By Bob Robb
“Bob, it’s Walter,” my friend Walter Parrott, a world turkey calling champion, said through the landline. “Me and Butch wanna come caribou hunting. Can you help us out?”
Here we go again, I thought, another couple of cheechakos who had never been to the 49th state thinking a hunting trip to Alaska would be nothing more adventurous than calling a private ground gobbler into a cameraman’s lap.
“Let me make a call, I have a bush pilot friend I think we can work something out with.” I called Fat Bill, a nice guy with a de Havilland Beaver on floats who was starting up an air taxi service. We made a deal on the money and Butch, Walter, and I were loading our shit into Fat Bill’s plane shortly thereafter— taking care to leave all the shit on the float dock I told them not to bring. We took off and headed across Cook Inlet to see if we could find part of the vast Mulchatna caribou herd. This was back in the late 1990’s, when the herd was massive with a population estimated to be more than 200,000 animals—well above the current estimate of somewhere around 20,000. No one knows what’s happened, exactly, but wolves, overharvest, and a brucellosis outbreak have severely limited today’s hunting opportunities.
For us, though, it was game on, and we were ready to go and make some meat. The weather was good, the August days long, and we found a big ball of caribou migrating through the area away from the other hunting camps dotting the landscape. When Bill spotted a small lake he could land on a couple of miles from the caribou, he set her down, we made camp, and got ready to go the next morning.
At 0500 our little group headed out to a hill that gave us a panoramic view of the area. About a mile away I picked out the herd, a gigantic mass of bulls and cows heading our direction. We got the wind right, dropped off the horizon, and moved ‘em out. An hour later I had the boys wait while I bellycrawled to the top of a small hillock and peeked over. Jesus, Joseph and Mary, not a quarter mile away were literally hundreds of caribou, aimlessly feeding towards us. I retreated, set the team up on their bellies side by side 20 feet apart, and told them to get ready. For some reason they had decided they wanted to hunt with muzzleloaders, did I forget to mention that?
Before long the first velvet-encased antler tips appeared over the crown of the hill, quickly turning into a mass of heads and bodies. You could hear the caribou’s knees clicking and clacking as they slowly chewed their way to our position. The boys were quivering like shorthairs pointing quail, but to their credit, no one fired a shot until the animals were maybe 75 yards away. “On three,” I hissed, and they nodded. “One, two …” BOOM! Three shots and clouds of smoke. Caribou running in a big circle around us, the boys frantically trying to reload, dropping Pyrodex and Buffalo Bullets and primers to the ground. Then, silence as we watched the herd top a rise two miles away, gone forever.
The damage? One caribou cow dead, no bulls, and no wounded animals. In a nanosecond a million thoughts went through my mind. Cows were legal, but there were some giant bulls in that herd, and they shot one fricking cow??? WTF???? As we regrouped, then butchered the little cow, I remarked, “Those animals are 50 miles from here by now. So we have to go find some stragglers.” In three days of hard hiking and glassing we found a couple of small groups, with Walter and Butch each killing a nice bull. But it was hard.
Not as hard as the trip out. With the meat of three caribou plus all our camping gear, we had a Beaver that was on the edge of being seriously overweight, but with a stiff north wind Fat Bill decided he could take off from the small lake. By the time he realized he couldn’t it was too late, and he ran the airplane 75 yards up into the tundra. We emptied it out and, after three hours of grunting and groaning, had it back to the water, where we found one float punctured. A quick jury-rig repair, and Fat Bill said, “I can take one of you, the meat, and some stuff back to town, then I’ll get the float fixed, and be back, lickety-split.”
Walter and I stayed and pitched camp. No biggie, except that we were short on grub and out of bourbon—and Fat Bill didn’t come back for three days. That fat son of a bitch never said what took so long, which meant that, whatever his excuse, we wouldn’t have liked it. After a safe return to civilization, showers, a steak, and lots of beers courtesy of Fat Bill, all was forgiven.
