Never Say Die (12 page)

The wind died suddenly. Out of the tundra came the mosquitoes. Out of my day bag came my bug shirt, and over my head it went. I threw up the hood and zipped the netting shut across my neck. How sweet it was, and what a good feeling to have some bear protection again—my pouch of bear bangers, our backup can of pepper spray, and the air horn.

This was the first I'd laid eyes on the air horn. It looked like a can of soda with a dinky red trumpet mounted on top, and it came with a holster for wearing on your hip. “Does it work?” I asked.

Ryan shrugged. “Some say yes, some say no.”

We put camp together, tables and chairs and cooking gear and all. After a supper of chili and corn bread—chili cooked on the propane stove and corn bread baked over charcoal in a Dutch oven—we crawled into the tent. I was so tired I didn't even waste the lung power to inflate my ground pad. I just rolled it out, unzipped my sleeping bag and got in, grabbed my fleece jacket for a pillow, and crashed like a fighter plane going down in the sea.

A
fter thirteen hours of sleep I crawled out of the tent. It was ten in the morning, and the wind was blowing strong enough to keep the bugs down. Over a breakfast of pancakes, fried Spam, and oatmeal with peaches, I found out that my brother had been up for hours. He had already sewn up the rip in the raft tube and glued a patch over it.

I asked Ryan if he'd seen any caribou moving through. He hadn't. I said, “Maybe that herd swimming the river was the biggest bunch we'll see.”

My brother feigned horror. “Now that I've got my cameras? Tell me that it isn't so!”

I wasn't sure what to tell him. If he knew how vast the range of the Porcupine herd was, he would know he didn't stand much of a chance. Granted, they weren't in their winter range in the trees down south in the Porcupine River country, but their summer range was vast in itself.

“Jonah saw big numbers once, really big numbers, here in the Firth country, but he was lucky.”

Ryan winked and said, “I brought along a secret weapon. Actually, two.”

“Really? What are they?”

“Our satellite phone and our handheld GPS.”

“Where do those get you?”

“To the post-calving aggregation, I hope. That's what the caribou biologists call the phenomenon when lots of smaller herds gather into herds numbering in the tens of thousands. When it happens, it's usually about a month after calving.”

“That's what Jonah must have seen, but how do a phone and a GPS get you there?”

“Here's how. The Canadian and American caribou biologists who study the Porcupine herd have put satellite collars on a hundred and twenty cows. The location of each one can be pinpointed day or night by the twenty-four satellites that make up the Global Positioning System. Keep in mind that each of those collared caribou represents about one thousand that aren't collared.”

“Our hunters know all about that. It's on a government website. We used to be able to track the caribou on our computers. Then they made it so you could only see where the caribou were in past years.”

“So you couldn't use it as a hunting tool.”

“Right.”

“Did you, before they pulled it?”

“Me and Jonah, no, because Jonah is against putting satellite collars on the animals—bears, caribou, whatever. So we never took advantage.”

“Did other hunters take advantage?”

“Some did. Who's to blame them? They were trying to feed their families.”

“Sounds like you don't always agree with your grandfather.”

“Of course not. As I tried to explain to him, tracking caribou with your laptop was just the newest tool, like rifles taking the place of spears. Anyway, it didn't last long. Nobody was surprised when the government quit showing where the caribou were. So how can you track the … wait a second … do you have some kind of inside information?”

Ryan's dark beard parted with a wide smile. “Yep, I've got a friend who's a caribou biologist. Lives in Whitehorse. Ken Logan has been studying the Porcupine herd for a dozen years or more. He even spent five months following them on the ground once. Here's the plan: I call him up on the sat phone, he calls up a bookmark on his computer—at the office or at home—and he's looking at the present location of those hundred and twenty dots we were just talking about, superimposed over a map of northeast Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada.”

“He tells you if a bunch of the dots are coming together—if the mother of all herds is gathering—and you hike to that location?”

“Steering by my GPS,” he agreed with a nod and a smile.

“I bet you checked in with him this morning. What did he say? Are the caribou gathering?”

My brother surprised me with a shrug. “I didn't call.”

“Why not? That's what you came for.”

“I'm not in a rush.”

I put my coffee down. “After ten days, and what we've been through, you aren't in a rush?”

Ryan took a long sip from his mug. “It's a matter of first things first.”

“Like what?”

“I'm waiting on your feelings about where we stand.”

“My feelings? I don't get it.”

“Okay, I'll spit it out. After everything you've been through, you might want to think of putting the pedal to the metal tomorrow.”

“Meaning what?”

“We could reach the coast in a couple of days. By tomorrow afternoon we would be close enough to put in the call to Red.”

“You'd give up on finding the caribou and taking your pictures?”

Ryan looked me square in the eye. “That's not nearly as important to me as you are. After what I've put you through, I am highly motivated to get you home safe and sound.”

For a second I was about to jump in and agree with him. Here was the chance to get home soon and in one piece after all that hardship. My natural instinct, though, was to hold back and think about it. Strange to say, I hadn't even thought of quitting. Since we'd gotten the raft back, I'd assumed we were going to chase after the caribou.

I sat there letting this soak in. The sooner I got home, the better my chances of seeing my grandfather before he slipped away. I pictured what that would be like. Jonah would ask, “Did you see caribou far as your eye could see?” I would have to say, “No, Jonah, we had some trouble. We had to give it up, didn't really try….”

That was hardly the good-bye I'd been picturing. And I really did believe Jonah when he said he'd be there when I got back, that he wasn't ready to make his last journey just yet. My brother and I had plenty of food, and nobody was expecting us anytime soon. July 15 was the date Ryan and Red had agreed on for Red to pick us up on the shore of the Beaufort Sea. July 15 was a long ways off—twenty-one days.

But did it really make sense to patch up the trip after it had started so badly? To go out on the land, for who knew how long, after we'd lost more than half of our bear protection, such as it was? We'd already had more than a lifetime's worth of bear trouble on this trip … wasn't it crazy to risk even more?

Here was another thing that argued for calling it quits. Even if we did find the mother of all herds, how was Jonah going to feel about the way we did it? He was going to ask how we tracked the caribou, the signs on the land that we followed.

I decided to spit it out. I said, “Jonah wouldn't like the idea of us tracking caribou that have been chased by helicopters into nets and then tranquilized. Give me an example that would convince him it's okay for those government experts to put satellite collars on the caribou.”

“Fair enough. You can tell him some of the things the caribou biologists have learned about the Porcupine caribou using these methods. For starters, they've found out that two-thirds of the calves are born on the Alaska side of the coastal plain. Only one-third are born on the Canadian side.”

“We already knew that. Like Jonah always says, just ask the old hunters.”

“Well, you know how it is, the science guys are all about data and facts. They set out to learn why the caribou calve more on the Alaska side. Part of that involved studying the survival rate of calves born to collared mothers on the Alaska side compared to those on the Canadian side. Get this: calves born on the Alaska side survive more often than calves born on the Canadian side.”

“Never heard that. How come?”

“Here's what seems to be the answer. The forage that produces the most nutritious milk—cotton grass—grows more abundantly on the Alaska portion of the calving grounds. Thanks to cotton grass, caribou milk has the highest fat content of any land mammal.”

“Cool. I didn't know that.”

“Here's something else about the Alaska side of the calving grounds: there's fewer predators over there. The land is too flat and wet for wolves to make their dens. The wolves have to stay within reach of their dens to be able to feed their young.”

“Okay, but how does knowing all that change anything?”

“Well, the calving grounds on the Canadian side lie within Ivvavik National Park, which was created to permanently protect them.”

“Sure, that's why we agreed to the park. Ivvavik means ‘birthing place' in our language.”

“Here's the rub. On the Alaska side, the calving grounds don't have permanent protection.”

“Why not?”

“When the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was created back in 1980, oil had already been discovered underneath the strip of coastal plain where the caribou drop their calves. Congress postponed the decision whether to develop that small piece of the overall refuge for oil or protect it for the caribou. The way it stands today, it's still up to which way the political winds are blowing.”

“That's not right. What kind of wildlife refuge is that?”

“It is what it is, and it comes up for a vote every few years. It's a squeaker every time. The pro-development senators show pictures of caribou grazing in front of pipelines, and claim you can take the oil out without harming the caribou. They never mention the studies done by the American and Canadian caribou biologists. Maybe they don't even look at them.”

“What do the studies say?”

“That caribou can tolerate a certain amount of development where they graze, but none on their calving grounds. If their birthing place becomes an oil field, the Porcupine caribou herd would likely collapse.”

“You're going to put all of that in your
National Geographic
article?”

“For sure.
National Geographic
has eight and a half million subscribers. A new article about the Porcupine herd and those caribou studies will help, no doubt about it.”

“People way down there actually care?”

“They don't want the caribou to go the way of the buffalo. That's why I'm after the photos, to show that the caribou still roam in vast numbers, and are worth saving. And if I can put a human face on the subject by featuring Aklavik as one of the thirteen Native communities in Canada and Alaska that depend on the caribou, people will have even more reason to care.”

So much for thinking that my brother wouldn't be able to write about the caribou and us. He must've spent no end of time learning all this stuff before he came up here. So much for thinking he had to be a hunter to care about hunters.

Now I knew. Ryan and I—Jonah, too—were all on the same side. “Call Whitehorse,” I said.

I
jumped up and went for the sat phone. It was a clunker, nothing like a cell phone. “Call Whitehorse, Ryan. Right now. Let's find out if the dots are coming together.”

“Only if you're going to sleep on it tonight, whatever we find out. I don't want you passing up the chance to head straight home without thinking it through.”

“Deal. Let's make the call.”

Ryan put the sat phone on speaker so I could follow the conversation. His friend the caribou biologist picked up. Ken Logan was surprised that Ryan hadn't checked in earlier. “Thought you might have had some trouble.”

“We did,” Ryan agreed. “Long story. We're fine now.”

“Glad to hear it. What's your present location?”

Ryan gave him our GPS coordinates, adding that the river map showed us just upstream of Surprise Rapid and Big Bend Roller Coaster.

“I was thinking of you yesterday,” Logan said. “My computer monitor showed two of our collared caribou about to cross the Firth, heading east. Wondered if you might be in position to photograph a pretty good mess of caribou as they swam the river. I left a message with the GPS coordinates on your sat phone.”

“We weren't checking our messages. We happened to be there, though. Saw fifteen hundred or so.”

“Good deal. Since then, lots of dots have been crossing the river downstream of your current position.”