Anticipation

What does anticipation smell like?

The days have blended together. The sun hasn’t set. Together, you drive in the pickup, hike a few miles out across the Arctic tundra with overnight packs, glass for caribou, and share a small two-person backpacking tent when you decide to sleep. You have to decide, because it’s been broad daylight the whole time you’ve been north of the Arctic Circle.

Your diet has been a repetitive combination of freezer bag cooking, mostly involving recipes with ramen noodles, peanut butter and jelly tortillas, and occasionally oatmeal when you feel like heating water for breakfast.

Most of your clothes smell like bug spray. And then you wake up and spray them down again. Combined with the faint smell of scented baby wipes…well, you hope you see caribou soon.

You’ve seen one or two. Not a herd. Mostly just running across the tundra, seemingly chased by something but you’ve never seen what was spooking them. A few grazing across the Sagavanirktok river, but across the main channel, too deep and swift to chance a swim in 30-degree weather.

And then, having spent a whole day glassing the bottom of the Franklin Bluffs, you get tired of watching the musk ox and decide to move camp a few miles north and try again the next day.

And BAM!!! A whole herd, hundreds of them, hanging out on the sandbars between the braids of the river. On your side of the main channel. Sure it will be cold, but it’s only waist deep. The hard work of the last several days and suddenly they just plop down into your lap.

It’s closer to evening, around 6:00 in the afternoon. You’re rifle hunting, and these caribou are too close to the road. Your hunting partner grabs his bow and takes off across the river. Your hunt just became a spectator sport.

There is a fresh breeze blowing in from the southwest. It’s cool enough that the mosquitos have finally gone away and you can take your headnet off. Sounds from the construction crew a bit to your south drift to you as they wrap up for the day. A steady cloud of dust washes over the Dalton Highway, you can smell the flinty particles hanging in the air.

The bow hunter wades the river. It’s a tad more than waist deep, and the current is swift. He stumbles, and you hope he doesn’t go down because these are your dry boots. The wet pair are back in the truck. He makes it onto the sandbar, methodically empties the water from his boots so it doesn’t slosh around during his stalk. He begins moving towards the herd.

The wind is nearly perfect. It’s blowing in his face at a steady clip. There is no way the caribou will smell him.

Suddenly, a cow bolts from the herd. She runs straight north along the river, right at the hunter. He freezes. She runs right past him without stopping, until she gets downwind and smells him. She stops, just for a second, looks at him, then you swear she looks straight at you, even though you’re a good half a mile away. Then she takes off heading north again, looking for something. The rest of the herd ignores her. Crazy cow.

The hunter continues to move from scrub bush to scrub bush along the gravel sandbar between braids in the river. The herd starts grazing south. The large bulls are protected, lazily chewing their cud in the center of the herd surrounded by cows and younger bulls.

A group of cows moves north again. At an easy pace this time. They’re not going to pass close enough…

The hunter makes a decision. He sprints across fifty yards of open gravel, hoping the natural depressions in the sandbar conceal his movement. He reaches a tuft of scrub brush and drops to a knee. The caribou are just over 40 yards away. He draws, pauses to catch his breath, and releases.

The arrow flies straight and true. The caribou jumps in startled pain, darts south towards the herd, but then immediately goes down. The arrow has passed straight through her, puncturing both lungs and severing the aorta just above the heart. A clean, humane kill.

She’s no trophy. But she is the reward for several days of hard work, patience and persistence, not to mention fording arctic rivers in just above freezing temperatures. The hunter doesn’t care. He’s got a wife and a young daughter at home. Gas, in Alaska, is hovering just below $4 per gallon. His grocery bill just got a lot cheaper.

I change into my wet socks, my wet pants, and my wet boots. Time for me to ford the river. Friends don’t let friends pack their caribou out alone.