Authors: Will Hobbs
“Heading which way?”
“East, toward the Babbage River.”
“Where were most of the calves born this year?”
“Typical year. Two-thirds were born on the Alaska side of the coastal plain, one-third on the coastal plain in Ivvavik National Park.”
“About those dots that have been crossing the riverâhow many?”
“Twenty-seven dots, with more on the way. After they swam the river, they fanned out to the north and south, but now it looks like there might be a convergence in the foothills of the British Mountains, north and east of you. You might be in a position to photograph the biggest post-calving aggregation since 2001.”
“How far should we take the raft downriver before we start walking?”
“Ten miles, no more.”
“Then how far east?”
“Twenty-five miles, maybeâdepends on what they do. You're in for some hoofing for sure. Stay in touch. I'll be tracking them from home as well as the office. Does your GPS have the maps of the Yukon Territory's north slope?”
“Yes, and photo view as well.”
“Excellent. I'll send you there like a guided missile.”
They arranged for Ryan to call from ten miles down the river. Soon as my brother switched off, he got out his river guide and turned to the map with the stretch of the canyon we were in. He showed me where we were, then pointed out a campsite down the river at Canyon Creek. “We could get there today,” I said, “if we really got with it. I'll sleep on it there, okay?”
“Canyon Creek it is. Did you want to call home, let them know you're okay?”
“It's expensive, isn't it?”
“Yes, but don't even think about that.”
“They're not expecting me to call ⦠no, I don't want to. I might find out something I don't want to know.”
With that we turned to doing the dishes and breaking down camp. We carried the raft to the river, pumped it up, and strapped on the frame. It took another hour to load and rig the gear. Around three in the afternoon, after nine days without the raft, we launched back onto the river.
Surprise Rapid was waiting just around the bend. Our rain gear saved us a drenching from the ice water that cascaded inside the raft. All I had to do was hang on. Without a lick of trouble, Ryan took us through Surprise and all the way through Big Bend Roller Coaster, which was two miles long. Turns out he knew how to row a white-water raft after all. We pulled into the mouth of Canyon Creek, set up camp, and made supper.
Crawling into my sleeping bag that night, I thought about that decision I had to make, but not for long. I was dead asleep in a minute or two.
I woke a little after six in the morning to the smell of coffee. I crawled out of the tent and Ryan poured me a cup. “I'm in,” I said. “I wanna see those caribou, and I want you to get your pictures.”
“Good deal,” he said. “Thank you.”
After breakfast we climbed to the rim of the canyon to use the sat phone. Ryan called his friend in Whitehorse. More and more dots were coming together on Ken Logan's monitorâmore than thirty thousand caribou!
Under heavy backpacks that morning of Day 11, we paused on the shoulder of the ridge above Canyon Creek to take in a last glimpse of the gear we were leaving behind. Ryan had been extra cautious, deflating the boat and rolling it up for fear of high winds or a bear having a bad day. After that we carried the boat, frame, and everything else up the slope to a spot out of reach of Noah's flood.
Ryan left a note in an empty jar that said who we were. He dated it June 25. Ryan brought out his second camera, gave me a few instructions, and hung it around my neck. I told him I wasn't very big on taking pictures.
We turned away from the Firth River and dropped into a wide green valley without a single tree. Ryan stopped now and again to take pictures of the expanse of rolling tundra. He was keeping his GPS handy in his shirt pocket, and scrolled the map every so often to update our exact position. After a couple of hours we stopped to rest and eat. Ryan called Ken to see if we were still headed in the right direction. Here's the first thing the biologist said: “Bet you guys have the hoods of your bug shirts zipped up.”
“That we do,” Ryan said. “But how'd you know?”
“Because those dots on my computer monitor have scattered. Looks like the caribou stampeded out of the foothills to get away from the bugs. Climbed onto the high ridges where the wind is blowing.”
“I hope this doesn't mean the weather is going to put an end to the post-calving aggregation.”
“There's hope in the forecast. There's a storm brewing in the northern Pacific, and some of the models show it heading across Alaska and onto the north slope of the Yukon Territory. If it even brushes the north slope, you'll get plenty enough wind to keep the bugs grounded. The caribou will come down off the ridges to feed and have their big reunion.”
Ryan gave his friend our coordinates, and mentioned that we'd been seeing a lot of fresh caribou scat. He wondered if there were any dots close to our present location.
“You bet. Six, pretty well clumped. Got your pencil ready?”
Ryan jotted down the coordinates we needed to be able to steer toward those six dots. We marched on. My pack wasn't nearly as heavy as my brother's, but it felt as heavy as the load of caribou meat I had carried on my back six weeks before, on the day the grolar bear surprised me on the bank of the Mackenzie. Ryan and I were carrying food for nine days, a backpacking stove and plenty of fuel, his heavy camera gear, our tent, sleeping bags and ground pads, and enough clothes to weather a snowstorm.
Steering east according to Ken Logan's directions, we followed a newly trampled caribou trail through a low pass. We dropped into a basin where we came across a caribou highway two feet wide cut into the dark earth. It was flanked by minor trails on both sides. Caribou like to follow one behind the other, moving in parallel lines. A big herd has dozens of leaders and cuts dozens of trails. We were walking in the wake of a very large herd that had passed this way only hours before. The tundra was littered with fresh droppings, and the air was sharp from dark spots of urine that hadn't yet evaporated.
We followed the caribou highway back and forth across a creek, climbing all the while. I almost bumped into my brother when he stopped dead in his tracks. I stepped to the side to see what he was looking at: two stragglers, a cow with her calf.
The cow was no more than a hundred feet away, facing our direction, but didn't seem to see us. She was sneezing and shaking her head. Her legs were splayed; she barely had the strength to stand. Her head was down, and thick strands of dark snot were hanging from her snout. Her calf, alert and healthy, was grazing about twenty feet away.
The mother caribou was engulfed in a swarm of botflies. I've always hated bots with a passion. They're about the size of houseflies, but they're more like wasps. They lay their eggs in the nostrils of the caribou, and the larvae grow by the hundreds and thousands in the animal's sinus cavities and lungs. The bot swarm we were looking at wasn't the first to get at this caribou. She was so far gone, she was already blind.
Ryan was taking pictures as the mother caribou went down. She tried to rise but didn't have the strength. As her calf came to her, Ryan took more pictures. We didn't stay to see the end of the story. Ravens would come down to feed as soon as the mother was dead, possibly before. Scavengers watching the ravens would soon followâa wolf or a bear, maybe a wolverine. By the next day there would be nothing left of cow and calf but bones and hide.
We kept to the caribou trails we'd been following, up the creek and all the way up a tongue of tundra that ended at the foot of a rocky slope. When we looked up we saw hundreds of caribou lining the ridges. Ryan got out his telephoto lens and took some pictures of them silhouetted against the blue sky.
We made another bunch of miles before we stopped for the night on the far shore of a river shallow enough to wade. Ryan called Whitehorse. Ken said that the concentration of dots we'd thought we were gaining on had picked up the pace and moved twenty to thirty miles that day, east through the foothills. We would have to cover a lot of ground the next day to stay within striking distance.
In the middle of the night I was wakened by the clicking of caribou tendons. I had never heard the clicks this close. It was just after three in the morning, bright as day of course. The wind was fluttering the tent. Through the yellow fabric I saw that we were surrounded by caribou. A bull with a trophy rack was grazing on Ryan's side of the tent. I reached for the camera he'd given me and turned it on. I switched it to automatic like he had shown me and snapped the silhouette of the long-snouted head and wide, branching antlers.
The sound of the shutter didn't disturb the caribou but woke Ryan up like I was hoping. He looked at me groggily. “Caribou,” I whispered, “all around us.” Ryan wormed his way out of his sleeping bag. Quietly as possible, he opened the netting door and crawled outside with his camera. The caribou didn't spook. When my brother came back into the tent half an hour later, he said he'd taken pictures of the herd passing through camp, with our tent like a boulder in the middle of a river.
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.”
T
he 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 preyâan 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 wolfânot 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 expectedâthirty-nine dots, a third of the Porcupine herd's estimated strength.