One Heck Of A Ride

51 More Antlered Game Outfitter/pilot Dale Drinkall (left) and author pose with Drinkall’s aircraft British Columbia’s spectacular back-country where author hunted mountain caribou it. I spent the next two days shooting California quail while the meat from my elk was butchered and frozen so I could drive home with it. It had been a fun hunt. A Mountain Caribou For My Birthday I celebrated my seventy-third birthday on a mountain caribou hunt above the Toad River in the northeast corner of Canada’s British Columbia province. I had booked a fourteen-day hunt with Folding and Terminus Outfitters, a family business operated by Dale and Sandra Drinkall for more than twenty-five years. Their concession covered more than five thousand square miles and supported hunts for nine types of big game animals – Stone sheep, mountain caribou, mountain goat, western Canada moose, Rocky Mountain elk, grizzly bear, black bear, mule deer, and white-tailed deer. Dale met me at the airport when my flight from Vancouver Island landed at Fort Nelson in September 2012 and drove me to a lodge, his base camp two hours away. From there, Dale flew me in his single-engine aircraft to his wilderness tent camp where I looked down while we were circling and saw tents and horses along a creek. Dale said he brought in the horses and set up the tents in the summer, and removed everything after the last hunt of the season. After landing on a long airstrip he had cleared, we walked up the creek to the camp. Blair Miller, the man Dale had hired to guide me, greeted us when we approached the camp. His wife, Rebecca, had begun preparing our lunch on an open campfire when she saw us circle the camp. The camp could not have been built in a more scenic place. The leaves on the aspen trees in the meadows and hillside around it were gorgeous shades of yellow and gold. Here and there were splashes of bright red from the sumacs. Above it all were rough and rocky benches and cliffs where mountain goats and Stone sheep were sometimes seen from the camp. Blair and I didn’t hunt there, though. Instead we left on horseback early each morning, crossed multiple creeks, and rode nearly three hours each way to the caribou area. It was not an easy ride, either. There were many blow downs and talus slopes we had to get past and there were no trails. After a few days, one of the horses came up lame and wouldn’t put his left rear foot down. When we stopped on a sidehill to look at its feet we found a stick had nearly buried itself in his