Several mornings later I set out to search for some lower-lying fruit and found it, literally, in the form of wild blueberries.
Serious backpack hunting involves a grim nutritional accounting. A typical day of sheep hunting can require 4,000 to 5,000 calories of fuel, and a serious stalk will demand even more. But you can carry only so much food on your back, and on an extended hunt like this, supply rarely exceeds demand. A dead sheep would have solved the problem, but given the conditions we needed to pursue other possibilities, of which the North Slope offers several.
We had char, smaller versions of which occupied the little stream beside our camp, but you can only eat so much fish. The great Porcupine caribou herd calves each spring on the nearby Arctic Coastal Plain, and every summer hundreds of thousands of these nomadic deer travel eastward toward the Yukon. The season was open, and a calf for camp meat would have been manna from heaven, but this year we couldn’t even find a straggler. On previous trips to the area I’d packed enough arrows to produce several ptarmigan dinners, but this year I had not seen a single bird. Mushrooms don’t pack a lot of nutritional punch, but a pan of sautéed boletes can turn a bland packet of rice into a mouth-watering main course. Unfortunately, thanks to the brutally hot weather, mushrooms were as scarce as caribou.
When I returned to camp that night, the bag full of blueberries made me a hero, because we’d brought along one of the two absolute culinary necessities for any North Country hunting trip: Krusteaz Pancake Mix. Soon after we crawled from our tents the next morning, willow smoke was drifting down the gravel bar, and then blueberry pancakes began to slide from our frying pan onto our plates. That breakfast would have put IHOP to shame.
Thus fortified, we held a reluctant council of war. Our pickup flight was due in three days, and we were nearly
out of food. We could have stayed where we were and hunted another day, but if someone actually killed a sheep, getting the meat and our camp back downstream in time to meet the plane would mean around-the-clock travel. Yote voted to stay, and I admired his determination, but in the end age prevailed. For which I offered my apologies.
Two days later, when we broke for lunch before tackling Hell’s Gate again, it had begun to rain. Dick had flipped one of the two inflatable pack rafts we’d used to line our camp downstream, and a lot of our gear was soaked. Because we didn’t know whether our cache had survived two weeks in bear country, we stopped at the Char
Hole, where we found plenty of fish, along with signs that a grizzly had discovered this bounty as well. With visibility in the willows a matter of feet, we didn’t linger after taking a few fish for dinner.
A few hours later, back at the strip on the main river, we were relieved to learn that the bears may have found
our fishing hole but they hadn’t found our cache, which among other things contained a bottle of fine Australian
red wine and two cans of Alaska’s second backcountry gourmet essential. I don’t know what’s in a can of Spam, and I don’t want to. But next to Hawaiians, Alaskans consume more Spam per capita that any state in the nation. When you’re hungry, wet, and exhausted, nothing enlivens the spirit more than slices of Spam crisped over an open fire, especially when washed down with wine from a tin cup.
The next morning I said goodbye to the Arctic, likely for the last time.
The circle provides an ideal geometric metaphor for this narrative. On the map, a circle separates the Arctic from the rest of the world, defined for once by geophysical certainty—the southernmost point at which the sun doesn’t set on the summer solstice—rather than by some political power’s arbitrary whim. A circle defines the languid course the northern summer sun follows around the horizon, playing peek-a-boo through the peaks as it treats the observer to a dozen dawns per day. And a circle represents the course I’ve taken over decades in the outdoors. After nearly three weeks in the wildest wild our continent has to offer, I’d come back to the point of beginning. And thanks to lessons learned in the Arctic, I’d accepted the terms of my own unexpected return.
Like most of us, I began as a kid with a fiberglass rod, a beat-up shotgun, and a disobedient dog, perfectly content with whatever a day afield might provide. Then I began to push myself against increasing extremes of terrain, weather, and the inherent challenge of hunting big game, never caring about trophies, whatever that word means, but gladly enduring all manner of exertion, deprivation, and risk to experience the excitement of taking big game at close range with sticks and strings. The mere possibility was sufficiently intoxicating to make me abandon common sense. And “intoxicating” may be just the right word. I wanted it the way recovering alcoholics say they once wanted their next drink.
But the Arctic taught me that I don’t need to do that anymore. Not because I’m too old—this trip reassured me on that score—but because it became clear that watching sheep can be as gratifying as stalking them, because a char can be as important as a ram, a blueberry as important as a char. I’m at peace with this now.
This hunt took place with an asterisk I haven’t yet mentioned. While training for the trip, a fall led to a severe rotator cuff injury in my right shoulder. Although I carried my bow, I hadn’t shot it in two months. Even if I’d been able to stalk within 25 yards of a ram, I probably couldn’t have shot. (The shoulder underwent surgery not long after I returned.) I now have the Arctic to thank for inviting me to look ahead to whatever remains in a gentler, more thoughtful fashion, with my fly rod, shotgun, and bird dogs once again, and most importantly, with friends.
Don and Lori Thomas have finally realized that traveling south to central Montana for the winter doesn’t make sense unless you really like snow and cold, and are exchanging their Alaska home for an outpost somewhere warm. Don’s latest book, Peaks, Streams, and Prairies, examines Montana’s wildlife and ecology with, atypically, no discussion of hunting or fishing. Almost.
