AM: Yesterday morning I caught Jason returning to camp empty handed from what was obviously a trip to Number Two Land. Now that I can safely take a shit, I do. I take T.O.T.F.C. and an ice axe into the woods, dig a hole, crouch into a racing tuck and begin. Seconds later, T.O.T.F.C. slides down the tree it was leaned against; the noise startles me so much that I instinctively grab the ice axe and swing it like a baseball-playing ninja in the direction of the noise. Imagine that if you will: a grown man, his pants around his ankles, racing tuck, toilet paper hanging out of the pocket of his Vias camouflage vest, swinging an ice axe at phantom grizzly bears.
Thursday, 12:15 AM: Kent calls Tav on the satellite phone that Kent doesn’t believe in. Tav answers and immediately asks, before Kent can say anything so much as a hello, “How big a ram you got?” They plan our pick-up—in 8 hours at Canyon Strip, the same gravel bar as before, same place we got dropped off.
Thursday, 12:16 AM: I make the switch from coffee to Crystal Lite Iced Tea. Canadians, especially in the North, go crazy for Crystal Lite instant beverages.
Thursday, 3:47 AM: Kent hands me a sheep’s tooth. We are standing next to the river just behind camp, 10 miles east of the Yukon, 80 miles south of the arctic circle and 43 miles from Basecamp, Kent is removing various bloody bits from the sheep’s head by way of digging his fingers into all the cranial nooks and crannies. He saws the jaw off, the jaw drops with a crack into the rocks. Plucks the eyes out. Throws all the meat and sausage into the river, effectively chumming. At this point I picture a Grizzly knee-deep and slowly moving up river towards the source of offal, smiling and grinning, following a candy trail.
“Wild Sheep is the best meat in the world. Even the Caribou—which anywhere else is wolf bait at best—is good. Even the Swamp Donkey [that’s a code name for moose] here is good.”
—Kent
Thursday, 8:01 AM: Kent walks over to an eddy in the shade where several trash bags full of meat are currently refrigerating. He reaches into one and removes a back-strap still covered in fascia and gnar. He takes the backstrap, a blue plastic bowl and a scalpel to a flat rock near the edge of the river where he finishes butchering the mess into a fine looking steak.
Jason discovers/invents Man Kabobs:
- Find a sheep and murder it.
- Hike it off the mountain in trash bags.
- Butcher it next to a glacial river.
- Stack several slabs of meat onto a willow stick you whittled to a point with the knife you carry on your belt. No vegetables!
- Place them over a fire you made.
- Season them with Montreal Salt or nothing at all.
- Barely cook them.
- Eat them off the stick. No vegetables!
Thursday, 10:00 AM: Man Kabobs whistle when they cook, literally, it’s a high-pitched whine often punctuated by the hiss of fat or blood hitting the fire. Sheep backstrap is the best meat I have ever eaten in my life. Ever. Not joking. Furthermore, Man Kabobs seasoned with Montreal spice and a side of discount instant mashed potatoes is the best meal I’ve eaten in the dirt and/or more than a mile from indoor plumbing, ever.
Friday, 9:34 AM: We are packing-up camp and returning to the landing strip. We have decided to walk back on the far side of the river, the opposite bank. We start with a crossing, it’s up to Kent’s crotch. Kent’s legs are blue and white like skim milk, only they’re hairy too. T.O.T.F.C. hangs from his neck and he walks with a tall stick, crossing through the rapids like Gandalf if was Gandalf hobbit-sized.
“You know Kent, if we had shot my ram on that first day, when it was bedded down broadside 600 yards up from where we were camped, it would have rolled down the mountain crashed through the river and come to a stop at my feet.”
—Jason
“It’s all part of the experience”
—Kent
Friday, 10:50 AM: This side of the river is flat. The ground is firm. It’s wooded but not thick or dense and the game trails are well maintained and easy to follow—basically this is the best ground we’ve been on since landing in the N.W.T. Pointing to neat and tidy pile of semi digested blueberries, I say to Kent, “check that out.” Kent remarks that yeah, it looks like that bear ‘actually’ stopped to take that shit. Kent then goes on about how he doesn’t mess with wild blueberries because unless they’re ripe they will give you the shits, and how we haven’t had a proper frost yet this year which means the berries aren’t ripe yet, the whole time he’s talking he’s looking straight at Jason who’s not listening but is eating handful after handful of blueberries.
Friday, 11:29 AM: There is a split in the trail. Left goes up a hill. Right goes around the hill. Kent takes us left.
Jason: “Kent are you upset about something?”
Daniel: “Hey Kent, can’t we just talk about it?”
Jason: “Are you mad at yourself? It can’t be that bad!”
Friday, 12:32 PM: We stop often to rest briefly. It’s overcast though not raining. It’s warm but not hot. Except for the dead ram strapped to the top of Jason’s backpack and the shotgun swinging around on the end of Kent’s arm, we could be backpacking.
Friday, 1:44 PM: We are back on the landing strip, packs off, resting, lunching, and waiting for Tav to pick us up and relocate us.
Friday, 2:44 PM:
Daniel: "Are you sure you left a message on Tav’s voicemail? Are you sure Tav checks his voicemail? Should we call again? Did he get lost?"
We hear a jet, the big kind, the first since landing in the bush, it’s painfully obvious that it’s a commercial jet and not our bush plane.
Jason: “It’s Tav!”
Kent: “We might need to clear a few more feet off the end of the runway in that case.”
Friday, 3:31 PM: A cloud of flies buzz around Brad Pitt’s head. The river is gurgling. The fire is crackling. The rain is drizzling. The weather breaks but it’s a “sucker hole” according to Kent. Also, while he’s on the subject, Kent informs us that if the weather stays like this, socked in and low, it may be a while before Tav can land.
Friday, 3:32 PM: A series of imaginary voicemails from Kent to Tav left over the next several weeks.
- “Tav, Kent here again, the winds are about 5-6 miles an hour and coming down valley, we are all set and ready to go, just waiting on you.”
- “Tav, Just to be clear, we are waiting on Canyon, that’s C A N Y O N Strip.”
- “Tav, it’s snowing. We are out of food, except for one Mountain Home Seafood Chowder. Jason only has three rounds of ammunition left and there is a hole in my boot.”
- “Tav, it’s us, we built a raft but then the river froze over. Bummer. At night we’re surrounded by wolves. Daniel is confident that if we play our cards right we can convince them to pull our raft cum sled into town, it’s really just a matter of making a harness.”
Friday, 4:01 PM: There is mounting concern, genuine concern, that we will not be getting off this strip today. The clouds are getting lower and thicker and there appears to be a weather event to the east, the direction from which Tav would come if he comes. We make a hot lunch because A.) we want some hot lunch and because B.) it’s a technique: as soon as one fires-up the stove and collects water from the river, one’s ride shows up. At least, theoretically.
We start a real fire, a bonfire. We take naps. I am laying on rocks in the rain in a cloud of smoke in the middle of the afternoon and I have no problem falling asleep.
Friday, 5:33 PM: Jason is throwing rocks into the air and batting them with his ice axe in the direction, I imagine, of an imaginary shortstop, à la infield practice. Bored of that he plays a round of gravel golf. “I topped it!” A little later Jason and I strip down to our base layers, pants and boots for a bona fide foot race. While playing professional football in the NFL, Jason ran a 4.58 in the 40 yard dash. Plus, his boots are lighter than mine. Running in the gravel proves treacherous and ridiculous, and halfway through when we both instantaneously and simultaneously forfeit, I am leading by six yards. Just saying.
Friday, 6:01 PM: Seriously. I say to Kent, “seriously?” He says “there is always a good reason sometimes.”
Friday, 7:01 PM: Kent mentions something about setting up his tent, moments later we hear an airborne rumble, a few moments later Ron’s Super Cub pokes into existence. Ron carries a Desert Eagle or some other sort of extremely large sidearm on his hip. He wears Wranglers and a baseball cap. Kent loads up and they take-off within ten minutes. It’s quiet again for two minutes until suddenly Tav pokes through the ceiling, circles and lands. We small-talk, load-up and take-off within minutes. The flight from Canyon Strip to Upper Kuntz is impossibly majestic. Tav and Ron are talking to each other on the radio. We are headed to Upper Kuntz, Ron is headed back from Upper Kuntz to Canyon strip to collect Jason. We take the high road, Ron takes the low road. We pass under a low ceiling a few hundred feet apart only a few hundred feet above a high-altitude saddle. Below, scattered snow packs and hundreds of creeks.
Friday, 8:15 PM: Jason, Kent, Ron, Tav and I are standing in a light drizzle on a gravel bar called Upper Kuntz. There is talk of Jason’s ram, whether it’s 168 or 170. We also talk about where the caribou stack this year, weather and strategy. Nearly dark, the weather worsening, Ron and Tav fly off. Jason, Kent and I are now officially on a Mountain Caribou Hunt.
Friday, 9:00 PM: We hike off the gravel to camp in a half-natural-half-ice-axed nominally flat clearing in some low bush beside a 30 foot high wooded shelf. In a little clearing in the willows in the middle of all three of our tents and packs, is a cardboard box. It showed up during relocation. In the box are two blueberry pies, brownies, bread, butter, rolls and three large servings of nearly still warm lasagna individually wrapped in aluminum foil.
Groceries and Caribou Camp, check.
Saturday, 10:01 AM: In my tent. Jason and Kent are discussing Jason’s type of Caribou. He’s looking for something asymmetrical. Something with trash everywhere.
Saturday, 11:01 AM: Yesterday Jason sprayed Canadian Military (contraband) DEET into my face and mouth. “Accidentally.” Today I try to count the number of mosquito bites on my shoulders. Fingertipping the topography, I say hey dudes, I think I can count like 37, no 43 mosquito bites on my shoulders, it’s like Braille. Kent says yeah and you know what it says, it says “use bug spray.”
Saturday, 12:30 PM: Jason has been watching the valley all morning. Two bulls were spotted on the base of the Doolies, a large perfectly triangular mountain at the bottom-end of Upper Kuntz. For better vantage and to see around a peninsula of timber blocking our view up valley, we decide to day hike up into the hills behind camp.
“Everywhere else you either have good tips and shitty bottoms, or good bottoms and shitty tops, but here you can find real double-shovels.”
—Kent
Saturday, 2:51 PM: We are a thousand feet up from the Orthogonal River on a rocky bench. Glassing. Watching, as Kent likes to say, “water go down the river.”
Saturday, 3:44 PM: I pick-up what I think is a tuft of grizzly hair, Kent looks at me and asks me why I have a wolf turd in my hand. I say it cant be a turd because it’s covered in hair, and he says it is a turd “and it’s covered in hair because before it was a turd it was a Dall sheep.”
Saturday, 4:12 PM: Golden Eagle.
Saturday, 4:13 PM:
“Caribou hunting requires patience. They are unpredictable. They can be on the mountaintops, down the river bottom, in the bush, etc. You can sit and watch the same spot for six days and nothing, and then the second you get up to leave, six bulls come loping past. The question is, do you sit and wait, or do you walk around and look?”
—Jason
Saturday, 4:57 PM: We spot a grizz sow and two cubs moving up river. The cubs are black as night and the mom is golden brown. They dig for roots and walk to the river where they splash and frolic Disney-style.
Saturday, 5:45 PM: We’ve been watching squalls come up over the ridge and mountains on the far side of the valley all day. They blow over, down, up, and but always wide of us. This one looks different.
“We will see what we see”
—Kent
Every guide says some variation of this on multiple occasions during every hunt, it’s a mantra of sorts.
Saturday, 6:30 PM: It just rained, the temperature dropped 20 degrees, it’s windy. We hike back to camp.
Saturday, 8:09 PM: I’ve finished my book. I am tired of counting the nylon squares in the top of my tent. Jason shows mercy, cuts his Everest book in half, it’s a collection of short stories—perfect. Ptarmigan walk along the river and right up to camp. They make a barking noise. One could, if one wanted, walk right up to them and drop a rock on the largest of the mountain chickens and kill it without breaking a sweat. “I’d have to report you, it’s in your letter.” Man Kabobs tonight anyway, the second and last backstrap. There is no more Montreal Spice so Kent plunders a number of Ichaban Noodle packets for the bullion packets inside. Jason shakes (marinates) the backstrap steaks in a ziploc loaded with a combination of chicken and steak powder.
Saturday, 9:47 PM: Kent talks about flying with Tav. As well as flying in the Yukon and the N.W.T. in general. And helicopters. And color matching the duct tape used to patch rock holes in Tav’s Super Cub.
Sunday, 7:00 AM: I have forgotten that we are hunting, and that through luck and skill we may well kill a Mountain Caribou. We pack-up, prepare for weather and distance and various other contingencies like the need for light and fire, and move out. Toward what and why is seemingly inconsequential. We are doing what is in front of us. We have rifles and scopes and packs and kit enough to hunt and so, it would seem, we are hunting. At some point yesterday or last night I let go of all the contextual and circumstantial stuff.
Sunday, 7:19 AM: We hike along a braided creek lying in the middle of a half-mile-wide gravel bottomed valley. The walking is flat and firm and easy, it’s practically paved. We splash through shallow streams, leave boot prints in the sand, look for animal sign, find it, lots of it (wolf, bear, caribou). It’s not hot but not cold either, 55 degrees. From time to time we stop with no word or gesture in a loose back-to-back, outward-facing huddle to glass in our own private directions. We scan for movement, color and shapes, incongruences, animals.
Sunday, 10:34 AM: In the middle of what is the widest river valley in the universe we walk over a small hillock which for some unknown reason Jason describes in great detail as his castle.
Sunday, 11:15 AM: Less than a mile up a massive drainage it begins to rain. Following Kent’s lead, we sit down in small clearing under the tangled awning of a large tree. I stack pine cones and rough hewn twigs into the shape of a miniature log cabin, and scratch tic-tac-toe boards into the loam with the end of a stick. Kent talks about the internet. Jason spits between his feet, makes a puddle. When it stops we hear it stopping first. Everything is wet. We begin again with switchbacks up an intolerable boulder field. Spread out, cussing, stopping often to remove a layer of clothing, or a boot from a particularly deep and potentially damaging hole in the rocks, we each of us slowly make our way off the increasingly steep and tight valley walls into the creek itself. The creek is cold, wet, slow and slippery. We go from side to side along the edge of it at first, then, because it works best, we just walk through the middle of it. An hour passes, maybe more. We follow the creek, like a rope, out of what has become a narrow near-vertical trench onto a grassy mostly flat saddle.
Sunday 3:00 PM: To the left, a rocky peak covered in patches of snow and mist. To the right, more of the same. Ahead, a wide and long grassy meadow riddled with ponds, standing water, scattered rock and a network of streams. The saddle slopes up, crests in the center, slants slightly downward toward the far edge. Beyond that, beyond the deep craggy ravine-of-a-drainage we see big peaks and bona fide alpine. Facing the alpine, we stop to lunch in the drizzle and consider. Kent is uneasy about our distance from anything approximating a runway. Lunch, like us, is cold and boring.
Sunday 3:30 PM: Kent stands-up suddenly and dramatically, cussing and incoherent. I make out “typical” and “of course” and “it figures.” He has spotted three bulls bedded down high up in the alpine on a rocky ridge-line. Seconds later, shoulder to shoulder, Kent talks Jason in. Patient and measured, they discuss each of the animals as though each of the animals is auditioning for a part, The Part. They talk bottoms, palmation, double-shovels, double bezels, bezels, pie plates, etc. Jason likes the big one in the middle, the one nodding off like an old man, catching his heavy antlered-head every thirty seconds right at the last moment before planting a tip in the mud.
Kent is adamant. We are already too far from camp. These unreasonable caribou are too high up and even farther, he’d like to add, away from camp then us which like he mentioned a moment ago, is already too far from camp, not to mention a runway. He says by the time we get there they will be gone. He thinks it will take us an hour to get there. Maybe more. And then, by then, they will have left. Besides, the approach is too steep. And also besides, “we need to pattern them!”
Then Kent changes his tactics—less complaining and more pleading.
He says none of these animals looks big enough or nice enough to shoot. And this is only our second day hunting Mountain Caribou and so why not wait, why not consider our options? We have five days left, why not be patient?
But Jason has made a decision. He likes the one in the middle, the old one nodding off, the one with trash all over the place. We can stay here he says, and wait. He’ll be right back. He says it like that, like he just wants to run to down to the end of the saddle, scramble down into the rocks a few hundred feet below, zigzag up the 700 foot peak in front of us, the top of which is in the clouds again, pop over a low rise, whack the old dude, bag him and pick us up on his way home. He says it like it might take an hour, two max. Kent says no way, we stay together. He says take it easy. He says let’s just keep our heads together here and think about it. Seconds pass. He says okay let’s hike to the end of the saddle and reassess. We do, and before you know it ten minutes has passed. Jason’s impatience is palpable and everything is the color and texture of wet fog. Kent makes noises, digs around in his pack for something, anything, probably nothing, another bar maybe, nothing I bet, just stalling.
Jason, resolved, throws his pack on. He says it’s cool, you guys stay here, I’ll be right back after I kill that caribou. Kent says hang-on-already I’m just looking for my rain jacket and pack fly.
Sunday 3:40 PM: I don’t want to move. Those animals are, when you can see them, when the shroud blows off, so far away and so high up. It’s late. We have been at it for seven or eight hours already. The way up to the saddle was a mother and it looked nothing half as bad as what lies in front of us. I don’t know why I am here. I just feel “present”, not much else. I am incapable of thinking. I feel tired and cold. I follow.
Sunday 7:45 PM: We scramble into the chunky wet rock below, into a valleyette where two glacial ravines converge. We take the one on the left. Strung out, thirty yards apart, first Jason, next Kent, then me. Labored breath, sweat freezing, breath freezing, snot on the end of my nose freezing, hat off periodically to wipe my sweaty forehead, I am hot, spitting, unzipping, fumbling. In the bottom here, no wind, just damp chill. I fall further behind, think about grizzly bears or worse. I come to another juncture, I see them up aways on the left. We are deep now in a series of rocky uphill corridors. The walls, mud and lichen and loose rock, are vertical in spots, near vertical in other spots. We are now surrounded by the same cloud and mist that was once above us. We pass over and skirt massive gray-black slabs of ice and snow dripping and chunking apart. Under our boots, rocks get wedged loose and kicked and rolled onto each other, the sound is hollow and deadly, primordial. Reminds me of time. Reminds me of the one about if a tree fell in the woods and nobody was there to hear it, does it make a noise? Steep now, more like ascending ancient disorganized steps. Like climbing into mythology itself. Or into the past. I am waiting to pass Zeus or a band of orcs or maybe a yeti. At some random seeming point Kent motions for us to begin making our way out of the rock and up into the face.
The face is wet. We slide often. It rains hard.
Sunday 8:09 PM: We pull more than climb our way up onto the ridge. The caribou are believed to be straight ahead across a narrow drainage, somewhere. We can’t see them. Too much swirling white and gray. Sinking fog, rising mist. Nobody talks. Jason rests his rifle on his pack on the ground. The rifle points in their imagined direction.
Three-hundred yards across, on a flat section of the ridge, through roiling cloud, a silhouette forms. What remains of the mist sinks to reveal the others too. The others are still bedded down but the old dude, the one Jason likes, is standing, a perfect profile.
Jason says something to Kent. Kent says something back to Jason. A loud crack. The old dude drops straight to his knees and falls, in a single oddly graceful slump, all the way over. The others bolt. We high-five.
Sunday 8:45 PM: Thirty minutes to the other side. It’s colder now. Wetter too. Next to the kill we drop our packs, cover them with a tarp. We take photographs. We comment on the distance. We discuss the approach. We talk about that last effort in the rain, the gnarly distance we closed and how fast we closed it. Jason and Kent dress the kill. Orange bags, saws, entrails, steam. Two hours, maybe three. Numb hands, wet boots and feet. Headlamps. The weather even more disagreeable. Dark now, we hear a rock slide that goes on too long and sounds too close and comes from back the way we came. We decide then to take the ridgeline straight down instead of the way we came and circle back around to the saddle.
Monday 12:33 AM: Our packs are beyond heavy. Its well past midnight. Making the saddle takes hours, more than twice what it did on the way in. We are in wet nasty shit. We are loaded. The ground is too soft. The saddle never comes even when it comes. Too slowly we crest. Stop. Fall into the grass and dirt, shove our packs off, look for water, find it, make instant coffee, talk, make more instant coffee, then head back down too soon toward the nasty draw we came up yesterday. We have a plan, we strike out wide, at an angle, hoping to wrap around the face of the peak between us and the river below, hoping to avoid this morning’s boulder field which is now really yesterday’s boulder field.
Monday 2:33 AM: We get caught-out high in yesterday’s boulder field. It’s steeper now, in the dark and wet. I walk on my hands and knees. An hour goes by like that, crawling in sharp and slimy and sliding rock. We descend and ascend, paralleling, slowly, the creek in the direction of the river below. We cuss. Talk. Sing. Say nothing. Anger. Denial. Acceptance, etc.
Monday 5:51 AM: The night is near over by the time we make the mouth of the draw where the timber and the hummocks bog and buckle and trip.
We make the valley bottom but not before more rocks and holes and snags and twists and scrapes and tears and cuts and thunks and giant fucking rock after giant fucking rock.
Monday 6:33 AM: We make the river in the valley center. Finally. Able to walk now, nearly upright, we head down river in silence. The sun comes up, beautifully reflected, as if we care, in the braided-out water and streams we stumble alongside in the direction camp.
Epilogue
- Deermaster offers a short guide to caping, or skinning the head and neck for trophy purposes, the "trophy of a lifetime." [↩]
