In early September, Dash and I bought a rifle, a pile of hunting books, a backpack, and s'mores materials - we were going on our first hunt for Dall Sheep. On the advice of a friend, we decided to try our luck along the Nabesna Road, where the mountains are relatively accessible by road and where the subsistence regulations allowed us to harvest any male sheep. In most game management units, and for most Alaskan and outside hunters, the rules allow only full-curl rams to be shot. We were not interested in a trophy animal because we were most interested in getting sheep meat.
The fall colors were at their peak, a particolored riot of the warm side of the rainbow. On the first day of our hunt, the skies were clear and the air was warm.
Within the first mile of our hike, we spied a group of sheep in the distance! They appeared to be all females, but there could be a male associated with the group that we couldn't see because it was hidden by the involutions of the mountainside. We hiked forward with excitement and purpose.
We approached the group ridge by ridge, until by 2 pm we were less than 200 yards from the group. They were feeding, and the group was composed of around four adult females, four lambs, and three half-curl rams. Now we were really excited because we were allowed to harvest the males. I waited below the ridge, watching through binoculars, while Dash crept above trying to get a closer shot.
Of course, the sheep with their sharp senses, and practically x-ray vision, noticed our presence and spooked "out of the country". We tried to pursue them on foot by climbing the mountain ridge to a point level with a saddle and then traversing across the mountainside, but the sheep were miles away by the time we stopped. And still running. We decided that continuing to pursue them was not worth the risk of continuing across the scree slope we were on, which also had snow fields that were dangerously steep. We instead watched the sheep trot off into the distance, filled with regrets that we had moved too boldly, too quickly. This might be the best opportunity we would have on our trip, and we blew it. We could have shot our sheep and gone home on our first day, elated with an easy victory. Now we faced a potentially long, uncomfortable, difficult trip - with no guarantee of a successful hunt.
We hiked back from the mountains down to a public use cabin we were staying at for the night. I was frustrated that we were not camping up high in the alpine, because I wanted to stay and keep looking for animals first thing in the morning. We spent a lot of effort and time hiking from the flats to get into sheep country. However, when I was sitting by a crackling campfire, toasting marshmallows, I appreciated having a place to stay dry and warm.
The next morning was rainy, and the mountains were completely obscured in cloud. We stayed at the cabin to wait out the weather. When you have poor visibility in the mountains, sheep hunting is virtually impossible - so you have to wait. Luckily, we could wait in relative comfort. We read our hunting books. We picked cranberries.
That afternoon, the clouds began to break. We didn't have much time left in the day to hunt, but we decided to make the most of our window of opportunity so we hiked up into the mountains again. After cresting to a low saddle dividing two large drainages, we saw a full-curl ram grazing alone on the opposite mountainside. Unexpectedly, we had another chance! And we were close to this animal, though we needed to do some circumnavigation of the mountain to avoid being seen.
In the evening shadows, we tried to sneak down to the creek below the sheep by hugging the side of a shallow gully. The difficulty of stalking sheep in this country was that there were not a lot of features to hide behind. The mountainsides were mostly smooth scree or tundra, with the curve of the mountainsides providing the best cover. We had picked the wrong gully to try and sneak down, because soon we ran out of topography to hide behind and were trapped in open view of the ram. He saw us and ran.
We had been given a second chance, but we messed up again. Rain clouds began to close in on us again, and with the ram spooked out of sight we had nothing to do but return to our cabin, where we could at least dry our clothes off while preparing for the next day.
Our stay at the cabin was finished, and now it was time for us to move into a tent. We pitched our tent in a small level place we had found on our hike the day before. It was a great location - close to the creek for water and close to the low pass with views down the drainages to the north and south. We were also hidden by the steep sides of the valley we were in, so sheep would be unlikely to see us. After setting up camp, we continued exploring, always looking for sheep. We spied a group of three off in the distance, but by then it was too late in the day and they were too far away to pursue. We sat on the hillside and watched the sheep through binoculars, devising our strategy of pursuit for the next day.
But the next morning, all our plans changed when Dash saw a ram crest the low saddle while we were eating breakfast. Hurriedly, we cleaned up camp, packed our bags, and ran up to the pass.
We used the early morning contrast in shadows to hide us as we climbed down from the saddle to the creek.
We were able to climb up the same mountainside as the ram without being seen, but we couldn't get close enough to take a shot because there were no gullies or rocks to hide behind. Suddenly, the ram turned around and started heading back up the valley, away from us. Dash wasn't sure if the sheep had left because it had seen him, but the sheep eventually stopped to rest on a hillside that protruded out above the bowl at the top of the mountain valley, giving him an excellent view of everything in that valley. The ram then bedded down to rest for the afternoon, which made further pursuit a bad idea - a sheep at rest can spend 100% of their time looking for predators, so the best time to stalk them is while they are feeding in the morning and afternoon. While sheep are feeding they also move frequently, which makes it possible to anticipate their direction of movement and to subsequently intercept the sheep. We decided to wait out our sheep by bedding down ourselves, by finding a perch and rolling up in the white tarp we brought with us. It was a beautiful sunny day and felt warm on the windless side of the mountain.
After a few hours rest, we discussed what our best plan of action should be in order to get close enough to the sheep for a safe shot. Because the ram had such a commanding view of the valley we were in, our only option seemed to be climbing the back side of the mountain, and once we reached the top we would be above the sheep and, hopefully, up-valley of him if he decided to return to the same spot he was grazing earlier that day. Climbing the north side of the mountain was harrowing. One of us would traverse a little ways, then tell the other if it was safe to cross and continue. We scrambled across so many steep slopes with dangerous exposure, loose scree, and slick snow, that I found myself just as afraid of needing to go back and retrace our steps as I was of continuing onwards. The worst part was not knowing if the sheep would still be there when we reached the top. In the time it took us to traverse around the opposite flank of the mountain the sheep could easily walk out of sight, making our effort worthless and our risk unnecessary.
Finally, we reached the top, with relief - that we were safe, and that the sheep was still bedded down where we had last seen him hours earlier. After another hour of waiting, the ram got up and started to move again, back down the valley towards the greener slopes below. We began to move too, descending down the snow fields to avoid creating noise and movement from knocking rocks loose.
To our surprise, we saw a second ram appear on the far side of the valley and run to join the ram we had been stalking! We now had one ram for each of us. I had not expected to have the chance to shoot two animals. I thought that the extreme effort of successfully stalking just one ram would be plenty for our trip. Now, the prospect of having one animal for each of us presented new difficulties - we would need to be able to butcher two animals and each carry out a whole sheep, which with the hide could equal up to 100 pounds of meat each.
Dash took the first shot, aiming downhill about 120 yards. He missed a couple times before cleanly killing the first sheep. The animals hardly reacted to the explosive sound of the rifle shot, only stopping their feeding to look around after the second miss.
When his companion died, the other sheep reacted by immediately sitting down. I took the rifle next for my shot, and waited for the second sheep to stand up so I could get a clean shot. Minutes passed by with no movement, and I decided to see if I could take advantage of his position by sneaking closer. Still the sheep did not move, and eventually I stood up, in plain sight, and began walking straight towards the animal. Now I was trying to prompt it to stand. I walked to within 50 yards before the sheep finally stood up, and I gave a clean shot.
The sheep were shot at around 7pm. Butchering both animals went late into the night, and it was fully dark by the time we were finished, at . With our headlamps only illuminating the ground directly before our feet, we began the tortuously slow climb back down to our camp. The slope seemed incredibly steep now that I had the additional weight of a sheep on my back. One slip with pack this heavy, and you could seriously injure yourself. We descended to the creek and followed that for a little while, and I was glad to be wearing knee high boots that allowed me to easily ford the stream without getting my feet wet. No way could I have hopped from rock to rock if I didn't have waterproof footwear.
In the darkness I could make out the outlines of the mountains, and thinking that we saw the pass that our tent was below we left the creek and began climbing up. After half an hour of climbing hand over foot, I finally reached the top - only to be faced with a wall of snowy mountains that I didn't recognize. In the darkness we got turned around, and climbed up the wrong hill! We did have a GPS to help us navigate back to camp, but I had been so certain of my direction that I didn't think we needed it out. As we turned around and began heading in the right direction, the aurora began to brighten in the sky.
Once we reached camp it was after midnight, and we were both exhausted after the stresses of the day. There were no trees for hanging the meat to keep it cool and protected from bears, so we decided to spread our game bags out in a rocky depression, cover them with the tarp, and move more rocks to pin down the tarp edges. We had seen bear tracks and bear sign up in the alpine, but I was not too concerned about predators being attracted to the meat because we were going to wake up in just a few hours. At dawn we would start packing the meat the rest of the way back to the car, in two trips: the first trip hauling just the meat, and the second trip packing out our tent and gear.
Late night dinner was served under an increasingly active aurora. Sometimes the bands were directly overhead, and when you tilted your face to the sky it was like looking up an infinite curtain. Even though I was completely exhausted, I couldn't tear myself away from watching the swirling lights.
Our hike back was uneventful. We had hiked this same route so many times during the past week that we knew the game trails to follow, and where we were better off in the creek bottom or on the gently sloping, shrubby hillside. We were completely out of food except for a handful of instant potatoes, which was becoming increasingly less appetizing because instant potatoes had comprised most of our meals the day before, when we were running low on food. Instead of eating more pasty potatoes for breakfast, I decided to wait until I returned to the car, where I could eat all the s'mores I wanted. Halfway back to the car with our load of sheep meat, we encountered an old man standing alone in the woods by a ramshackle cabin that we had thought was abandoned. After a few moments of silence, he warmly invited us inside for hot soup and stories. He had built this cabin on his homestead 50 years ago with only an axe. The wood stove was packed in two miles from the road, and he spent his time trying to live off the land. He told us that when the Homestead Act was revoked and he lost his claim to the land and his cabin, he was upset for a long time. Now when he comes back to visit, he's not angry anymore. The landscape and his view of the mountains looks exactly like it did, 50 years ago, and that's invaluable.
No comments:
Post a Comment