Blessed by perfect timing on a rookie big-game hunt

EASTERN BROOKS RANGE — Caribou filled surrounding valleys and hillsides, but every view through my binoculars confirmed only groups of cows and calves feeding on lichen. I had seen a bull the night before. It was our first night in the mountains, and the regulations did not allow us to hunt until morning.

I couldn't sleep, whether it was due to the light outside or the click of heels as caribou passed the tent. My anxiety was worse than the night before Christmas, but these reindeer weren't an imaginary flying team — they were game on the hoof.

I knew it was amateurish of me to believe the bull I had seen the night before would be in the same place come morning, but I thought it anyway. One thing I had learned about glassing was not to look for something in particular but to look for something different. It didn't matter what I'd learned when I glassed the valley, I looked for the bull I had seen before.

The herd was stretched out as it made its way between two hills and into the mountains. "All cows and calves," Steve said. "The bulls might be in back."

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We continued along, stopping to glass and then moving. It was cold, but it looked to be another bright day. I thought about how we might hike into the higher country and spend the day glassing the slopes. After all, we had planned to hunt the area for a week.

"Right there," Steve whispered. I spun around and sat at the same time.

"Is it him?" I said. "There's two of them," he replied.

Getting closer

Through the binoculars, two bulls appeared 600 yards away — almost identical twins except I recognized the slightly wider spread of "my" bull. The other bull was a bit taller in the antlers.

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We dropped into a depression as the bulls wandered our way, and I could see their antlers again at 150 yards.

The wind was quartering away from us as I chambered a round in my .300 Weatherby. I passed over the narrower bull in my scope and steadied myself. "They see us now," Steve said. Both bulls lifted their heads. They stared at us with their heads turned. "They're coming this way," Steve said. "Wait for him to turn."

I watched as the weight in their bodies shifted. In my mind and memory, I could see hair and velvet antler. I pressed the trigger and heard the bullet hit without hearing the report of the rifle.

The silence was deafening, and my senses left me so completely I wondered if I could do anything except fall myself.

I shouldered my rifle. I wanted to see the bull up close, but for now there was only heart-pounding silence. My hands shook as I held them in front of me for balance. When we reached the bull, I dropped to a knee, somehow lost a glove, and felt the velvet of his antlers.

"He's beautiful," I said.

We packed meat to the edge of the landing point just as our pilot flew over in his Super Cub after just dropping off guides. So he landed to pick us up, just hours after I'd shot my first caribou on the first day of hunting.

The timing was too perfect, but that's what happened. As I flew away with the meat in the hold and the antlers on the wing, I wondered how it was possible not to have suffered the planned week of misery I had dreaded and yet wanted for its uncomplicated magnificence in a place that would haunt me until I saw it again. As the terrain disappeared beneath the plane, my ordinary senses rushed back.

There's no predicting the weather or caribou, Steve told me as we drove home. I was never much of a realist. My thoughts fastened on images or philosophies. When thinking of hunting I thought mostly of small-game hunting and envisioned chocolate Labradors with green-headed mallards hanging from their jaws, skies filled with every kind of wild fowl or English setters holding a point in a field of grass choked with game birds.

No victory, no remorse

When I thought about hunting a big-game animal, I wondered if I was capable. I'd hunted big game without taking a shot, cleaned big game, and eaten wild game. But, there was no familiar image in my mind for what I would experience in the remote backcountry — only my philosophy that humans cannot live harmlessly and depend on other creatures to survive. It was one thing to believe that I could kill an animal in a skillful and reverent manner, and quite another to do it. Until I saw the bull from the night before, my mind was full of doubt.

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When we got home, we prepared two steaks from the bull for dinner. It was the most I have ever tasted a meal. There was no feeling of victory or remorse but rather an overwhelming sense of life's beauty and its reality. If there was an image or philosophy in my mind, it was the image of a pair of antlers high up on the hill, and a solemn gratefulness for life.

Christine Cunningham of Soldotna is a lifetime Alaskan and avid hunter. On alternate weeks she'll write about Alaska hunting. Contact Christine at cunningham@yogaforduckhunters.com