by John Smelcer
He had left his base camp base camp early in the morning and hiked back into the rugged valley, walking along the rocky creek when it was possible, bushwhacking his way through dense brush when it was not. Now, the camp full of supplies was almost eight miles away. Despite his better judgment, he had gone hunting alone. None of his friends could take time off from work. But he had been fortunate to draw a special permit to hunt dall sheep in the north fork, a treacherous valley beginning at the upper end of the narrow, deep lake. The opportunity was too precious to pass up. He had loaded his gear into a freight canoe at the lower end and motored up to the far end of the lake, where he put up a wall tent in which he set a small portable wood stove, a comfortable cot, and a sleeping bag good to twenty below zero. He had told his wife that he’d be back in five days.
That was two days ago.
Earlier in the day he had seen a band of the white sheep on a mountainside. Through his binoculars, he could see two rams with full curls. Despite his best efforts to stalk the sheep, he never got close enough to take a shot. Dall sheep are masters of their cloud kingdom with eyes as keen as their footing. They can see the slightest movement in the valley. Their survival depends on it. Any hunter who has gone after dall sheep knows that they are at home on the punishing talus slopes, where each uphill foot is gained at the cost of exhaustive labor and sweat. Sheep move as quickly on sheer cliffs as caribou on open tundra. Very rarely does a sheep lose its footing and fall to its death, feeding lucky wolves or bears.
Hunting dall sheep is the supreme test for the northern hunter, requiring stamina, patience, wisdom, and a will as self-assured in high country as the game itself. That’s why hunters who happily share their moose or caribou or deer meat are inclined, instead, to horde the precious, hard-earned sheep meat. Though they may not say it aloud, sheep hunters universally tend to think along the same lines.
I didn’t see you up on that mountain or humping a pack of meat back to camp.
For one thing, unlike a moose or caribou, there’s not a whole lot of meat on a dall sheep. Pound for pound, the price is a steep as a talus-flanked mountain. It is the truest measure of friendship when a hunter gives away even the smallest package, tenderly wrapped in white freezer paper and lovingly marked “Sheep” on the outside.
The man tried to stand, using his rifle as a crutch. But as soon as he put even the slightest weight on the broken leg, he collapsed in agony. He counted bullets in his pockets. Eight. He aimed the barrel skyward down the valley and fired three quick shots, the universal distress signal meaning, roughly, “Hurry and come save our souls!” But he knew it was unlikely anyone would hear the signal. He was the only hunter in the valley, his camp the only one at the northern end of the blue lake.
Over the next hour, the hunter fashioned a splint from nearby pieces of wood and white parachute chord, which he always carried to strap game bags and horns to his pack. But no matter how tightly he tied the splint, his leg could not bear the weight when he stood. With no other options, he began to drag himself slowly and torturously campward. More than once he surprised a rabbit or flushed a covey of grouse. A lone raven followed him for a time, curious that the man might be something to eat later.
He quickly abandoned the empty and awkward pack after stopping over and over to adjust it and the rifle. He wouldn’t need it anyhow. It had been meant to carry his prize down the mountain, holding nothing more than game bags, the white chord, and a small lunch, which he had eaten hours earlier.
At dusk, the man was pulling himself along the gravel creek bed when two grizzly bears hoisted themselves up from a patch of alders. Both bears looked to be about the same size and age—three-year-olds at about five or six hundred pounds each, likely abandoned recently by their mother. A sow will stay with her cubs for as long as three-and-a-half years, but she will drive them away once they near the edge of adulthood, around four. The hunter knew that deserted siblings sometimes stay together for a while. The closer bear had a lighter-colored coat than his brother, who had a large, dark bare spot on his right rump from scratching and rubbing himself, perhaps from some kind of infected skin condition.
The first bear charged at the man but stopped halfway, its ears flat against its massive, blonde head, which it shook from side to side as it hopped up and down on its front legs while making popping sounds with its yellow teeth—an intimidating warning signal. The hunter struggled to pull himself upright and shouted at the bear while waving his arms, a tactic that sometimes works, but sometimes doesn’t. Another tactic includes wearing a cow bell while hiking in the woods. The idea is that the loud noise lets the bear hear you from far away, avoiding sudden and dangerous confrontations.
An old Alaskan joke claims that you can tell when a bear has eaten a tourist by the shiny bell in its scat.
In a fury of golden-brown fur, the bear charged again. The hunter barely had time to yank the rifle from his shoulder and force a round into the chamber. With the bear barreling upon him, closing the yards, he fired from the hip. By an unlikely miracle, the bullet entered through an eye and exploded out the back of the bear’s head, killing it instantly. The animal crumpled at the man’s feet, his shaggy head plowed into the earth, like a derailed locomotive upended in a farmer’s field.
With his heart racing and his hands shaking, the hunter hastily jacked another round into the rifle and raised the butt to his shoulder, ready to fire again, but the other bear had already vanished into the brush, crashing through alders and willow, frightened by the shattering sound. The hunter thumbed the safety, leaving the cartridge in the chamber, just in case the second bear returned.
Reacting to every sound of twig and wind, the man dragged himself, foot by foot, down the valley even after night hurled itself upon the land. Far above the mountain peaks, ursa major—the Great Bear—popularly called the Big Dipper, stalked other stars in the sky. Indians say the constellation is a sow bear followed by her three cubs.
The clear night brought a bone-deep cold. Sometime before midnight, the man huddled in the darkness, trembling and trying to stop his teeth from chattering, the loaded rifle cradled on his lap. Although he had no way of knowing for certain, he was sure the temperature was around zero—maybe a few degrees above. He took turns breathing warm air into the cup of his hands and holding them tightly under his armpits. For short spells, he held his hands to his face, warming his cheeks and nose. He must have looked at his watch a hundred times during the eternal night, hoping morning was just around the bend. The cloudy night before had been warmer, and he had slept soundly in his sleeping bag on the cot in his tent.
He wished he were in that tent with a fire rattling inside the small stove.
Several times he thought he heard the snorts and grunts of a bear nearby. At those moments, he nervously unsnapped the leather flap to his knife sheath, ready to use the blade as a last resort. Hand-to-hand combat with a grizzly in pitch black was not something he liked to think about. But the urge to survive is strong. If he lost his rifle in a struggle, he would use the knife.
Finally, the man welcomed the low, rising sun, checking his leg in the frail, porcelain light. It looked discolored and infected around the break. He sniffed it. There was no odor of gangrene yet, but he knew that might be only a matter of time.
He sat for a long time warming himself in the slant sunshine, pondering his circumstance. It was only day three of his hunting trip. It would be two more days until his wife expected him to return home. Even then, she knew from past hunting trips that he might not return until late, which meant she might not report him overdue until the next morning.
Three more days.
Three more nights.
Judging from the distance he had made the day before, the hunter calculated he could not reach his camp by then. Searchers would quickly find his canoe and tent at the northern end of the lake, but they’d have to search the wild valley to find him.
That is
, if the elements didn’t get him first.
All day long the hunter dragged himself through brush and blueberry patches, across sand bars and boulders. Twice he had to cross icy streams on his belly. His only food was the too-ripe berries he encountered. Several times during the long day the man saw the bear with the bare-spot rump on the treeless hills above him. Once he even saw it standing on the shore on the opposite side of the creek. As before, the deafening report from the rifle sent the bear bolting back up the valley.
What was likely to get him first, the weary hunter wondered, the cold or the bear?
Later that evening, as the sun rested on the sharp lip of the valley, the hunter saw a moose standing in a small clearing, about a hundred yards away. Cloudless as it was, the temperature would soon plummet to zero. He had barely survived the night before, and he had no desire to endure such suffering again. He had heard stories of people staying warm by killing a large animal, gutting it, and crawling inside.
He had even seen it done in one of his favorite movies.
Driven by the need for warmth, however temporary, the hunter aimed his rifle at the heart of the unwary beast and pulled the trigger. As unsteady as his hands were from the cold, it took him three shots to kill the moose.
The shots rang and echoed in the quiet valley.
In near darkness, he hastily cut open the moose and dragged away the guts, being careful not to cut or nick the cumbersome intestines. He used the side of his hand to swipe out a pool of steaming blood. As stars blinked down at him, the man leaned his rifle against a nearby stone and squirmed into the warm, tight cavern. Cold and exhausted, he curled up inside the dead moose and fell asleep. As he slept, the modest warmth of the day clambered into the darkness toward the waning moon. Sometime during the night, the flesh of the moose turned as rigid and steely as any steak or roast ever pulled from a freezer.
The man awoke in the morning just as a pencil-thin line of blue light appeared on the black horizon. Shaking from cold and unable to feel his toes, he tried to climb out from the moose. But the meat and ribs would not give, no matter how much he struggled. Pinned as he was inside, he couldn’t even move his arm to reach for his knife.
Just then he heard a rustling outside. With effort, he was able to turn his head enough to see outside the ribcage. In the graying dawn he saw the bear lumbering toward him.
The hunter’s muffled screams rattled inside his frozen cage.
The Mammoth Eaters
At the far-northern end of the world, the arctic tundra is as boundless as a sea, as treeless as a desert. Only the faraway Brooks Range marks the insurmountable southern boundary of the tundra. A hunter can walk all day while the fixed horizon never seems to change. Nothing changes quickly on this land where summer is fleeting and winter and darkness seems to last forever.
It was across this unbroken landscape that Willie Paniaq was hunting caribou, his battered rifle slung over his shoulder. Summer was over, and winter loomed greater than the far mountains crouched before him. Already the temperature was near freezing. Frost turned the tundra red, orange, yellow, and golden-brown. The sky was dark blue, clear to the range and out across the listless sea.
Like many hunters, Willie needed meat for his family. Later, in mid-winter, a whale might be killed and the delicious fat shared among the villagers. But that time was many months away. Until then, a bull caribou would them.
It’s hard to get close to caribou on the tundra, where there is no place to hide, no trees or hillocks. The best hunters know that they must be where the herd will cross a river or pass on one of the many worn and ancient trails they follow from spring breeding ground to winter feeding ground. On seeing a herd approaching in the wavering distance, sometimes containing tens of thousands of animals, the hunter lies flat behind a scraggily blueberry bush or a gray lichen-covered stone and waits, while a black cloud of mosquitoes buzz around him, seeking any exposed flesh.
Many times in Willie’s life, he had lain patiently, still as a stone, until he was surrounded by caribou, some almost stepping on him. From his concealment, he studied the relationship of small bands of cows with their calves, the boisterous clans of young males, and the noble behavior of old, white-chested bulls—the undaunted sentinels of the herd. A large bull can weigh three or four times as much as a man. In one Native language, the word for these patriarchs is udzih kaskae: caribou chief. Willie lay on the spongy earth, unflinching despite the swarming mosquitoes, waiting for one of the large bulls to come within range.
When a big bull finally offered himself to the hunter, stepping clear of cows and calves, presenting a broadside silhouette, Willie prepared to take his shot, first calming himself, breathing easily, not holding his breath as less experienced hunters do. Holding breath too long causes the hands to tremble and throws off the shot. When he was ready, his sights where he wanted them to be, Willie squeezed the trigger, slowly and steadily.
The butt of the rifle pounded his shoulder as the loud report shattered and then rolled through ruined silence. Almost instantly, Willie heard the unmistakable sound of bullet smacking into flesh, and the bull crumpled to the mossy earth, kicked for a moment, then was still. Though startled by the gunshot, other caribou did not run away. Instead, they milled around curiously watching as the hunter began to work with his knife on the dead animal.
Caribou are strange that way.
In remote Alaska, many animals have never seen man. Willie sometimes wondered what they must think of man and his machines, of his loud sticks that kill from far away. Do they have unspoken myths about us passed on in their genes? What are we?
Are we Raven?
Are we Death?
While the hunter worked to cut the hind quarters, he thought about how much living off the land meant to him. Not all men in the village subsisted off the land the way he did. Many, especially the younger men and families, ordered their food from faraway grocery stores, the boxes and cans and cases of soda pop and canned meat brought into the village each week by small airplanes. Most of the tiny houses in the village had satellite dishes by which they watched commercials for things and places they would never see. Mostly, it was the older men—those who were still strong enough—who hunted or searched the open sea beyond the ice pack for whales or walrus.
Willie, who was not yet so old, yearned for the old ways. Hunting connected him to a nearly abandoned past. Too much had been lost to the present. Already, the language of his grandparents had been mostly abandoned. Only elders still spoke the words or could name the familiar places of the northern world. The young didn’t seem to care at all. The past is the past. Flat screen televisions and expensive basketball shoes are the future. To the young, the old ways have vanished for a reason—survival of the fittest. The new ways are better. How well can a man live when he does not know himself?
Willie was drawing a line.
No more of his heritage would disappear the way winter snows melt each spring when the days become noticeably longer and longer until nothing of the snow is left at all to show it had ever even existed.
After strapping a hind quarter to his pack-board, Willie set out for home, knowing that it would take several trips to collect all the meat. The cold air would preserve the remaining meat, unless wolves or bears found it first, which happened often.
On the way home, following a winding stream, which had carved a deep bed into the earth, something jutting from the side of a muddy bank caught his eye. Willie slid the heavy pack from his shoulders and climbed down to see what it was. It was brown and shaggy and covered in mud. Part of the head and one leg protruded from the bank. Willie brushed away some of the soil. It was clearly some kind of very large animal, something much bigger than anything he had ever seen. Finally, it dawned on him what it was.
A woolly mammoth.
Most People of the North have heard the stories, how every now and then a woolly mammoth or woolly b
ison is found in the circumpolar regions of Alaska, Canada, or Siberia. The great beasts date back tens of thousands of years, dying out from over-hunting or perhaps from climactic changes. No one knows for certain. What is known is that occasionally one of the creatures died and fell to the tundra where the permanently frozen soil acted as a deep freezer, preserving the carcass.
In the summer, even the low midnight sun melts the topmost layer of the tundra, forming countless shallow ponds and lakes. The sun’s effects are even stronger on south-facing cutbanks or cliffs. As the water in the ground melts, the soil becomes muddy, and mudslides reveal still-frozen soil. The process continues summer after summer, year after year. Sometimes, the giant bodies of shaggy, prehistoric animals become exposed, a little bit each day. Eventually, more often than not, bears, wolves, arctic foxes, wolverines, and ravens find and consume the half-frozen bodies. The meat is edible. Like many Alaskans, Willie had heard stories of how the Smithsonian Institution had once included mammoth on the menu of their annual gala. He also vaguely recalled a story about a Russian czar who had once done the same thing.
Willie cut back the fur and the thick layer of fat. The meat beneath was gray-brown, freezer-burned, like all meat left in a deep freezer too long or exposed to air. He sliced deeper until he found red meat. He cut a roast, as large as his two fists held together, and smelled it.
It smelled good.
The hunter built a small campfire from the dry twigs of stunted willows and alder. He roasted the meat, careful to make sure it was cooked all the way through. The sizzling flesh smelled delicious. He ate several small bites, chewing slowly, trying to gauge the unfamiliar flavor. For the most part, it tasted like other red meats—bear, caribou, marmot, musk ox. Willie ate it all. Afterward, tired from walking all day and from carrying the burdensome pack, he lay down for a nap, resting his head against the hind quarter.
A short time later, Willie was startled by a piercing sound unlike anything he had ever heard. It sounded almost like a horn trumpet. He opened his eyes. A dense fog had enveloped the tundra.