Never Say Die (11 page)

The calf's mother hadn't run far, and was watching it all. “I'm sorry,” I said to her. To her calf I said, “Thank you.”

By the time Ryan caught up with me I had the calf gutted. “Well done, Nick!”

I offered him the liver, told him he should start on that—it would be the easiest to keep down on an empty stomach. I ate the heart and one of the kidneys. Ryan ate the other kidney.

I had no stomach for eating the rest of the calf raw, but there wasn't any firewood close by. I draped the animal over my shoulders and we walked for another mile before we came to a tongue of spruce trees that came off a ridge to the edge of the valley floor. Within an hour we were roasting strips of caribou on sticks over a small fire. Ryan had the good sense not to overcook his.

That day rolled into the next, with us either eating or sleeping. We slept about as well as you can, curled up in a ball on the ground like animals. The eating was much better. We squatted on our haunches and ate bits of milk-fed caribou from the tips of our knives. “Like the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert,” Ryan said.

Like Jonah and me, I thought, many a time together out on the land.

W
hen we had eaten every last morsel of that deliciously tender calf meat, we set out again. I felt a whole lot better, much stronger. Before long we saw more caribou, a small herd on a ridge ahead and to the right. It was rocky up there, nothing for caribou to eat. The windy ridges gave them relief from their bloodsucking tormentors. The coats of the calves up there shone silvery brown. They were about three weeks old. The coats of the cows were blotched with clumps of unshed winter fur.

As much as possible, we walked the rim of the canyon so we could keep the river in sight below. Ryan said our chances of finding the raft were improving. We were seeing more rocks in the river that rafts could get pinned on, huge rocks that had broken loose from the walls.

We were also seeing caribou, but only trickles of them. In the early hours of the next day a flood of caribou was approaching the canyon from the west. My photographer brother had no camera in his hands, but even so, he had a satisfied smile on his face. So did I. This was the most I'd ever laid eyes on.

I wondered where the herd would swim the river. Just to the north would be a good choice. On their side, no more than a hundred yards from us, a grassy chute led down to the river. Our side had no cliffs at all for half a mile.

The leaders must have remembered that chute from years gone by. They paused only seconds before starting down it. Behind them, the wide front of the herd flowed into the funneling chute toward the water. It was quite a crowd: the cows with their shabby-looking coats; their calves, looking awfully small to swim this river; the yearling bulls that had migrated to the calving grounds with the females; and the recently arrived mature bulls with their big racks and magnificent new coats, white as snow on their manes and chests.

The leaders stopped at the shore, sizing up the crossing. They hesitated, anxious and unsure, while more and more animals came surging down the chute, so many that the crush from behind left the leaders no choice. They took the plunge.

The rest followed without hesitation, leaping into the water. Lit by the radiant Arctic light, soft and golden, caribou soon filled the river from shore to shore, from the small but sturdy calves to the biggest bulls with their bristling antlers. It was something to see.

It took a good while for the caribou to cross, at least fifteen hundred, we guessed. When the last of them climbed out of the river on our side, we stayed put to watch the big flow of animals browse its way across the broad tundra bench and onto the flanks of the treeless mountains. “Sure wish you had your camera,” I said.

Ryan waved the mosquitoes from his face. “Even if I don't get a chance to take pictures, what I just saw was worth the price of admission.”

“How many caribou did you see last summer on that other Arctic trip you did?”

“No more than sixty.”

“What river were you on?”

“The Burnside, in Canada's central Arctic. I was expecting to see huge numbers of caribou. The Bathurst herd has always been a big one. The last time the wildlife people had done an aerial survey—ten years before—they counted over four hundred thousand. I got back home, and a couple of months later I found out that a new aerial survey had been conducted shortly after I was there. After studying all the photographs, the total count was thirty-four thousand.”

This news landed like a stunning blow, and I was slow to speak. “I didn't know it was that bad. All we heard was that the government put quotas on caribou for the Inuit and the Indians over there. That's unheard-of! Over here we can still take all the caribou we need.”

“If you don't mind me asking, how many do you personally get in a year?”

“Usually around twenty-five, almost all of them in the fall when they're still on the tundra but migrating south toward the trees. It takes that many to feed us and the relatives and friends who can't hunt for themselves. We make it last all winter. If we had to live on a quota of a few caribou a year, it would be a disaster.”

“From what I hear, the team of caribou experts from the Yukon Territory and Alaska haven't been able to do their photographic survey of the Porcupine herd since 2001. For the last nine years, they've had weather problems, or smoke from distant forest fires, and some summers the caribou don't form into the large groups that make a census possible. If I remember correctly, the 2001 count was one hundred and twenty thousand caribou, down from one hundred and eighty thousand in 1989. If that steady decline has continued since 2001 … What have you been hearing, Nick?”

“They're afraid the herd might be down to a hundred thousand or even ninety by now. We think there's more, but after what you said about the Bathurst herd, I'm really worried. What if there's even fewer than the government thinks?”

Ryan didn't say, but I could hear what he was thinking: we'd be facing quotas, too.

We set off again, soon walking across the stretch of ground where the herd had just been. Soaked with urine, it sure smelled gamey. The tundra was freshly grazed and littered with droppings. Ryan was amazed by the numbers of robins we were seeing. I told him they used to be an unusual sight, according to Jonah. “Even in my lifetime,” I added, “I see more red foxes and fewer Arctic foxes. And get this: Pacific salmon are showing up in our nets out at Shingle Point.”

“Birds, animals, and fish all moving north,” Ryan said. “Great climate-change observations for my article. What if, in the future, it warms up enough for the trees to move north all the way to the ocean, and there's no more open tundra? Would the land support very many caribou?”

“Don't even go there,” I said. “I never heard that one. That blows my mind.”

Next time the canyon walls tailed off and we were able to walk along the shore for a while, we discovered that the water in the Firth was still dropping. The falling river had left a thick high-tide line of caribou hair along the shore. The cows had shed gobs of their shaggy winter coats as they swam the river.

Pretty quick the Firth was back in its canyon again, and the walls were the highest yet, more than a hundred feet. A pair of rough-legged hawks flew back and forth screaming at us. “They must have a nest nearby,” Ryan said. That was pretty sharp of him. Rough-legged hawks don't like it a bit when people are anywhere near their nests.

We spotted their nest and moved on. Before long we had a lot more rough-legged hawks giving us what-for. Over the span of an hour we spotted thirteen nests on the west side of the river. There were probably as many on our side underneath the edge of the cliff.

The parent hawks were bringing rodents to their young, mostly ground squirrels and lemmings. Across the river, one nest wasn't being guarded; maybe both of the adults were away hunting. We weren't the only ones to notice. A red fox was climbing the cliff underneath it, carefully yet steadily finding a way up among the cracks and ledges. No doubt the fox had young of its own to feed. Even so, I was amazed at the risk the fox was taking. I thought for sure it would give up, but I was wrong. The fox made it all the way up, nabbed a fledgling, and was halfway down when one of the parents returned, screaming mad. The hawk dive-bombed the fox with raking talons. Fox and fledgling fell to their deaths.

We'd been so absorbed with what we were seeing across the river, neither of us had looked into the distance downstream. I did, just as we were turning to go. I saw white water down there, a major rapid where the river was turning a bend. Something unnatural in the rapid caught my eye, a patch of bright blue.

Pointing, I said to Ryan, “Check out that rapid. You see what I see?”

“The raft!” he cried.

It was out in the river, hung up on a boulder.

“We'll never be able to get to it out there,” I said.

Ryan wasn't saying anything. “Can't tell yet,” he said finally.

Half an hour later we were looking down on the raft from the cliff directly above it. There's no way, I thought. Situation hopeless.

Even though the raft was only thirty feet from shore, it was folded around the leading edge of a huge boulder shaped like the prow of a ship. To make things worse, the boulder sat at the foot of the rapid. White water was boiling off it.

“It's wrapped,” Ryan said grimly. “A wrap is worse than a flip. One of the tubes is deflated … one of the spare oars got ripped off the side of the raft … it's hard to tell if all the gear survived the ride. Let's hope everything's there, especially my hard-shell camera box!”

A couple hundred yards north, a break in the cliffs allowed us to get down to the shore and scramble upstream to the foot of the rapid. I still thought the recovery of even one little metal box—preferably the one with the satellite phone—was out of the question. My hopes rose when Ryan said he had helped recover rafts wrapped around boulders in the Grand Canyon.

“I don't see much gear,” I said.

“That's because it's underwater. The cargo net appears to be intact. This might not be as bad as it looks.”

If you say so, I thought.

Ryan was able to swim to the raft. At the spot where the current was least powerful, he pulled himself onto one of the raft tubes, then higher onto the flat top of the boulder. I had no idea he was that strong. The caribou meat he had recently eaten gets some of the credit, I'm sure.

From his perch on the boulder, Ryan was able to climb onto the pinned raft. He went after rope and carabiners first. He was hoping to rig a pulley system to ferry the gear bit by bit to the shore. While getting hit with freezing white water, he retrieved the one-hundred-foot coil of climbing rope he had brought along, with carabiners clipped to it. He had prepared for an emergency like the one we were looking at.

Ryan rigged his pulley system between the boat and the shore. Setting it up took several more swims on his part. I waded halfway to the raft when he was ready. Out at the raft, he grabbed hold of the gear and clipped it to “prussic knots” he had attached to the rope. I stood in shallow water heaving on the rope hand over hand. The first item I brought to shore was the ammo can with the first aid. The second was the can with the satellite phone. Ryan hollered over the sound of the rapid, “Open it up and see if the phone stayed dry!”

Heart in my throat, I did, and hollered back, “Not a drop!”

The third item I hauled to shore was Ryan's hard-shell camera box. “Want me to open it?” I yelled.

“Might as well find out now!”

His two cameras and his extra lenses were nestled in foam just like he'd left them. Same for the memory cards and the rest of his camera stuff. “Dry as a bone!” I reported.

My brother let out a victory whoop that might've carried to Herschel Island, if anyone was listening.

Some of our vinyl river bags had stayed sealed, others not. No big deal. Clothing would dry fast with round-the-clock sunshine and wind.

Here came my day bag with sunglasses, sunscreen, lip balm, bug repellent, energy bars, and more.

The big white cooler was heavier than it should have been, and no wonder. The river had gotten inside. All that fresh food meant for the first week was spoiled. Oh well, the first week was history anyway.

After every few minutes in the water, we had to recuperate, Ryan atop the boulder and me on a slab of rock beside the river. The last item to come ashore was the raft itself. It felt like the two of us were hauling in a whale. No wonder one of the raft's four perimeter tubes had deflated—it had a six-inch rip in it.

At the foot of the cliffs there wasn't a flat spot large enough for Ryan to do the repair. We had to roll the raft up and carry it out the same as everything else. Where the cliffs tailed into the river, we humped all the gear up to the first grassy spot that would serve as a campsite. We were both worse than spent.

My eyes bugged out at the sight of all the canned and packaged food in the larger ammunition boxes, all undamaged and watertight. Our tent bag was dry, and so was Ryan's big river bag with his sleeping bag and personal stuff. Mine had taken water. I hadn't folded the top with as many wraps as Ryan had said. I spread everything out to dry.