Chapter 4 – Redemption
One last cast, one more bend in the river, one more curve in the trail, one more ridge to cross before we camp. That little bit of extra effort has paid off now for me too many times to count. In many cases it’s not even a monumental feat but rather a few more steps just to peer around one more corner before the day is done. Last year on my first Dall Sheep hunt my partner and I crawled out of our sacks after a warm dinner on somewhat of a whim. We’d all but decided to call it a day but there was a little light left and we hadn’t seen into the next valley yet. From a vantage point a short stroll above our tent we picked out two sheep we were almost certain were rams. Too far away and too dark to be certain, we at least knew there was a possibility. Without that five minute walk at dusk we never would have seen these animals and the most memorable hunt of my life may never have panned out the way it did on the following day.
Perseverance doesn’t always have to be a herculean effort against all odds, it can take far more simple forms such as not quitting until the end, not giving up until the task is complete or until you are out of options, or not letting a moment slip by unproductively.
Back to the caribou.
After dragging our soggy sorry asses back home and re-entering the real world I wasn’t happy. When I look at things from the 30,000-foot level my life is good and I am blessed far beyond what I deserve. Still, I can’t help but be preoccupied with failure. I knew that with such a small window to hunt we would have had to not only get lucky to find some animals within range, but then everything would have had to have gone perfectly with the hunt, pack out, and return trip to the trailhead. My mindset should have been that failure was a lot more likely than success, but of course that isn’t usually the way hope and anticipation work. I’ve never been good at expectation management.
I couldn’t let it go and I had to try again. Even contemplating the notion riddled me with guilt. My wife, being the saint that she is, was wrangling two kids, one of whom was less than a month old while I worked and now asked for another two day window to go hunting. I was able to re-configure work and personal lives to come up with another day and a half of hunting. If we were doomed to fail for lack of time on the previous trip, this itinerary certainly wasn’t going to improve our odds, but it was better than nothing.
In the week since our first try I couldn’t stop thinking about the big bull, the monarch of the mountain. I refused to believe that there wasn’t a better way to get to where he was at. I spent quite a few hours poring over maps, googling the earth, and searching for anecdotal reports of access into the area from local knowledge. What I came up with was a few sketchy rumors at best about another rough trail system that lead into the southern end of this small group of mountains. The caribou that we had seen were at the far north end with a handful of miles separating the two zones, at least that’s what my best guess led me to believe. Though the hiking distance appeared to be longer there was one major difference, if we were able to access this terrain from the south, there would be no major drainage in our way and most of our travel should be well above the green zone. How steep was it? Were the animals still there? Does this trail even exist and if so where does it go?
With all of these unknowns and a healthy helping of doubt we cast off again, this time in the middle of the night hoping to find a trailhead at first light and start the uphill ramble. The weather had improved over the course of the week and it wasn’t raining, but there was a fairly thick layer of low elevation clouds obscuring everything around us. I hoped that with warming temps the clouds would dissipate, if they didn’t, we’d be back in the ping pong ball with nothing to see or hunt.
Somewhere not far from where I’d hoped a trail would materialize we found something that looked promising and we launched via 4-wheeler with a plan similar to the last one. Follow the trail until it runs out, drop our overnight gear and continue by foot. Things worked out far better than I hoped with the trail getting us very close to a ridge I picked out on maps that seemed to lead us up and over the top from south to north and to where we had seen the animals. The distances seemed quite manageable and the terrain, though steep, was totally doable from what I could see. The cloud layer was thinning by the minute and I couldn’t unpack and repack fast enough. I was pumped and determined not to waste a minute.
Soon enough tents were pitched, gear was stowed and we were trekking across open tundra towards the access ridge. The going was easy (by comparison) and the sun came over the horizon just as the terrain started to ramp up. The day was shaping up to be a perfect 10, but one huge nagging unknown hung in the air, would we find the animals. It had been a week since we’d last seen them and by now they could be in a different country. After an hour, maybe two we gained a low saddle in the ridge that offered a view down the other side towards the northern end of the escarpment. I’d been pushing the pace pretty fairly well thus far and had a few minutes to chill while my partner caught up. I had a seat on the ridge and started glassing the valley below for signs of life. Caribou. One lone, very large bull appeared about a mile away. It had to be him. He was by himself, giant, and not too far from where we had last seen him. What were the chances? I was jacked but he was a long way off with a lot of convoluted terrain between us. My partner caught up and I pointed the animal out. We agreed, it was the same bull. Redemption might be a possibility after all.
We needed a strategy. We were about a thousand feet above him and maybe a mile away. I watched him feed for 15 minutes and though he was meandering, it seemed like he was favoring an uphill trend. My first thought was to drop down from where we were at and come across at his level hoping for a 200-300 yard shot before he busted us. After watching him for a bit longer he continued his upwardly mobile path and I changed my mind. We had to stay high. Before we had the chance to close the gap he could out climb us to the point that we’d never catch up. Our only option was to top out on the peak we were currently climbing, run a long ridge around the top of a small valley and then hunt down to where he was working his way up on the other side. Unfortunately this meant losing sight of him for who knows how long, maybe forever.
With the plan settled we moved into beat feet mode, moving up through scree and talus just below the crest of the ridge. The view from the top of the peak was sweet but I didn’t want to pause long enough to enjoy it. The long ridge from the summit I hoped would continue around the head of the basin did just that, and minus a few steep bits of scrambling it was straight forward and relatively direct. We hustled as fast as our legs and lungs would allow us until we circled the basin and connected with the broad sloping ridge we had last seen the caribou at the foot of nearly two hours before. We dropped our gear and went into stealth mode, slowly picking our way down the sloping terrain with no idea what lay below us. Thirty minutes into this fairly slow movement I came to a rock outcropping that obstructed the view below. I asked my partner to hold and I crouched and slunk to the rocks until I could see over the edge. And there he was, 70 yards away and perfectly broadside. Be busted me immediately and I had no time to think. With scope covers open and a round in the chamber I raised my rifle, clicked the safety off and eased onto the trigger with my crosshairs moving more than I would have liked due to a pounding heart and heaving lungs. I won’t say I was entirely unprepared or caught off guard, but I was in a state of disbelief that after several miles and a few hours of not having seen him I popped out right on his nose.
My first round hit him high but he was down immediately and dead but didn’t yet know it. I added another one for good measure and he was done. My partner, having been a few paces behind me and looking at a bear in the opposite direction was beside himself. “What the hell just happened” he yelled, “did you kill the caribou, did you shoot at the bear? What happened?” In an instant he was at my spot and saw the animal and started freaking out. Being entirely consumed with what had just transpired I hadn’t paid much attention to anything but getting the killing done. He was huge, the biggest caribou I’d ever seen. As we picked our way down to him his size became apparent and I knew he was a special beast. He’d tumbled down into a small drainage and as we reached him the sun lit the place up and I took it as an omen. It seemed like a good time to smile, so that’s what I did.
The easy part was over and there was significant work to be done. We were 2-3 miles from camp and a couple of thousand feet above the valley floor with a lot of rugged traversing to get back to where we started. I won’t bore you with the details as I have rambled on long enough, but the work was pretty real. We carried our gear and the animal out Denali style, that is triple carrying loads. We’d move a third of the load half a mile ahead, come back for the 2nd third, and the return again for the final third, each load weighing 60-85lbs. And so we shuffled into the night. Finally back at camp as the sun crept low we were greeted with one of the finer sunsets behind Denali and the Alaska Range I have ever seen, a fitting end to a remarkable day.
But that wasn’t quite the end. My partner still had a tag to fill and we had a whole day of hunting left. It was extremely hard to pull our sore, blistered, and beaten bodies out of the fart sacks in the morning but we managed to do it, barely. About a mile from camp on the valley floor we jumped another decent bull and my partner managed to drop it with one shot while it was running at 230 yards. It was a pretty remarkable shot and another awesome animal. Compared to the day before the pack back to camp was cake and we were on the trail home in the early afternoon with ear to ear grins.