By Chad David Ferguson
“I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy — I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it —
Came out with a fortune last fall, —
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all. . . .
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting . . .”
― Robert W. Service, “The Spell of the Yukon,” 1907
Twenty-nine miles in on the Chicken Ridge trail, I see my first caribou of the season. It’s August 23; opening day was the 10th. Before now, I’d been to Eagle Summit south of the Crazy Mountains, and I camped out a few days as far east as I could get on the trail off Chena Hot Springs Road at mile 55. Now Chicken. When the Fortymile herd moves, you move. Six hundred miles of driving, and time in the glass. It’s good to see caribou.
. . . . .
Chicken, Alaska. When the USPS was ready to set up a bona fide post office there circa 1902, requiring a town name, locals suggested the name Ptarmigan, grouse of the tundra, to honor the plentiful bird that kept their first settlers—gold miners—from starving to death. But nobody could spell Ptarmigan, so to avoid the infamy of ignorance they chose a more reliable, and perhaps more ignominious, name for posterity. No good deed goes unpunished.
What’s less well known is an 1898 reference to Chicken Creek, named because the gold “pickers”—pieces of gold too small to be nuggets but big enough to be picked up with your fingers—were the size of corn kernels in chicken feed. That first placer gold was found in Chicken Creek in 1891, five years before Klondike.
The big years in Chicken were 1958-1967, when a 500-ton wonder known as the F.E. Company Dredge No. 4 or the Pedro Dredge was disassembled and hauled over from Fairbanks and up the new Taylor Highway. The dredge had originally shipped from Oakland on the S.S. Point San Pablo on April 1, 1938, and it dredged Pedro Creek for the Fairbanks Exploration Company for 20 years. This bucket line dredge ran five months a year for eight years in Chicken and extracted 55,000 ounces, the tailings high enough to register on subsequent topo maps.
. . . . .
I decide to hunt back towards camp, a few miles south-southeast along the ridge. The bands of caribou that were moving this morning have slipped into the spruce or funneled into another valley, but the herd is still here. If you wrinkle up a piece of printer paper into a tight ball, then spread it out flat, then wrinkle it up and spread it out again, that’s what this area looks like on a topographic map—an unimaginable number of spurs, passes, and plateaus, and the caribou move among them like smoke.
It’s getting late when I spot a small group of caribou that have walked back out of the spruce. Getting closer I can see that there are two nice bulls, not big but nice. I want one. The group is feeding on a multicolored autumn saddle, sparse willows going yellow and dwarf birch sienna-red, the crowberry leaves still green as grass. I start the stalk a mile out, the pine siskins flitting out of the scrub in front me, aureate and brown. The tundra smells like Labrador tea, which Thoreau described as “between turpentine and strawberries,” earthy, floral, piney. It’s the signature scent of the tundra, and how caribou taste.
At 400 yards, I can see that one bull has bedded down; the other is feeding behind him. I’ve always wanted to stalk and shoot a big game animal that was bedded down, plus this bull had some palmation in his antlers, which I like. He was facing me almost directly, again lying down, with his head up and turned to his left. I thought if I could get a shot, I’d put the crosshairs low in the throat, expecting the bullet to take a straight path through the boiler room.
Three hundred yards, second rock outcropping for cover. All is well. The bull I want is still bedded, chewing his cud; the other caribou are still feeding. About 200 yards, as close as I can get, covering the last 75 yards of it on the ground, holding my rifle in my right hand and using my left hand and legs like a three-legged dog. I say “about” because my rangefinder won’t read through the tiny sight window of brush and tree branches, but I have a clear shot; the terrain won’t let me prone and use my pack, so I try to steady my rifle against a solid spruce. I wait for my breathing to slow. The rifle pulses with my heart, the crosshairs drifting from and returning to target with every beat: on caribou, off caribou, on caribou, off caribou, on caribou—a polished sear trips, and in a lock time three thousandths of a second, the Model 70 booms.
When I find the bull in the scope after the shot, his head is on the ground, facing me straight on now. I watch; he does not stand. I must have held well, but I’m no Fort Benning grad, either, and there’s some fortune in a shot like that. I’ve chambered another round and watch for a full minute to be sure, then start towards him. Only a hunter can appreciate this thrill, like with your first whitetail, still and forever pure, pure in a world that isn’t and often leaves us wanting. The other bull trots down toward the trees and the cows for the top of the saddle, where a few linger, looking back from the skyline.
The shot entered the right side of his neck, passed low through the spine, and exited impressively out the other side, which explains how quickly he was stilled. Remington Core-Lokt—still got it. I gut him out in the very last light of the day and prop his ribcage open with a cut spruce bough to let the meat cool overnight. Me, the bull, and all the rolling tundra around us are glowing in golden light—the gold is coming out of the sky.
. . . . .
I wake to the sound of light rain on the tent. Clouds and ground-level mist have melded, and visibility fluctuates from a quarter mile to one mile and back again, scattered dark spruce trees standing against the grayness like random cairns in a dream. It’s a four-hour round trip, two-trip run to get the head, meat, and gear back to the truck. At least there won’t be any dust.
About 10 miles toward the trailhead, I see a line of five trucks, three pulling campers, crawling over the rocks. What the fuck?, I think in disgust. There are a few bad apples that hunt the Fortymile, and here they come, illegally taking full-size vehicles on a 4-wheeler trail. The ruts they leave below treeline will suck.
I’m finally close enough to pull over and let them around, the trail not wide enough to pass side-by-side, and it’s then that the driver, alone in the first rig, comes into focus. When she rolls up alongside and puts her window down, she really comes into focus: a hot, busty redhead making outstanding use of her plunging scoop-neck white tank top. She’s even got a diastema like Brigitte Bardot and a sultry look to go with it. A land of primal, and carnal desires.
“We’re miners,” she says.
“Gold?” I ask, temporarily intellectually dulled. At the word, she gushes.
“Nine years now. Until the snow flies.”
She says something about ounces. I catch that they built this trail to get to their permitted claims. Thank you very much.
“Are we going to see you on TV?” I don’t even have a fucking TV.
She says no, she’s the daughter of a trucker and has a filthy mouth.
I’m guessing her personality is somewhere between turpentine and strawberries.
“Nice rack,” she says, with a glint in her eye. Honest to God. I accept the compliment, feeling a little light-headed. Like I’m rut.
I wonder what she’d think of joining me to watch the gold that comes out of the sky. I don’t ask.
