Home on the Tundra

Home
on the
Tundra
Seeking true solitude on a hunt for muskox in
the farthest reaches of the Arctic.
Story and photos by Walt Prothero
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S p o r t s A f i e l d . c o m
“S
catter my ashes in the Arctic,” I’ve told them on days
when I felt particularly mortal. I meant it, too. After
I’ve stalked that last ram, tracked the last bull, or slept
the last night at deer camp, dump me again on the Sheenjek Dall
sheep pastures or the polar bear icepack off Cape Storm on Ellesmere Island, both well north of that dotted line on maps they call
the Arctic Circle.
I’d written muskox outfitters requesting a hunt, “. . . without
any technology in a place where no one has hunted before.”
“Why?” a pal asked.
George Mallory, attempting to explain why he climbed Everest, put it as well as anyone: “Because it is there.” Meaning that if
you have to ask, you can’t understand the answer.
Three years earlier I’d sold my cabin on the Yukon River,
and I missed the Far North, the wildest place on the planet,
bar none. I’d trekked the world’s wilds on four continents,
and always found people or recent sign of them. In parts of
the Arctic, you could get away from all that. I dreamt of the
tundra barrens with hundred-year-old willow trees six inches
tall and wolves wailing in the gloaming, but mostly I missed
J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y
2 0 1 0
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the silence you felt against your face and the solitude that slid
into your soul. Heck, I even read Robert Service poetry aloud
on nights I couldn’t sleep.
“We’ll fly you to a lake no one has hunted within memory,”
outfitter Boyd Warner said. “Just a blank spot on the map.” I
didn’t even ask the price.
In Yellowknife, we hopped a Twin Otter float plane and
winged northeast over the gnomish last trees on the continent and
over more lakes than Wisconsin times ten, depositing a diamond
prospector on a lake just big enough for the Otter, then stopping
on a larger lake to let off a German hunter so jet-lagged he staggered into the plywood “camp” without interest in the muskox
bull grazing three hundred yards off.
Hundreds of miles later we circled the dozen-soul Inuit village at Bathurst Inlet (Kingoak in modern orthography) on the
Arctic Ocean. I was so stoned on the sea breeze and wind-drying
fish, I didn’t help offload the fuel drums and ton of groceries. We
twisted a canoe into the Otter cabin like a Chinese puzzle, and
when our guide, Sam Kapolak, and his nephew, Tony, wedged
themselves aboard, we winged east into a place so wild wolves
two hundred feet below stared in astonishment. Creamy caribou
stopped mid-migration and ogled.
What seemed another eon east, we banked over a miles-long
lake maybe a mile across, banked again, and flew low above one
end and a stupefied white wolf. Then the plane floats battered
whitecaps into froth on what the pilots christened Asterisk-Shore
Lake, because of the crappy, bouldered shoreline. We grunted the
gear ashore through thigh-deep liquid ice at the only semblance
of a beach while the pilots revved into a maelstrom shrieking out
of the High Arctic, to keep the plane off the rocky shore. While
we battled the flailing tents, the Otter hammered into the howling and vaporized as if it had never been there, as if we’d been
plunked into the Pleistocene through some time warp. THIS is
why! I told myself. It isn’t only the horns.
We finally cinch down the wall tents and my smaller aerodynamic expedition tent, because I don’t trust the wall tents in the
gale without any tree cover. We hunker in and fry supper on the
Colemans. Of course, no firewood exists on the tundra prairies.
The big tents hold.
The gale eases by morning, and Sam’s on the bluff glassing muskox miles south in a wet-snow blizzard. Typical of Arctic Septembers, the sun burnishes the wine and gold tundra
across the lake.
“Let’s go,” Sam hollers into the cook tent. I jam .375
ammo in my pockets. Cheri wrestles her parka and Tony yanks
on knee-high rubber boots, no laces. I opt for the yellow commercial fishing raincoat—it’s for sure waterproof, my camo
parka is iffy, most mammals are color-blind, and it matches
the dwarf willow leaves anyway.
Caribou graze tundra flats midway between the muskox and
us. According to the record book and maps, they’re central Can-
Lunch break on the Precambrian Shield, after the trophy muskox is down.
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S p o r t s A f i e l d . c o m
ada barren ground caribou. We squat and
wait for them to plod around the end of the
lake so we don’t spook them into the oxen.
Slushy snow plasters Sam’s binocular. We
close to half a mile on the open barrens,
and the muskox pay no attention.
Like every third guy at the time
hunting anything more exotic than a
woodchuck, we’re probing our luck with
a new video camera. Cheri hangs back
to film us slogging through the sun-broken scud and polychrome tundra, while
caribou and muskox graze in the backgrounds like a National Geographic wall
poster. A mastodon lumbering out of the
mists wouldn’t surprise anyone.
When we close, two old bulls pose on
an esker, and beyond them another good
bull and fourteen cows bed in low bogs.
The bulls ignore us and profile within easy
rifle range. Sam studies them with the
spotting scope. He sneaks left to get another angle, then we duck-walk across the
flat while the bulls bed down. He studies
them more, then we hands-and-knee so
near I could touch one with a stick—honest! Strands of rusty hair drift on the wind
right into our faces. Cheri videotapes and
Sam computes Boone and Crockett points
I don’t much care about.
We crawl nearly as close to the
second bull, but Sam decides it’s not
as good. We lizard along the bluff and
study the herd in the bogs below. First
one cow stands, then another. The
younger herd bull is not the trophy the
old one is, but they all look plenty good
to me. Heck, even the horned cows look
fair. We duck-walk the flat again to
check them over once more. I’d tell Sam
I don’t care about those B&C points, as
long as the bull has that “look,” but I’m
afraid the animals will hear me. Finally, Sam gestures. Cheri’s videocamera
hums, I stand to get a better angle, settle the cross hairs behind shoulder, and
touch off. The bull bucks and lunges
off the bluff, and the herd below hydroplanes through the bog. When we peek
over the edge, my bull is gasping his last
and the second bull is goring hell out of
him, the muskox version of kicking ’em
while they’re down.
Normally I’m against bagging the
trophy on the first day. I like to drag
out my hunts. But it’s OK. In this day,
no real person yet owns a cell phone
so we can’t call in a pickup flight if we
wanted, we have no radio, and the Otter won’t return for ten days, no matter
what. We’re stranded, and happy day!
Besides, I can hunt wolf, wolverine, and
caribou if I get desperate. I’m not considering it, though, because I’m high
on my muskox. Though he hasn’t been
here, Sam’s sure char and pike prowl
the lake, and I’d brought fly and spinning outfits, just in case.
The bull’s bosses fuse together solid
and blood oozes from them and a horn
tip is chipped; apparently he’d lost a fight
with the younger herd bull. We photograph, skin, and butcher, then grunt meat
on packboards miles across tundra to
camp. Cheri hauls the .375 and cameras.
Later, Sam and Tony canoe back within
a mile for the rest of the meat while I cast
from shore and hook 5-pound pike. No
contrails, bushplanes, motor boats, and
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best of all, no ATVs or electronica. I understand again, This is why.
The lake is silky the next sunup
and the sky the hue of azurite. It’s sinking in—more than a week with nothing
more pressing than wandering into solitude and hearing silence. Or fishing for
pike to turn them loose, trekking across
the first solid rock on the planet—sixbillion-year-old Precambrian Shield—or
hunting caribou or wolverine without
urgency, the best way to hunt anything.
As we hike one shirt-sleeve afternoon, two big stocky men loom on the
horizon maybe a mile off. I’m as deflated
as it’s possible to get at the sight of them;
I thought we had the place to ourselves,
but Sam grins as if they’re old pals. Later, we climb the rise and, to Sam’s great
amusement, find they’re 30-inch stone
men called Inukshuk. Prehistoric Inuit
built them to haze caribou toward where
they waited in ambush or as landmarks.
Sam explains each stone represents a
man and how well they fit together with
other men, or stones. On the treeless
tundra, no way exists to get proper perspective. Six feet or thirty inches looks
the same from any distance.
Another day we wander across
mouldering bones overgrown with lichens. A dozen caribou had died there,
we surmise stranded in some Arctic blizzard beyond memory. As we eat lunch,
I kick loose a rusted tobacco tin containing lead musket balls, and another
one, and a broken blade. We change our
guess to a nineteenth-century foraging
party down from some ship moored on
the Arctic Ocean twenty or thirty miles
north; possibly even the Franklin Expedition, which explored much of the local
geography, had ambushed the caribou.
Perhaps they survived this expedition,
perhaps not. We sense how brief our
time, and I at least sense that the tundra
prairies would be a good place to rest.
We use hunting as the goal to justify
those things we do that make no sense
to most of us, like just looking and un-
Tony and Sam packing out the Arctic Islands caribou.
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derstanding. We don’t really hunt for
a trophy that eventually fades into the
wall, we hunt for the hell of it.
In coming days, we spot caribou
bands, a few muskox. We glass our distant gut pile for a wolverine, but don’t
find one. I decline to shoot a wolf.
On the Arctic Barrens, we relish
those rare moments when the wind
drops, at least in part because I can loft
a dry fly with the weight of a feather.
The spinning rig with its “five-o’-diamond” wobbler is more effective for
three-to-seven-pound pike. Caribou
bulls browse the esker. I double-take
one bull as I crank the spinning reel.
That’s King Kong! I don’t make it to the
gun in the tent before they swim across
the lake and mist away, but the hunt’s
on again. I shoulder the rifle and climb
the esker to glass. Distant caribou filter
into the country.
“I see your bull,” Sam hollers down
from the bluff after breakfast next dawn.
“It’s got your name on it!” I stuff .375
ammo into pockets, aware the Otter
comes in another day. Cheri wrestles her
parka and Tony grunts into his “breakup” boots. Sam’s lashing an ax and saw
on a packboard. I like his optimism.
Two caribou bands plod before a
northwester toward the south end of the
lake two miles out, or so I think because
of the perspective problem. We intercept
them with some jogging across the killer
muskeg and tundra. The first band is just
over the rise and one good bull brings up
the rear. I shove a round into the .375,
catch my wind, belly over, snuggle onto
the stock as the caribou launch into their
calliope canter, and . . . I’ve forgotten to
flip open the lens caps!
The caribou double-time now, I
fumble the lens caps, do it again, and by
now they’re running so fast through the
shallow bog, their churning hooves kick
up geysers six feet high behind them as if
they’re getting strafed just a little too far
back. I get off one of those Hail-Mary
shots you should never take and the slug
slams the bull. The bull doesn’t stop so I
chase it through the muskeg. Everyone
else has better sense, and they let me go.
A mile later, gasping and slogging
and glad I run throughout the year, I top
a rise and sprawl to catch my breath. My
bull stands at the edge of the lake. When
it spots me, it plunges in and swims. I
get the cross hairs at the base of the bull’s
tail as it swims straight away knowing
the big .375 slug will punch into vitals
if I hit it right, and make a better job of
it this time.
Now what? The bull floats two
hundred yards out. As if in answer, the
wind veers so the bull won’t blow past
the point and down the lake, and surfs
it toward shore. I’m sweat-drenched.
Sam, Cheri, and Tony top the esker before the caribou makes landfall, and we
celebrate with cold muskox chops and
smoked char.
“What the hell?” I wonder aloud
when Sam drags the pint-sized bull onto
the boulders. It’s hip-pocket-tall at the
withers. I’ve shot a score of caribou over
the decades, from the big mountain caribou to the Alaskan barren grounders, all
of them double in size to this bull.
“Gotta be one of them little Arctic
Island caribou that comes across the
icepack in winter,” Sam says. The maps
and books say Central Canada barrenground caribou—those were the kind
Sam usually hunted—so we’d assumed
that’s what we’d shot. Out here on the
barrens, no trees grew to give them perspective, so they looked like any other
caribou. No matter, I’d never shot an
Arctic Islands caribou before.
The Otter thunders in the next day,
dumps off a 55-gallon drum of fuel and
an outboard motor, and we weigh the canoe down with rocks for the next hunters. There goes the neighborhood. No
one is happy about leaving except teenage
Tony, who misses the action in downtown
Bathurst Inlet.
Epilogue: Years later we run into Boyd
Warner selling hunts at the Safari Club
International Convention in Reno. Cheri
and I explore the possibility of returning
to Asterisk-Shore Lake.
“You couldn’t do it today,” Warner
says. “Fuel and plane time is too expensive. The canoe and gear is still there. You
were the first and last hunters up there.”
But I think: I could make one final
trip.
For information on muskox and
caribou hunts in Arctic, contact Boyd
Warner at Adventures Northwest:
hunt@adventurenw.com
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