by Will Hobbs
We went back to sleep, and by the time we got up, they had vanished. A bear showed up as we were eating breakfast. I spotted it at half a mile, headed our direction. Most likely it was following the herd, but we might have brought it on ourselves. Hiking in the heat all this time had left us pretty rank. “Here comes trouble,” I said. “Big old grizzly.”
18
THEY JUST DON’T GET IT
The grizzly was a big male with a frosty-brown face and forelegs. The rest of its body was dark brown. The bear stopped running at a hundred yards. It stood on its hind feet for a better look. “Get your bear bangers ready,” Ryan said as he snapped pictures. I had already taken the launcher and three cartridges from the pouch on my belt. “Got one loaded,” I said, “and two in my shirt pocket.”
I reminded Ryan that our air horn and pepper spray were clipped to his belt. Ryan kept the air horn, but handed off the spray. “This is for point-blank range,” he reminded me.
“I know. What about the bear bangers?”
“Before the bear charges … whenever you think he’s getting too close.”
I clipped the pepper-spray holster to my belt while keeping an eye on the bear. It had all fours back on the ground and was loping toward us. At fifty yards it stood up again, woofed a couple of times, then laid back its ears and clacked its teeth. Now was the time. I took the safety off the launcher, pointed it above the bear, and fired.
The whistling sound of the speeding banger was weird to begin with. When the thing exploded above the bear like a rifle blast, that grizzly came to ground, uncertain whether to charge or flee. Fast as I could, I loaded another cartridge and fired again. At the second blast, the grizzly took off like an Arctic hare.
That grizzly covered a lot of ground in a hurry. A couple of minutes later it disappeared into the folds of the land about a mile away.
I was all pumped up. “You see that thing run?”
“Fast as a racehorse! I got some great pictures.”
A couple hours after setting out again, we caught sight of a caribou herd, maybe the same one Ryan had photographed in the middle of the night. From the cover of boulders on a knoll, Ryan took pictures of a wolf parting the herd. The wolf was scouting the caribou for prey—an old one, a sick one, a calf with a gimpy leg. As big as they come, the wolf was the spitting image of that white wolf that kept me company on the banks of the Firth.
The caribou weren’t running from the wolf—not yet. And the wolf wasn’t going to give chase until the time was right.
Suddenly the wolf locked on to a victim, and broke into a run. In that instant, a thousand caribou took off like the wind.
It was a thing to see. The white wolf was running alongside hundreds of caribou. In a matter of seconds it sprinted between a mother and her calf. In turning away from the wolf, the calf was isolated from the herd, and was running for its life all on its lonesome.
The rest of the caribou stopped running as soon as they realized the wolf wasn’t after them. They watched as the calf ran a big circle away from the herd and back toward it, with the wolf sprinting all out no more than twenty feet behind. “Would you look at that,” Ryan said under his breath, eye to the viewfinder with his shutter whirring in motor drive.
Fast as the wolf could run, the month-old calf could run even faster. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. The calf was winning its race for survival, but in a flash it stumbled on loose rock and went down. The wolf struck before it had time to rise, and had it by the neck, and gave the calf a killing bite. The only time I’d seen this before was on a video at school.
The stumble, and the end of the chase, happened no more than fifty yards away from our vantage point in those boulders on the knoll. Ryan had his camera on motor drive as the wolf caught up with the calf. He showed me the close-ups, National Geographic quality for sure.
That evening we came to the banks of a shallow river in the foothills of the mountains. The weather was changing. The sky was full of high clouds and the wind was blowing harder than before. We decided not to wait until morning to ford the river. On the east bank we set up camp and made supper. After we ate, Ryan made his call to Ken and reported our location. The biologist was out-of-his-mind excited. He said the dots were coming together for us, more than he ever expected—thirty-nine dots, a third of the Porcupine herd’s estimated strength.
“Forty thousand caribou!” Ryan exclaimed. “When? How soon?”
“Maybe as early as tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Babbage River valley, your side of the river, fifteen miles from your present position. You and your brother are right on the money, Ryan.”
“We’ve got high clouds and wind. What’s the forecast say?”
“That Alaska system is still offshore and building up steam. It threw out a band of moisture that might reach you in a day or two. If the system tracks your way, a storm will probably arrive a couple days after that. You’ve got time to get your pictures, and right now, the caribou have no reason to head for the hills.”
“Good deal! Good deal all around!”
“You bet. Everything’s favorable for the first aerial census in nine years. It got started today, four planes with cameras on their bellies. They’ll be doing photographic transects over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the north slope of the Yukon Territory. They key on the collared caribou first, then eyeball the terrain for the rest. Get close to the caribou, you’ll get your picture taken!”
“We’ll wave.”
“There’s one other thing, Ryan.”
“What’s that?”
“Just a curiosity, but something to keep in mind. I’ve also been tracking a freak of nature, a bear that’s half polar bear, half barren-ground grizzly. You might have heard of it back in Inuvik.”
“Sure did, and my brother’s the one who tangled with it.”
“How about that! Tell him there’s been a second sighting.”
“Where?”
“Foothills of the Richardson Mountains, south and west of Aklavik.”
“When?”
“Thirteen days ago.”
“You say you’ve been tracking it. How can that be?”
“Roger McKeon, the polar bear expert, tranquilized it from a helicopter. He put a satellite collar on the creature—a big male—and estimated its weight at around a thousand pounds. That’s bigger than any barren-ground grizzly, big as a trophy polar bear!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “He should’ve killed it,” I muttered.
Ryan asked for the grolar bear’s present location. Logan said it was on the coast, halfway between Shingle Point and King Point.
Ryan saw me scowling, and said into the phone, “A bear can cover a lot of ground in a hurry.”
“Well, that’s why I mentioned it. What can I say, other than heads up? I would think that your chances of running into it are remote. Good luck with the caribou tomorrow!”
Ken Logan gave us the coordinates for the grolar bear’s exact location. My brother shrugged as he put the phone away. “Well, that was unsettling. Let’s break out the GPS and find out how far away that grolar bear is.”
I sure didn’t think much of the answer: fifty-three miles. “I tried to warn them. They just don’t get it. They haven’t seen the look in its eyes. I can’t believe they put a collar on it and let it go.”
“Roger McKeon thinks it’s a creature of climate change. As a scientist, he must want to learn everything about it that he can.”
“Okay, but while he’s doing science, somebody’s going to get killed.”
I didn’t get much sleep that night. I was back on the banks of the Mackenzie River, facing that monster.
19
WALKING WITH CARIBOU
In the morning I notched Day 13 onto my knife sheath. Ryan called Whitehorse after breakfast. The megaherd was no longer along the Babbage River. During the night the caribou had moved farther east through the foothills. At the Trail River the dots turned so
uth, tracking upstream into the mountains. Ken Logan gave us new coordinates to steer for.
My brother said it was time to make our move and intercept the caribou. We were going to climb between two mountains and drop into the headwaters of the Trail River from above.
As we began our march, a bush plane flew directly over us, only a few thousand feet up. We waved, and we joked about whether we’d be noticed by the caribou counters poring over the photographs.
Under heavy packs, the hiking was steep and strenuous. I kept my mind off it by imagining what we might see once we got there. Picturing huge numbers of caribou brought bears to mind—bears would be there too—and before long I was imagining us running into that freak of nature with features of grizzly and polar bear, and a patchwork coat. We’d better hope the grolar bear didn’t catch wind of all those caribou.
Suddenly I recalled the smell of that bear, and the smell of my fear. My mind lurched southeast, in the direction of safety and home. Aklavik lay a hundred and fifty miles or more across the trackless tundra. On the verge of tears, I got ahold of myself and steered my thoughts back to the here and now, and our quest for the “post-calving aggregation.” The ground we were walking was freshly grazed and trampled by their large split hooves. We huffed our way up the steep slope onto lichen-covered boulders with patches of bearberry among the rocks.
At the top of the pass, the ground leveled out. Two boulders rose from a wide patch of tundra. We propped our packs against the boulders, drank from our water bottles, ate energy bars, and stretched out on the grass for a nap.
I woke to the sound of my brother rummaging in his pack. He was getting out his mini tripod. He pointed back down toward the rocky foot of the pass. Three different streams of caribou, maybe as many as a couple thousand, were headed our way. The clicking of their foot tendons carried up the mountainside, sounding uncannily close.
As the leaders drew near, we didn’t make any attempt to hide. We sat atop the boulders about five feet above the grass. At twenty yards, the leaders took us in with their large brown eyes. They hesitated, then kept coming, some huffing, some snorting, some sneezing, some coughing, nearly all of them twitching their muscles to try to shake the mosquitoes from their bodies. The swarm of bugs following the herd reached us before the caribou did.
On came the caribou, their nostrils whooshing for breath, their long-suffering eyes rolling our way—those who even noticed. The flood of bodies and antlers was upon us. Ryan’s shutter was whirring. I didn’t take a single picture. At a time like this, I didn’t want to be looking through a camera.
They were coming so close I could barely believe it. Their snorts, grunts, huffs, and wheezes filled my ears. My eyes took in their long snouts and rubbery noses, their white chest ruffs, the scars on their forelegs, their quivering muscles, their deep-brown shoulders and rumps. The branching racks of the big bulls were all in velvet. The calves were sturdy and full of spunk. Some tried to nurse as the herd passed through the bottleneck. Some called to their mothers; some snatched at sedges and lichen.
It took a good while for them all to come through the pass. By then the wind was blowing hard and the bugs had gone to ground. Clouds lower and thicker than the day before were racing in from the west. We followed the caribou down the other side of the mountain.
By the time we reached the valley of the Trail River, our herd had turned upstream and vanished. We followed, heading south. Before long we had another herd coming from behind. Every time I glanced over my shoulder, they were closer. Before long they were practically on our heels. I could hear their nostrils whooshing over my shoulder. My brother and I exchanged glances without saying a word. “Unreal,” he mouthed.
Half a minute later they drew even with us, and we were walking with caribou. I had to tell myself this was really happening. Some of the caribou rolled their eyes at us as they passed by, but mostly they ignored us. We weren’t hunters, and they weren’t prey. It was like we were seeing each other in a dream. I touched the back of a calf and felt its spine run under my palm. “Grow big and strong,” I murmured. “Make more caribou.”
After that herd passed us by, we didn’t see any more for a while. We kept following the Trail River upstream. Mostly the river was slow and winding, with chest-high willows lining its banks. In spots it ran fast through the riffles. It was loaded with grayling.
Rounding a bend, we climbed to the top of a small, flat-topped hill that rose all alone from the floor of the widening valley. With nary a tree in sight, we could see a long, long way. Our eyes were greeted by the vision we’d come for. Upstream, the valley floor was teeming with caribou, and so were the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains. “Huge numbers!” my brother declared.
“Tens of thousands! Should we try to get closer?”
“We’ve got high ground here—a perfect place to shoot from. Let’s stay put, and hope they come to us.”
Ryan walked over to a circle of stones, ten or so feet in diameter, at the very center of the hilltop. “Got any idea what these are about?”
I was proud to say that I did. “Prehistoric tent circle. The stones held down the edges of the caribou hides.”
“Very cool,” Ryan said as he snapped away. We pitched our tent inside that ring where my ancestors had tented every time they came here to hunt. It must have been prime hunting.
After supper the throng began to flow in our direction, and kept flowing, until our hilltop tent was like a ship in the middle of an ocean of caribou. At midnight, with the light all glowing and golden, my heart soared and about flew away. Hey, Jonah, they’re still here. And so are you, looking over my shoulder. Hunter’s paradise!
Caribou grazed their way up and onto our little hilltop. Cows lay down no more than twenty feet away to rest and chew their cud. One plopped down and took a nap at my feet. I started taking pictures. Ryan had been taking hundreds all this while. “You and I are in the middle of the Serengeti of North America,” Ryan said.
Of the pictures I snapped myself, I felt the best about one I took around three in the morning. I took it from low on our hillside as three magnificent bulls were fording the river from right to left. I snapped it with the bulls in the right half of the picture and open water on the left. The background was filled with that ocean of caribou lapping against the bare mountains.
Around five in the morning we took pictures of a grizzly parting the caribou as it lumbered by the foot of our hill. A couple hours later, from a hundred yards, we watched a mother grizzly trying to wrestle down an old bull in the shallows of the river. Her two small cubs were all agitated at the sidelines. For a good long while the bull was able to fend her off with his antlers. Finally she put a move on him and got him by the neck, took him down, and finished him off. Ryan’s motor drive was whirring all the while.
As it turned out, the mother grizzly and cubs never got a bite to eat. A boar grizzly ran the sow off. She couldn’t defend her cubs and the carcass at the same time. The male opened up the carcass of the bull caribou, only to have a pack of seven wolves show up and harass him into giving it up.
Other than that, we didn’t see any caribou fall prey to the wolves and bears. We couldn’t see what was going on at the fringes of the enormous herd. All morning the clouds were thickening, and by noon, thunder was rumbling. We pulled on our rain shells and rain pants. A sheet of dark rain fell like a curtain in front of the peak at the head of the valley. A lightning bolt struck the peak, and thunder came rumbling toward us. Caribou by the thousands—who’d been lying down, chewing their cud—rose to their feet in alarm.
A couple minutes later a second bolt of lightning broke loose with a searing crack, like the sky was breaking open. The thunder that came with it was like an atomic explosion. The whole valley shook; my teeth rattled. The caribou stampeded every which way, terrified out of their skulls.
I was terrified out of mine. I’d never been in a thunderstorm, only seen some from a distance, not very many. I turned to Ryan, who was calmly pho
tographing the nearest caribou as they stampeded off our hilltop.
“What do we do?” I cried.
“What can we do?” he replied with a crazy grin. “Look at ’em go! It’s like a tidal wave!”
“Your hair is standing on end!”
“So is yours!”
The next bolt came in like a missile. I thought I was dead. The explosion of thunder about knocked my head off.
Amazingly, we were alive and intact. There was a strange, sharp smell in the air. My brother was still shooting pictures of those masses of caribou running like the wind. The next bolt of lightning struck three of them dead no more than a hundred yards away.
The rain began to fall like bullets. Ryan stuffed his camera inside of his camera bag, which he pressed to his belly underneath his rain shell.
“Should we get in the tent?”
“Let’s get off this hilltop, and fast!”
We hustled down to the river bottom and huddled on the tundra, water pooling all around us. If the next bolt had our name on it, I was going to beat Jonah to the hereafter.
Ryan had his hood pulled tight around his face. His beard was streaming water like he was standing under a showerhead. He was pumped up and giddy. “Ever seen a storm like this, Nick?”
“Never!” Another bolt broke loose. “Hope we live through it!”
“Weird weather for the Arctic!”
“Tell me about it!”
By now there wasn’t a caribou to be seen. The rain continued but the lightning had moved on, down the valley to the north. Ryan said it was okay to go back up to the tent. Once inside, I asked my brother if they have thunderstorms like that in Arizona. “Every summer,” he said.