THE BUSH PILOT dropped my brothers and me on a gravel bar where a stream that I’ll call Nowhere Creek flows into the much larger and glacially fed Forgotten River. This was in the Alaska Range, about 120 miles west of Mount McKinley and 30 miles from the nearest road. It was hot, with daytime highs in the eighties and nighttime lows only down into the fifties. Such weather is rare at that latitude and elevation in mid-August; usually you can expect snow squalls and freezing rain by then. But the surrounding skies were cloud-free, except for the haze of smoke created by wildfires burning in the taiga forest that stretched away beyond the glaciated mountains to the north—fires that wouldn’t be put out until the snow started to fly.
We walked off the gravel bar toward a line of spruce trees that began where the floor of the valley tipped upward and climbed toward the mountains. Danny tied a length of parachute cord to a rock and tossed the rock over a high limb. We then used it to hoist up some emergency food and dry clothes and an extra tent where they would be safe from bears. If we got back to the landing strip and the pilot never showed, or if some other kind of disaster struck, then at least we had some supplies to keep us comfortable and fed. We then lifted our packs and started walking uphill. Somewhere up there, we hoped to find Dall sheep.
Our plan was to leave the main valley and follow Nowhere Creek all the way up into the treeless alpine zone. In order to pick up the creek’s course we had to navigate a maze of beaver ponds that were bisected by low, grass-covered beaver dams. Along the edge of a pond we kicked up a sharp-tail grouse. It flew a short ways and landed in a spruce tree. Matt shot it for dinner with a load of bird shot fired from a .44 Magnum revolver. He gutted the grouse and stuffed it into the water bottle pocket on the side of his backpack.
As soon as we started following Nowhere Creek we realized that it cut up through a tight canyon full of waterfalls. We then had to leave its course and veer to the right. This move landed us in an alder-choked hellhole with nasty under- and over-layers of downed trees. The alders made it feel like an army of little kids was pulling on our clothes and backpacks, and the downed timber made it feel like we were running an obstacle course of limbo bars and split-rail fences. Eventually we lucked into a moose trail that was beaten into the ground as heavily as a maintained path in a state park. The trail climbed upward and upward, until we finally reached the end of the timber and passed into the alpine zone at a point that was three miles from Forgotten River and two thousand feet higher. The transition was sudden and dramatic, like walking out of a crowded midday matinee into an empty sunlit street.
Here, above the maximum elevation of the spruce trees, the only vegetation that even reached our knees was the band of willows and alders that lined the floor of the valley. The lower portions of the surrounding hills were covered in mixed swaths of gray and brown and green—the gray from exposed outcrops and scree slides, the green from blueberry bushes and crowberry, the brown from dried lichen and sedges and grasses. Up higher, the vegetation gave way to exposed rock that rose up to sharp ridgelines and cliff faces. To the north, toward the head of the valley, the land climbed to a series of glacier-capped mountains that reminded me of the top of lemon meringue pie.
We slowed our pace and covered just a mile or so of ground before reaching a flat patch of land that was big enough to sleep three people. It was so hot that I’d already cut away the sleeves of my T-shirt, so I dipped the scraps of cotton into a rivulet of springwater that was seeping from beneath a rock and used them to wipe away the layer of sweat and pollen that had collected on my face and arms. There was no need for a sleeping bag in this heat, but I laid mine out anyway for a little extra padding between me and the ground. We put some water over an alcohol stove and boiled the sliced-up meat of the grouse. Then we strained out the cooked meat and used the water to reconstitute a few freeze-dried backpacking meals that we improved by adding the bird’s meat. Afterward, we shared a big glob of cheddar cheese that had melted into a sweaty and bulbous mass inside my pack.
Between eating and falling asleep, we discussed the fact that we really shouldn’t have been hunting in this kind of heat. People always ask if I lose game meat to bears and wolves, but warmth is a far greater threat. It will silently ruin meat without a lick of romance while you are sitting around fantasizing about the threat of predators. But while it might have made sense to wait for the heat wave to pass, a Dall sheep hunt is not something that you can simply postpone until another day. We had secured our dates with the bush pilot ten months earlier by putting down a nonrefundable twelve-hundred-dollar deposit on round-trip flights that would take us into the mountains. And since reliable Alaskan bush pilots are insanely busy during the months of August and September, it’s quite possible that you’ll miss your entire trip if you miss your dates.
On top of the fee for the bush pilot, Matt and I had each forked over about six hundred dollars for plane tickets from Montana to Anchorage. Upon landing in Anchorage, I had dropped another six hundred bucks for a nonresident hunting license and a sheep tag. When you factor in myriad other incidentals—freeze-dried backpacking food, gas for Danny’s pickup, miscellaneous bits of gear—I had well over two grand invested in the hunt. And that sum of money hardly guarantees success. Ninety percent of the sheep hunters who head into the mountains of Alaska without a paid professional guide meet with failure. In other words, only 10 percent of nonguided sheep hunters like my brothers and me get a sheep. Considering that mature Dall sheep rams weigh around two hundred pounds and yield maybe about 35 percent of their body weight in boneless meat, you see that we were faced with a best-case scenario of securing seventy-five pounds of game meat at a price of around thirty dollars a pound. And also considering that there was an outside chance of losing the meat due to factors including but not limited to the heat, you’ll see that this venture of ours could hardly be justified as an exercise in subsistence-based hunting and gathering. Instead it was an exercise in something much more controversial and difficult to explain—something that makes me cringe just to say it: trophy hunting.
The next morning we couldn’t have killed a Dall sheep even if we’d found one, because the season opener was still a day away. Our plan was to continue up the valley while scouting out the land and keeping a constant eye on the surrounding mountains for sheep. The best and most discreet route seemed to be right up the center of the valley, following moose trails or walking on the raised gravel eskers that had been laid down by a river that once flowed beneath some bygone glacier.
We used our binoculars to dissect the jagged rims of the valley and also the many side canyons and cirques that opened up to our view as we traveled along. Dall sheep are white, so they do stand out pretty easily against the muted colors of a snow-free mountainside. But their whiteness is obviously not a disadvantage. In fact, the animals spend far more days in the snow than they do on bare ground, and even in the absence of snow they often hang around near the ice-strewn peripheries of glaciers and sometimes even on the glaciers themselves—a type of background that can make them nearly invisible. What’s more, they have an affinity for lying beneath rocky overhangs or near crevices in cliff faces, where shadows diminish your ability to see them. Meanwhile, it’s possible for them to spot you from extraordinary distances. Dall sheep have eyes that are about eight times more powerful than a human’s are, and it’s possible to scare them away without ever knowing they were there in the first place. It’s essential to see the sheep before they see you, which means you need to be looking for sheep at distances that can be measured in miles rather than yards.
And you’re not just looking for any old Dall sheep. In most of Alaska you’re only allowed to kill a ram, or male, that meets at least one of the following three criteria: 1) at least one of his two horns must be full-curl, which means it must describe a 360-degree circle when viewed from the side; 2) both of his horns must be broomed, or broken on the ends;* or 3) the animal must be at least eight years old, as demonstrated by the presence of at least eight growth rings, or annuli, on the animal’s horns.† Basically, what all of this means is that only about 5 or 10 percent of all the Dall sheep in Alaska are legal quarry.
Matt and I argue about directions on a sheep hunt in the high country of the Alaska Range.
We pushed along through the morning and into midday, walking and glassing. We spotted plenty of critters, except for the ones we were looking for. A pair of beavers worked in a pond on the valley floor. A young bull moose browsed willows on the lower slopes of a distant mountain. A band of caribou cows and calves were bedded on a snowbank that was sheltered from the sun by a high peak. A young grizzly fed on blueberries at the head of a side valley. But no sheep.
By early evening we were about nine miles in from where we’d landed. Here Nowhere Creek forked into two branches that were separated by a nose-shaped wedge of land that rose into a high, triangle-shaped mountain. The left branch dropped toward the confluence through a series of waterfalls coming off a high plateau. Above the falls, our map showed that the plateau went only a couple of miles before entering a steep-walled canyon and then terminating at a cirque that would probably be impossible to climb out of. The right branch looked as though it went for about six miles before petering out at the foot of a pass.
We dropped our packs at the junction in order to make a quick scout up the left branch. After climbing past the waterfalls we could see a collection of white spots in the shade of an outcropping that interrupted an otherwise smooth ridgeline. They were miles off, but there was only one thing they could be. I started to form the word sheep in my mouth but I was cut off by Matt and Danny saying the same thing.
I sat down and studied the band of sheep with my binoculars. There were eight of them. I noticed that three of them were only about half as big as the other five, and each of the little ones was close to a larger one.
“Looks like ewes,” I said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Danny. “Ewes and lambs.”
“You sure there aren’t any rams mixed in there?” I asked.
“Not at this time of year. They won’t start breeding for another few months, so they’ll be separate now.”
We kept going. For a while we followed the course of the creek, sometimes walking from rock to rock over the water’s surface. But then the land rose up on either side of the creek, threatening to block our view of the surrounding country. We climbed the right bank and angled upward until the creek was just a fine line of white below us. Away from the water the temperature was at least fifteen degrees hotter, and I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the belly of my shirt. We climbed higher and soon hit a trail that was loaded with moose tracks. It continued upstream without gaining or losing elevation, and soon the creek had risen to a point where we were once again level with it. We veered back left to the water and refilled our water bottles, then followed the creek into the mouth of the canyon. It was cool and shaded inside. We went around a couple of bends and now the trail was littered with the bleached bones of a caribou; except for the teeth, the animal’s skull had been crushed by time and decay into fingernail-sized fragments that were pressed into the ground.
I was checking the skull out when Matt hissed the words holy shit and ram, put his hand on my shoulder, and pulled me down. My eyes went toward where he was looking. High above us was a white face surrounded by a mass of horn. The ram was peeking out over a ledge and looking down; it must have heard something just seconds earlier and stood up. It watched as we backed away, seeming unsure of what we were. When we were out of view, we turned and slipped out of the canyon without saying another word. None of us had gotten a good enough glimpse to tell whether the ram was legal, but we figured that we should try to find it again in the morning and have another look—this time without it seeing us. We walked to where we’d left our gear, and then laid out our sleeping bags on a soft mat of crowberry.
My brothers and I were first introduced to Alaska in 2000, when Danny took a permanent job as a biologist at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. At the time, Matt and I were both living in Montana and killing enough meat to keep us fed all year. Right away, though, we started coming up to Alaska on a regular basis to tap into the hunting and fishing opportunities. Our initial jaunts were tame by Dall sheep standards, but still exciting as hell. We launched canoes into rivers we’d never heard of to fish salmon. We walked into mountains that we’d never seen to hunt moose. We made unguided trips into the Arctic to hunt caribou, an animal that I’d never before laid eyes on. Each year, at the end of whatever trip we made, we’d sit around and fantasize about whatever new thing we were going to try next year.
These discussions usually turned to the subject of Dall sheep. Most people who have hunted them agree that they are North America’s most difficult game animal. The terrain that Dall sheep inhabit is remote, rugged, and intimidating. People who dream of hunting them put off doing so for decades, waiting for when they have the time and money, only to find that time and money never come or they’re too old when they finally do. What’s more, we were in a prime position with regard to legal issues. A nonresident of Alaska cannot hunt Dall sheep (or grizzlies or mountain goats) without a licensed outfitter unless he or she is accompanied by a second-of-kin relative who is a legal resident of the state. Second of kin includes brothers, sisters, spouses, sisters-in-law, sons-in-law, grandmothers, etc. With Danny living there, we were able to launch a do-it-yourself sheep trip that would have cost us ten or twelve thousand dollars apiece if we had to hire an outfitter. So, in the early 2000s, we made our first attempt on Dall sheep.
We picked a drainage in the northern Chugach Range, about 130 miles south of where we were now camped but which we could easily drive to. We parked along the Parks Highway and used an old rubber raft to cross the Matanuska River. We then deflated the raft and hoisted it into a tree (grizzlies have a strange tendency to rip rubber rafts to shreds) and headed up a large drainage that came in from the south. We hiked about ten miles to where the valley ended at a big blue-colored glacier and then followed a tributary stream deeper into the mountains. For seven rainy and miserable days we scoured the land without seeing a single Dall sheep. We’d grossly miscalculated our food rations, and by then we were running so low on food that we were cutting pieces of hard candy in half with the serrated blade of a Leatherman in order to share them. On the eighth day we climbed after a sow black bear while I was feeling so weak from hunger that I could barely move my feet. We shot it from a stone’s throw away, tagged it, and then feasted on cubes of meat deep-fried in rendered bear oil.
We packed up the rest of the bear’s meat and the hide and started hiking out with thoughts about dry clothes and a good night’s sleep. A few miles from the road, we passed an incoming stream where you could look up its valley and see a distant collection of peaks that seemed a world away. We took a break from walking and set up the spotting scope for kicks, just to have a look around. Sure enough, there was the first Dall sheep we’d laid eyes on. The animal was standing up near the crest of a far-off peak, like something that had been put there in order to play a joke on us. I zoomed the lens and stared at the sheep until my eye hurt. We’d heard a trick about how to tell a ram from a ewe at long distances: A ram’s horn will curl around and block out the white of its neck, so that from far away it looks like the head has been severed from the body. That’s what we were looking at here, though from this distance there was no way in hell to determine if he was legal. We had to get closer—much closer.
We hoisted the remaining bear meat into a tree so that the bears wouldn’t cannibalize it and then started climbing. By the time we reached the vicinity of the ram, enough hours had passed that he was gone and we couldn’t find him anywhere on the mountain. Completely discouraged, we headed back down toward where the bear meat was hanging in the tree. Along the way we had an argument about our routes. Matt split off in order to descend a particularly dicey cliff, while Danny and I went to look for a game trail. We made it back to the bear meat late that night, but Matt didn’t return until early the next morning. We then ate some more meat and hiked our way out toward the rubber raft, the river, and just beyond that, the highway. All the while, I thought about how that ram’s horn had blocked out the whiteness of the sheep’s neck from miles away. Though I could see none of the details of that horn, I became fixated on the idea of it. Better than any piece of man-made art, the horn seemed to encompass all the danger and beauty of a place that would just as happily kill you as let you walk on it. Over the next two years, I watched as Matt and Danny each brought into their homes beautiful heads of Dall sheep they killed on grueling trips that work obligations prevented me from joining. After seeing those horns, I knew I had to have a set for my own home. I remembered reading that Eskimo hunters used to bring home the heads of certain animals and then set them in their lodges in order to treat them as honored guests. I could see where they were coming from.
Now, three years later, we had a rough idea about the location of a ram that might, just might, be legal. We left camp before daylight and found him right at sunup, grazing high on a round-topped mountain that towered above the canyon where we’d found him the day before. The grass and lichens were so sparse up here it looked like he must be feeding on gravel. Whatever he was eating, he’d picked a good spot for himself. There was no obvious way to close the distance on him without spooking him. He could see in every direction, and there was no cover within hundreds of yards. It seemed that the best bet was to get a little closer and then wait for the ram to move into a more approachable position. Since Matt and Danny had already killed sheep on previous trips, we agreed that I’d be the one to make the stalk. Matt would come along with me, while Danny stayed put in order to keep an eye on the sheep in case it moved while we were out of sight.
Two hours later, Matt and I were lying on our bellies within six hundred yards of the ram. All we could see of the animal was its head and neck and the top of its back. We’d gotten this close when it had grazed out of view beyond the crest of the hill, but then it had wandered back and now we were pinned down. If we budged, it would see us for sure. We held tight and whispered back and forth about whether the sheep was legal. Just then I heard a strange and rhythmic clicking noise behind us and turned my head. It was a cow caribou. The noise comes from the way their tendons move over the bones of their feet. She got within spitting distance before she realized we weren’t rocks, and then she bucked almost like a wild horse, spun around, and ran off. The movement caught the ram’s attention. When I looked back he was staring right at us, stiff-bodied and alarmed. In a blink he turned and ran. I stood up. “Son of a bitch,” I said.
All Danny saw from his vantage point was that the ram was headed down toward the canyon. Once it started running, he said, it dropped from his view. “You think it was a legal ram?” he asked.
“Pretty sure,” said Matt. “I think his right horn comes full. But we weren’t totally sure enough to shoot.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t see him,” I said to Danny. “I thought he’d come down right through here.”
“He must have been around that bend,” said Danny.
We walked up around the bend and the story was clear. A set of downward-running tracks was dug into a hillside of crushed shale so clear and fresh they looked minutes old. The bottom of the canyon was mostly bare rock and wouldn’t hold tracks, but we could see the prints where he’d stormed up the other side and disappeared into the cliffs.
It was an impossible-looking slope, and it would be a nasty climb, but we had in our heads a piece of advice that Danny and Matt had gotten from a bush pilot they once hired: “Find the one you want,” he said, “and stay with it.”‡ For a lot of animals that advice just wouldn’t work, as they can vanish into deep timber and brush. But the open country that allows a sheep to see you from miles away also allows you to see him from miles away. If you spook one and then climb through the same terrain that he does, the pilot explained, there’s a good chance that you’ll run into him over the next couple of days. We kept this advice in mind as we discussed what we ought to do, though in the back of our heads was the reality that we weren’t even sure the ram was legal. Eventually it came down to a vote. Matt and I voted to follow the ram; Danny voted to go look for another one.
We followed. It was a hot and miserable climb, often so steep that we had to dig our fingertips into cracks in the rock to pull ourselves up. There were a few springs trickling out of the rocks, and the mountain was steep enough that you could stand beneath them like a shower.
It took a couple of hours to gain the summit, a square-shaped butte almost as flat as a football field and about that size. The entire surface was scattered in sheep droppings. Some were fresh and some were old. On every side, the land dropped away into sharp descending ridges and jumbles of collapsing rock. We began stalking around the edges, slow and easy, often crawling to the edges on our bellies in order to peek over the side and survey the confused terrain below. By moving along, we could steal angled glimpses backward and ahead and see into shadows and crevices that we hadn’t been able to see into when we were directly above them. At one point I took off my sunglasses and set them at my side in order to rub my eyes and wipe the sweat from my face. Just then some kind of pipit, a small passerine bird, landed right next to me and started to attack his own reflection in the lenses. I was wondering if he could actually damage the glass when I heard a whisper and saw that Matt was on his belly just a ways down the ledge. He was motioning me forward. I started to get up and he gave me the “stay low” gesture with his hand. I crawled over and he said, “Three rams.”
They were bedded in an indentation of the cliff face about three hundred yards below. The one we’d been following was there, along with two other young and nonlegal rams that he’d joined up with. They were straight down enough that I could have thrown a rock and landed it among them. All were staring downhill. While Dall sheep predators—such as wolves, grizzlies, and lynx—are some of the most badass critters in North America, sheep usually trust that they’ll be coming from downhill. In fact the sheep seem almost incredulous that some other animal would outclimb them in tough terrain. While this assumption has served the species well over the millennia, right now it was a major oversight. We were able to nestle into the rock and take our time while we again tried to ascertain the legality of the ram.
If the right horn was full-curl, as Matt suspected, it was only barely full-curl. At this angle it was tough to tell for sure. But the position of the sheep, and the fact that it was holding still, made Danny fairly confident that he could count the horn’s annuli with the spotting scope. We set the scope on a tripod, moving slowly and quietly, and trained it on the ram’s head. For thirty minutes we took turns counting, trying to sort out the annual growth rings from the horn’s lesser rings and grooves. To make a mistake is a major deal. If you screw up and kill an illegal ram, you can face heavy fines and even jail time. Of course, you could also walk away and no one would ever know, but you’d have to live with the knowledge and that’s as ugly as any fine or penalty.
I was reluctant to make the call, but eventually Danny’s hesitation faded. “I’m telling you,” he whispered, “that ram has at least eight annuli. It’s legal. If I were you, I’d take the shot.”
To know Danny is to know that he doesn’t screw up. I placed the crosshairs of my rifle behind the sheep’s shoulder, then considered the steep angle of the shot and adjusted my point of aim. I took a breath, let half of it out, and squeezed the trigger. The ram stood up, but then he got woozy looking and toppled over and dropped from view.
In spite of the fact that a slip and fall could have been fatal, the three of us half-scrambled and half-slid down the cliff face without even thinking of the danger. Far and away, the most exhilarating moments when you’re hunting big game in rough country come as you’re climbing up or down toward a fallen animal. It felt as if I might explode with tension and stress and anticipation. And then I finally got down to where I thought the animal would be, but it wasn’t there. I was hit by a horrible feeling that the wounded ram had escaped. Matt rushed past me and climbed down to the next ledge and then let out a whoop. There it was, dead.
The horns of a Dall sheep are so bizarrely curled and beautiful, and the first thing I did was lift the ram’s head by its horns in order to feel their mass and power. Through the horns, a sheep can deliver and receive blows with about forty times the energy required to fracture a human skull. But the initial thrill of holding the horns was quickly replaced by a panicked feeling. Neither of the horns seemed to come quite full circle. Instead of curling tightly, they spiraled outward in long, lazy arcs. Only one side was broomed, and that one only slightly. I frantically began counting the annuli, as did Matt and Danny. We counted together from the base outward, and then recounted the rings from the tip back toward the base. Without a doubt, the ram was nine years old. It was legal.
I grew up surrounded by hunting trophies. The heads of wild hogs, deer, and bears decorated the walls of our living room, though decorated might not be the best word for all of them. You might just say that these trophy heads defined our walls, and in some cases haunted them. What comes foremost to mind is the head of an eight-point buck that hung on the wall of our living room. My dad shot the buck in Michigan in 1985, while hunting from a tree where a cornfield edged up to a grove of red pines. The arrow entered the buck high on its rib cage and a few inches to the right of the spine, in the area of the back where a human has a hard time scratching himself. The buck then ran off, carrying the arrow with it.
We spent the whole night looking for that deer, and much of the next day, without ever finding a single drop of blood or a helpful set of tracks. My dad knew that the placement of the arrow should have meant a dead deer, but somehow it hadn’t. Perhaps the arrowhead had broken apart on impact without doing any damage, or it had lodged into bone without penetrating the deer’s vital organs, or some other unknown factor had allowed the deer to survive. We cut wider and wider circles through the woods surrounding the cornfield, but eventually we abandoned the search and gave up. My dad was unusually quiet for days.
A couple of weeks went by, and then Michigan’s general firearm season opened. Danny went out to hunt, and on the way to his stand he passed through the cornfield near my dad’s tree stand. In the darkness he encountered the deer’s body as it lay on its side with the arrow protruding from its back. From there he could look across the tops of the corn and see the canopy of the tree where my dad had been hunting, not thirty corn rows away. Later that night, after visiting the deer’s body, we entertained the idea that the buck must have run far away after getting shot and then returned days later to die in that spot. But we quickly admitted that this theory was pure bullshit. The arrow, which had penetrated a lung and then lodged against a rib without exiting, would have dealt death quickly. The deer had been there all along and we simply hadn’t found it, either through bad luck or stupidity and poor tracking skills or a lack of diligence. The meat was far gone, spoiled and pecked by birds and scavengers, though my dad removed the deer’s cape and antlers and brought them to a taxidermist. And while unknowing visitors to our home might have seen that deer as some childish emblem of conquest, what they were actually seeing was my father’s self-inflicted reminder of his own fallibility as a hunter.
Now that this set of sheep’s horns had come to me, I knew that they would live with me for the rest of my life as some sort of symbol. Whether that symbol would be good or bad now depended on our ability to salvage the meat in spite of the wickedly hot temperatures. Earlier we’d put that idea out of our minds in order to concentrate on hunting, but now it was coming back around like a boomerang that threatened to knock us in the back of our heads.
The key to handling game meat in the field is to keep it cool, a job that needs to begin right away. A sheep’s body temperature is several degrees warmer than a human’s, so already the animal was in a dangerously hot state. We quickly gutted and skinned the carcass, then removed all of the meat from the skeleton and laid the pieces out to cool on shaded rocks. Ideally you’d be able to leave it like that for several hours, especially if there’s a nice breeze, because that will cause a hard, protective rind to form on the outside. But almost immediately we had a fly problem, so we had to put all the meat into protective mesh game bags to prevent it from getting covered in eggs.
As soon as we were done butchering we had to make our second compromise. We needed to climb back up the cliff before it got dark, which meant packing up the meat before it cooled off. If we put it directly into our backpacks, we knew it would bleed through the mesh game bags and saturate our packs with blood, and then we’d be walking around with grizzly bait strapped to our backs for the rest of the trip. So we had to put the game bags inside a few of the plastic contractor bags that Danny had stuffed into the bottom of his pack, which further hampered the meat’s ability to dry and cool.
It seems counterintuitive, but you get into trouble in the mountains by climbing things that you can’t get down rather than going down things that you can’t get up. It’s basically the same problem that young cats get into when they ascend a tree. But this scenario gets turned on its head when it comes to hunting big game. If you drop down a steep face in order to retrieve a large dead animal, getting back up with a large burden can be a serious problem.
Once we loaded all the meat, I strapped my rifle and the skull of the sheep to the outside of my backpack with a length of bungee cord. We then started up the cliff. Two of us would give the first guy a boost up the ledge, and then we’d hand the packs up to him. Then the man on the ledge and one of the guys below would pull and push the second person up. The two guys on the ledge would then grab the third guy and drag him up. It was tough going, but within an hour we’d reached the crest of the ridge from which I’d shot the ram. From there it was just a three-mile downhill walk to where we’d left our sleeping bags about sixteen hours earlier.
——
There was no good place near our camp to hang the meat, so we slept close by in order to be able to hear a grizzly if it got into the meat. By the morning the meat had cooled off nicely, but the mesh game bags had become so saturated with blood that flies were laying their eggs directly on the cloth. Now the outsides of the bags were sprinkled with what might be mistaken for bread crumbs or shredded parmesan. We hauled all the bags to a clean gravel bar and emptied them out on the rocks. Then, while I used willow switches to keep the flies off the meat, Matt and Danny used my little mini-bottle of shampoo to wash all of the game bags in the creek. After rinsing them thoroughly and wringing them dry, we rebagged all of the meat and began building a tightly woven wigwam of willow limbs that would provide shade during the hottest part of the day and hopefully help deter the flies. We were only half done with this when we realized the futility of our plan. The flies had wasted no time rediscovering their egg-laying habitat, and by mid-morning the sun was hot enough to mitigate the cooling effects of the stream. Already we were standing around with no shirts on while we fretted about the situation.
I put forward the idea of hauling the meat uphill to a snowfield. We could dig out a hole in the snow and bury it. The problem with this idea was that the nearest snow was miles away. We kicked around a few more ideas, and finally Danny came up with the idea of double-wrapping the meat in contractor bags and sinking them into the creek.
We placed all of the meat back into the plastic liners, and I used my emergency roll of duct tape to seal the packages. I waded into the creek and found a knee-deep hole that had formed beneath a dense overhang of willows. The water was cold enough to make my bones ache. I reached in and pulled out a bunch of fist-sized rocks in order to expand the hole and make it deeper. Matt then handed in the bags one by one, and I held them in place while Danny anchored them beneath mounds of boulders. With that taken care of, we were free of the burden of having to constantly monitor the meat’s exposure to flies and heat. There was still the remaining threat of bears, but that’s just something you have to learn to live with or it will drive you crazy.
We repacked our gear and headed up Nowhere Creek into fresh territory. A mile or so up, we struck off along a tributary stream that flowed in from the east. We followed it for a couple of miles, passing some ewes and lambs that watched us without concern from the heights of the overhead cliffs. Later we spooked up two young rams that skittered away. After that we didn’t see much of anything, and we worried that we’d run off whatever sheep were in the area. In the evening we came to the head of the drainage and then climbed toward a low pass that would deliver us into a neighboring tributary that flowed back toward Nowhere Creek. When we reached the pass, we could see most of this drainage and it didn’t look very interesting. We hung a right instead and followed the ridgeline deeper into the mountains. By then our water bottles were empty, so we walked out along a spur of the ridgeline toward a snowfield where we could gather some snow to melt when we made camp. From there we could see into yet another valley, and at the head of that valley was a scattering of a dozen white specks. Through the spotting scope, two of the specks appeared to have necks that were not connected to their bodies. There was no way to get to the sheep that day, so we laid out our sleeping bags near the snowfield on a narrow flat of land between two cliff faces. The patch of ground was barely big enough to accommodate us, maybe about the size of two barroom pool tables. As we dozed off, Matt said, “If I’m not here in the morning, throw my boots over the ledge and I’ll climb up for breakfast.”
We began walking at daybreak and soon found that the gang of sheep had stayed put through the night. They were in the head of a valley that was shaped like an amphitheater. The ten ewes and lambs were on one side, the two rams on the other. Both of the rams were big; at least one of them was definitely legal. What was less definite was how we’d ever get close to him. He and the other ram were feeding and milling about in a bowl-shaped meadow at the head of a long, vertical snowfield. The bowl was near the upper lip of the amphitheater; from there the rams could see everything and anything that happened in their vicinity. What was more, it would be equally impossible to sneak past the ewes without alarming them. To put all this in baseball terms, imagine a stadium with a two-mile diameter. Then imagine that the rams were seated in the upper decks of the stadium above third base, with the ewes above second base and us hidden beneath the seats above first base. We couldn’t simply walk down and cross the field and then climb up, because the sheep would see us the whole time. So instead we had to climb over the backside of the stadium and descend down toward the parking lot. Then we had to walk around the periphery of the stadium and from the outside judge the exact location of the rams’ seats. When that was done, we had to again scale the outside wall of the stadium and climb up and over the edge, hoping to arrive at a spot just above the rams and looking down on them.
It took us eight hours to reach that position. By that point we had no idea if the sheep were still below us. They had had plenty of time to wander off and could have strayed miles away. We were prepared for disappointment when we got down on our bellies, crawled over the lip of the amphitheater, and inched forward. Soon the strip of snow was in view. With that landmark in sight, it was easy to locate the two rams that were still exactly where we’d left them. There was no need to guess about the legality of the big ram; I took one look and said “Legal! Legal!” Danny then dropped the sheep with a single shot. It tipped forward and hit the snow and went sailing downhill like a toboggan. We ran to the snow slide and jumped on, backsides down, and slid after it. I was sliding so fast that I had to dig my heels and elbows into the ground below me in order to slow myself down. After a few hundred yards we still hadn’t seen the sheep, but the smeared blood on the snow indicated that it hadn’t gotten back to its feet. Finally, a couple of hundred yards downslope, we found the sheep wedged against a rock that had melted up out of the snow.
It was late that night by the time we got the second ram butchered and packed down to where we’d left the first ram stashed beneath the surface of Nowhere Creek. We approached noisily and from upwind, in case a grizzly had gotten into our things. While there was no evidence of bears, flies had certainly been present. I’d left the ram’s skull in the shade of a willow without wrapping it up because we needed to save our remaining bags for meat protection. It was crawling with hundreds and hundreds of maggots. I waded out and dunked it into some fast-moving water and scrubbed it with my hands. Most of the maggots were carried downstream as fish food. I then took out my knife and carved away some of the nastier pieces of flesh that were still clinging to the skull.
In the morning we retrieved the meat from the creek and everything looked great. Cool and bug-free. Some of the meat had gotten wet and the water bled it of color, so we trimmed that away and then kindled a small fire with willow limbs to cook some of the meat for breakfast. After eating, we packed everything up for the walk. With the gear and rifles, plus the meat and heads of the two sheep, each of our bags now weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. A day of walking got us about eight miles down valley. In the afternoon we passed some scattered, windblown trees, and soon we reached the sharp edge of the forest. Below us, Nowhere Creek dropped over the falls and plunged down toward the big glacial river.
The air had finally cooled off and a breeze had picked up, so we unpacked all the meat and laid it on rocks where it could dry out and the wind would keep the flies away. We camped near it so we could protect it from bears. The skull from Danny’s sheep still smelled fresh, so we laid it on top of the meat. I wrapped mine in my extra shirt to keep the flies off and then walked it downhill and into the timber so I could put it into a tree where it would be safe and we didn’t have to smell it.
Danny and I pack out a pair of Dall rams.
We got a slow start in the morning, aching and sore from the previous day’s pack-out. As we organized our gear for travel, we heard the distant buzz of a plane. It came down valley, passed directly over our heads, and then began a slow circle that would take it toward the gravel bar where it had left us off. We knew the pilot wouldn’t wait forever, so we forgot our aches and pains, dumped out our instant coffee, and hurried down into the thick timber. On the way past the tree where I had hung it, I stopped to retrieve the skull. The cool air had done it favors; it was drier now, and smelled less, and the extra shirt had prevented the introduction of more fly eggs. Even in its unsavory condition, it had already become a symbol of the mountains’ beauty, of my love for my brothers, of the wildness of the land, of the pain of walking long distances under a heavy load. I fastened it to my pack, using bungee cords to hold it tight against the mile or so of snagging and grabbing alder bushes that waited below us. Once I got the skull the way I wanted it, I glanced downhill and saw that my brothers had nearly vanished into the timber below me. I rose to my feet and followed.
*It seems that some Dall sheep intentionally broom their horns by rubbing them on rocks once the horns grow large enough to impede their peripheral vision. Brooming might also be caused by the horn breaking off in a fight or in a fall.
†Some people think that the legality requirements on Dall sheep are needlessly complicated, but those people are wrong. While it might be easier to just say that a ram has to be eight years old to be legal, that would put an enormous burden on hunters. Counting growth rings at close range is hard enough, let alone at long distances and in poor light. A full-curl rule would be another way to simplify, but that would remove many sheep from the harvest pool because some rams will never reach full-curl no matter how long they live; their horns just don’t grow that way. Other rams that could reach full-curl never will, because their horns either break off or they rub them down. Together, these criteria are meant to ensure that only mature rams get killed, and they give hunters a number of ways of determining maturity.
‡Funny little story: The same guy that gave us that advice is to thank for us knowing about this spot. One time, Matt and Danny were sitting in the pilot’s hangar near the town of Wasilla while they waited for the weather to clear so that this pilot could fly them into the mountains. The pilot was fielding calls from various hunting guides that he worked for, and Matt and Danny overheard a conversation between him and a guide about a specific valley that the guide wanted to visit on horseback because he knew that there were some rams in the area but no hunters. Matt and Danny went home and studied that valley on a map and noticed that there were no landing strips in the vicinity. The only way to get in there was to land on a gravel bar at the mouth of the creek and then bushwhack through a couple thousand vertical feet of nasty terrain. Later Danny asked that pilot if he could fly us in to the gravel bar, and he said he could not because one of his guides sometimes hunted the area. So we called another bush pilot up in Fairbanks instead, and he agreed to drop us in there, no problem.