Native hunters in Alaska used to take wolves by bending pieces of springy willow with sharpened ends inside chunks of meat. The meat was then frozen. Wolves gulp their food. The wolves swallowed the meat, and as it thawed in their bellies the sharp sticks straightened out and pierced the animals' guts. The hunter followed wolf tracks from his bait until he found the dead animals. Gee, I'm not sure I am glad to know about that.
In all the years I have hunted Alaska I have never encountered a Game Warden or Game Protector while hunting. No Game Department official has ever checked my vehicle along a road or in any way endeavored to examine my license or my game tags. In how many states would a hunter be allowed that much trust and freedom?
The photographs in this book show clearly that Alaskan hunters do not concern themselves with fancy hunting clothes. As the probability of encountering other hunters is remote, the chance of getting shot by another is even more improbable. If you come to Alaska to hunt wear what you like. Dressing as an Eastern deer hunter, however, might prove embarrassing. If you are reading these words ten years after they are written, it would perhaps be wise to see if things have changed.
This cold weather boot was perfected in the 1950s. We called them "Mickey Mouse" boots. If the boot is black, it was made for wet snow conditions. If the boot is white, it was built for dry cold—where there was zero moisture. The valve in the side should be opened to reduce pressure during airplane rides. There is a repair patch sewn on just above the pressure valve. I have never found anything better for bitter conditions.
The late great hunter, Finn Aagaard, particularly liked discovering this little bootlace trick. Anyone—soldier or hunter—who often dresses in the dark will eventually find one boot lace a mile longer than the other. To keep them even, simply tie a knot at the bottom. When tightening, the knot will be pulled beneath one side or the other and never be seen.
Prepared!
It is the getting up and getting down when carrying a heavy load that exhausts a bearer. If you can find a way to rest while remaining standing, you will be far ahead in the game. Monopods and "A" frames are handy solutions—as soon as you get down to timberline.
A crude "A" frame can be attached to a pack. When the hunter stands erect the feet of the "A" should touch the ground so that the bearer can rest. A normal forward lean while walking will allow the frame's feet to clear the ground.
Using the "A," very heavy loads can be successfully carried without completely exhausting the carrier. The "A" frame system is used throughout the Orient where men still haul huge loads.
A monopod is almost as good as an "A." In this example, the "pod" is fastened outside the double gas can load. This burden is in excess of seventy pounds, but can be handled for long periods by a normally strongman.
This is a wolf and bear trap from the bad old days. Blacksmiths hammered out traps like this mostly in the lower forty-eight, and some came to Alaska along with their owners. It is common to find this type of steel trap with long and sharp spiked teeth as part of the jaws. Reproductions of these traps are being manufactured for "antiquers" these days and are a lousy investment.
Doug Cooper demonstrates how easily a Yukon packboard can be slipped from the shoulders. A pack with a belt or chest harness should be avoided. Slip in and slip out is the best and the safest way.
Bob Hirter demonstrates why the author believes a hunting jacket should not have any kind of pocket on the right breast—no matter how Richard Chamberlain dressed in King Solomon's Mines.
The author occasionally wears an army field jacket and unless I make certain the right breast pocket is snapped closed, this happens when I dismount the rifle. Incidentally, no loops of large double rifle cartridges on that side of your chest either. (King Solomon again.)
A friend of mine is an ardent hand loader. He claimed recently that he had trouble with the animals he hit not falling down. When he finally got an animal on the ground, he examined it closely and found that he had loaded his cartridges so hot, and the bullets were moving so fast, that they cauterized the wounds going through. Ah, well. Every book should have one of those kinds of stories.)
Yep, that is a white buffalo calf. We had two white calves, two years in a row, in the Big Delta herd. The cows seemed to recognize that the white calves were different and needed protecting It was difficult to get a picture of a white calf because the other buffalo formed around it, sort of (crudely) like the bull musk oxen do protecting their females.
Neither calf lasted through a winter. We have always believed that someone shot them for their rare hides. We do not mean native Alaskans. The northern Athabascan Indians have no tradition of holy or sacred white buffalo that I ever heard of. That is American plains Indians stuff.
Of Mosquitoes and Horses (Mules too)
I probably should not write about bugs and beasts of burden because I am unable to be unbiased and what the inexperienced might call fair-minded. I place both the insects and the equines among the undesirables of nature. It is additionally horrible to realize that if you have a horse, you will collect mosquitoes, flies, and black gnats in hordes, swarms, and plagues. Horses in Alaska attract mosquitoes as honey draws bees—only worse. That is bad.
Of course, horses have other really rotten attributes. They panic at bear scent, they panic at lightning, they panic at … the damned animals panic at everything. Horses kick at you. They suck in air when you are tightening girths—which means the loads will soon slide under their bellies. They bite. They roll with their packs or saddles, and they try to wipe away their packs and your knees by swiping them against trees. Horses bog down. They tangle in windfalls, they crash through ice, and they regularly break loose and head for home. If you do not have a wrangler on a hunt, you spend most of your time caring for horses.
Horses are very dumb. We are not speaking of handsome and shiny thoroughbreds trotting high-headed and high-tailed through blue grass meadows. Most Alaskan horses are scrub stock raised outside, barely trained, and completely unused to mountains or muskeg. Horses stink, but sometimes caribou bulls are attracted and try to claim an animal for their harem—or something. I always hope the caribou gets the horse, because, I hate hunting with horses almost as much as I despise mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes travel in swarms. There may be none and suddenly they arrive so thick that you breathe them in, and they bite like dragons. Alaskan mosquitoes are not large; there are simply multi-trillions of them—per swarm. You cannot wave them away. They land and stay in place until they are wiped away. Avoid dark and dank stagnant water hollows where there is no wind. At the first step, clouds of mosquitoes can rise from such places. When they rise, flee. There is no other choice.
Even a slight breeze may deter mosquitoes, and the no-see-ums as well. Yep, we've got those miniscule, all jaw-and-fang mites as well. I am sure they are closely related to those dominating Florida. There is a photo I have failed to locate for this book of a man standing on the tundra with his head net raised while glassing (into the breeze) with his binoculars. The picture was snapped from the rear, and his back, sheltered from the wind, is an inch thick with mosquitoes.
I carried four head nets and two mosquito bars in my airplane's survival kit at all times. I also had four bottles of military 100% Deet, which is the real killing agent in the few useful mosquito lotions and sprays. Cutter's mosquito repellent is the next best thing to the military stuff. Forget the be-kind-to-the-poor-bugs stuff like Off.
When mosquitoes are bad, and they are often simply unendurable, you will sit on the smoky side of the fire with relish, you will wear gloves and keep your ears covered. I have always wondered what mosquitoes eat before I arrived. You will try to camp on ridges where there is often a breeze, and you will still be miserable.
Do not take Alaskan mosquitoes lightly—I never have. Without protection, they could kill you.
Did I mention that I hate mosquitoes?
I do not enjoy bringing up the subject of bow and arrow hunters. I am unwilling to ap
pear even neutral. I am against bow hunting as a matter of principle.
Back in the 1930s, an archer named Howard Hill successfully hunted every game species he could find. The guy was a deadly bowman, no question about it. I avidly followed his adventures. I even knew the justly famous archer Fred Bear a little. Hill had disappeared into the mists of time, when Fred Bear and his pack train of bow hunters marched into our caribou camp on the Tanana River flats one long ago August evening.
Bear and his party of genuine experts were going to hunt Dall rams in the nearby mountains. They pitched camp, ate caribou with us, and swapped yarns at our fire. His party lit out for the high country at dawn. Later, I saw the full curl rams they had collected in Jonas Brothers, Taxidermists, of Fairbanks. That is the end of my positive reporting about bow hunting.
Before I begin lighting into bow hunters and their terrible (repetitive and interminable) wounding and maiming, I must confess that I am a lousy bow and arrow shooter. Robin Hood would have surrendered me to the Sheriff of Nottingham without regret. As an archer, I am pathetic, but it is not my personal deficiency that turned me against bow hunters. My disgust with the sport is based on the lousy shooting and the resulting wounding of game animals that stagger off to die everywhere the sport is condoned.
Through some inexplicable rationalizing, hunters who are ungifted even with a scoped rifle accept that, because they can drill a target at thirty steps with their compound bows, they are qualified to hunt big animals in difficult conditions. So few are bow-capable (the percentage is too tiny to measure) that only proven champions should even consider the sport. The wild game does not deserve to be tormented by poorly directed broadheads, and are too often unrecovered by their clumsy executioners.
Do I exaggerate? In the mountains it is difficult to prove, but lack of skills are demonstrated almost daily on the game hunting farms in the lower forty-eight where bowmen by the hundreds attempt to take animals from buffalo to the smallest of deer.
I have a friend who operates such a business. He curses the archers who regularly leave hogs (wild boar) running about with three or four arrows hanging from them. Licensed bow hunting instructors fail to kill cleanly shot after shot Sportsmen from sportsmen's clubs try, and they also wound and wound. Clean kills with bows and arrows occur far more regularly on TV programs and in magazines than they do in the hunting fields. Some of these sad sack archers come north.
Consider this actual incident. A client wished to shoot a buffalo with his bow. He solidly hit the standing animal at fifty feet. The buffalo walked away and lay down. The archer moved around and shot again. Once more he hit the bull solidly, but the buffalo got up and charged the shooter who had to be rescued by a rifle bullet. I know where that trophy hangs, and I have heard the story of the kill. Somehow, the backup rifle is never mentioned.
If that were a rare incident, it would not be worth repeating, but that kind of shooting is most common, and that kind of result is even more regular.
For the final time, our game rates better. Bow hunters are not that good, and there should be almost zero bow hunting in Alaska.
If I were asked to name the most grievous error made by Alaskan hunters, I would name the failure to follow through after the trigger pull. That may seem like a minor perhaps improbable error, but looking up too soon ruins more shots than any other listable cause.
I have watched countless hunters, many of them alleged to be experienced, squeeze carefully, then snap their heads up to see where the bullet went. No such movement should occur. Bullets are thrown off course because of riflemen trying to see what happened too soon. The shooter must attempt to remain on his target, holding as solidly as he can right on through the recoil. Not until then should he attempt to look downrange. Check yourself. The error is common.
As I reread the many preceding pages, I see that I have set high hunting standards and have managed to portray myself as quite a hunter indeed. I should modify that image and reduce myself to more realistic status. I will do so by mentioning three blunders that embarrass me to this day. True, I could list pages of errors in judgment and performance over the last fifty plus hunting years, but I lack the humility to do so. These three will have to do.
The first occurred when I was using my long Randall hunting knife to skin and gut my first moose (the 28-incher I mentioned in Chapter 22). To make the story short, I stuck the mighty blade through the moose's esophagus and pulled on it (blade flat) to raise the innards so that my partner could get at them more easily. Inevitably, the blade twisted and cut through the soft tube and stuck point first in my thigh—deeply into my thigh. What a stupid thing to do, but it had seemed clever until I was stabbed. No major blood vessels were cut, but I packed it in, hiked out and went to the nearest infirmary for a tetanus shot.
The next dopey move that I am willing to mention occurred a few years later. I was on top of a mountain examining a flat area to see if I could land a plane there. The surface looked like ten million dinner plates all stood on end and tight together. Nearly a mile of vertical plates—very unusual; I have never seen anything like it.
I was walking with my rifle slung onto my packboard with my hands stuffed into my jacket pockets. My toe caught on one of the plates. I could not get it over the height of the plate, and I fell forward face first. Unable to drag my hands from my pockets, I landed hard, right on my kisser. Somehow', the wallop did not knock me cold, but the rocks banged up my handsome features and broke my glasses. I wore the bruises and the glasses held together by adhesive tape for the rest of the trip. That was when I learned to pack an extra pair of spectacles into base camp. Damn, I shouldn't admit to such dumb stunts.
The last admitable blunder happened not so long ago. I was explaining our mountains to some folks from flatter lands. I identified a mountain that I had often hunted, by pointing and naming the passes, knobs, and streams while inwardly recognizing that something seemed not quite right. I was finished with my brilliant descriptions before I realized that I was looking at the wrong mountains, and that everything I had just spoken about was dead wrong. (I intended to correct my gross misidentifications, but the conversation turned, and I never got around to it. Those folks accepted all that I, the expert, said. To this day they believe they saw something they were not even near.)
That's it! I confess to nothing more.
As a book ends, more information always appears. For the most part, it is too late, and the photographs and stories must remain unpublished, but I end this tome with just-arrived pictures and a story about friends who always wanted to hunt in Alaska, and this short tale is a bit special.
The folks you see in these photographs have always been hunters. The younger three have safaried in Africa, but until this trip they had never been to Alaska. The old buzzard, Fred, the family patriarch in the white hat, makes the plans and foots the bills for almost everything his family does. The story of this hunt is exceptional because Harvey shot his ram at 200 yards with his 7mm Remington Magnum on his first day—a heart/lung shot. Michelle shot her black bear at 50 yards on her second day—7mm through the front shoulder. And Chris nailed his grizzly (squared 7 feet, plus) with his 7mm at 200 yards while the bear was standing and looking around, a perfect shot through the spine at the front shoulder joint in the rain on his fifth day of hunting. Master Guide Ray Atkins and Rick Hyce delivered big time about as swiftly as it can be done, and the shooting was one shot each at reasonable distances, as it should be—an enviable hunt and a nice story.
Harvey Thebes with his sheep
Fred and Harvey at the lodge with his ram horns
Michelle Thebes with black bear shot in the Alaska Range
Chris Thebes with grizzly shot near Cantwell Creek, south of Cantwell, Alaska
33 - In Closing
I wish that I could again experience all of the hunts described in this volume. Almost thirty years ago, I wrote that, even at my desk, I could imagine the bite of cold wind off Saint Anthony's Pass. I could taste the crystal w
aters of Morningstar Creek and feel the pull of tundra vines across my insteps. I could smell sheep and sense my pulse quicken at the thought. I longed for the high, clear air of mountain country.
I wrote that, as you read, I would be doing those things. My camp would be sheltered from the winds but open to the sun. My rifle would hang close to hand. Water would be near, and there would be meat on the rack. I would smell of sweat and my clothes would be in ruin, but my nose would be clear, my eyes sharp, and my mind one with nature.
All of those things came to be. Glorious have been the years. But, now I am eighty. The hills have steepened. I have lens implants in both eyes. I have suffered one retina collapse and have had two corneal transplants. My reflexes have slowed, and, of course, I am not strong, as I once was. There are older guys still packing through the mountains, so I may have great hunts remaining. Still, it is often later than we think, and a man is wise to examine his limitations. It would be grand to find another ten years have rolled away with more stories and concepts to include in a later edition of this volume, but it will be another's duty to perform.
The older a hunter gets, the more he will value his memories. I am fortunate. I have many—but I would like to have more!
The best thought for closing is the one I used decades ago.
"There is room for you, too, in our Alaskan wilderness. If our paths cross, we can share a tale or two. If we never meet, we are already friends through the pages of this book. I guess that alone makes the writing worthwhile."
The Hunter's Alaska Page 26