One Heck Of A Ride

22 The Making of a Hunter can legally hunt them in Canada; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just won’t let us ship our trophies home.) At age 77 as I write this, I’m reluctant to spend a week or more bouncing around inside a coffin- like wooden box while it’s being dragged behind a snow machine across a bumpy, frozen sea in below-zero temperatures (which is how Inuit guides transport their clients until a bear is seen), especially when I can’t bring home as much as a whisker, a tooth or even a hair from any bear I might take. My fascination with bears may be because they are such intelligent, potentially dangerous and amazingly strong beasts. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed the challenge and excitement of hunting them. The Tuktu Bear Schefferville still was a booming Quebec iron-mining town when the annual caribou migration began in mid-September 1981, and its airport was packed with hunters when I landed there. Tuktu Outfitting’s Jerry Portis was in the terminal to greet me and the eleven other hunters his company had booked into the three caribou camps it was operating that year. Our first stop was to buy licenses and tags for caribou, black bear, wolverine, and wolf. We probably wouldn’t see the last three animals, Jerry said, but we would need a license and tag to take one if we did. Our second stop was at a dock on the lake where a large airplane with floats was waiting to transport four of us farther north to Tuktu’s camp on Mistinibi Lake. On the flight there, I looked down on mile after mile of lakes and streams with forests and tundra ablaze in bright autumn colors, and tried to spot the caribou I had come this far north to hunt. (They may have been below us somewhere, but I saw none.) When the plane landed on the lake and taxied up to a dock in front of the lodge, it was hard, even for me, to realize that I’d been hunting Cape buffalo, hippo, and elephant in Zimbabwe just two weeks earlier. After unpacking our gear in our rooms, the four of us who were hunting from the camp went outside to shoot our rifles and tour the camp, including the shed where meat, skins, and caribou antlers were stored. The hunters who had taken the antlers we saw in that shed had wrapped up their hunts and were waiting to board the plane to return to Schefferville when we landed. After breakfast the next morning, I packed my backpack with ammo, knife, candy bars, binocular, and other things I thought I’d need that day, then picked up my rifle and walked down to the dock with the other hunters to meet our guides. My guide was Clifford Waye, a young man who worked at the local iron mine when he wasn’t guiding hunters. Cliff helped me load my pack and rifle into a canoe with a small outboard motor and we left the camp, heading uplake. Less than two hours later, we traveled up a small creek for approximately three-quarters of a mile and beached the canoe, then climbed through tundra and firs to reach the top of a hill where we could glass most of the country around us. A half hour later, we both spotted six caribou walk into an opening on a hill about a half-mile away. “Do you see the bull with just one horn?” Cliff asked. “Yeah. He’s the only bull there.” “There should be more around. Where you see one caribou, there usually are others nearby.” I was searching that hillside, expecting more caribou to step into the opening, when Cliff said he had found another group in a far-off valley. “Not a shooter in the bunch,” he said after setting up a spotting scope for a better look. A second later I found three bulls on the next ridge past where the first herd we had spotted still was feeding. I didn’t need the spotting scope. The antlers on one of the bulls were huge. Cliff