Shooting Times & Country Magazine
We saw a 7ft grizzly, no bull
A week in Canada’s vast wilderness is a dream come true, and the chance to hunt caribou is the icing on the cake for Graham Downing
Since I was in my teens, I have been fascinated by the great Canadian wilderness, the huge swathe of the northern hemisphere that extends from the Rockies to the Arctic. The hope that one day I would be able to hunt that magnificent country remained no more than a dream for decades, but in 2019 the stars aligned and I grabbed with both hands the chance to hunt caribou in the mountains of northern British Columbia.
As wilderness goes, this place is about as good as it gets. There are no towns, villages, roads nor tracks for a couple of hundred miles. Only horse trails and the occasional deserted mining camp. The only way in from the nearest jumping-off point — the tiny Tahltan First Nation settlement of Dease Lake — is by floatplane, so after a flight from Heathrow to Yukon and a 700-mile drive along the Alaska Highway, we pitched up in the crystal calm of early autumn at the jetty. There Ken, our pilot, loaded a vintage de Havilland Beaver with camp stores and horse food along with our hunting kit.
Then, lifting off in a glittering cloud of spray, he threaded his way between the peaks of the Cassiar Mountains, banking steeply and putting down on the tiny Wade Lake, beside the spike camp that was to be home for the following week.
Wade Lake lies precisely on Canada’s continental divide. From one end, water drains into the Mackenzie river and the Arctic Ocean while from the other it heads for the Pacific. And at an altitude of 4,600ft it’s cold; even in August there was frost on the ground as our guides Gerry and Zane, who had ridden
in and pitched camp the previous day, saddled up the horses and made ready for the first day’s hunting.
In the 1970s I rode a little with the West Norfolk Foxhounds, but this was very different. Seated in a western saddle and with a .338 Ruger rifle slung in a holster beside me, I trekked upwards along precipitous trails through the treeline and out into the sub-arctic scrub beyond.
Breathtaking
The scenery was beyond breathtaking, with rugged peaks towering above and the headwaters of the mighty Stikine river winding far below, jewelled with sparkling beaver lakes. And range after range of hills
“A 7ft grizzly bear appeared over the top of the knoll — and headed straight for us”
receding to the horizon in shades of mauve and indigo.
There were five of us in the group. Gerry, an experienced guide out of Oregon who has hunted these northern hills for many years; Zane, our keen, young Kiwi horse wrangler; Rodrigo, a hunter from Mexico, my wife Veronica and me. Rodrigo had a tag for a mountain goat, while I had a caribou tag, and by day two it was becoming clear that caribou were thin on the ground.
Perhaps it was predation pressure from wolves, the unseasonal heavy snowfall a couple of weeks earlier that had moved the herds to new ground, or a combination of the two. Either way, we were spotting occasional cows and calves, but not the big bull that I was looking for.
Gerry took Veronica and me up Boulder Ridge, a long, rocky outcrop that lay to our west, its steep flanks covered in loose scree through which the horses carefully picked their way. The summit of the ridge was crowned by a crazy boulder, the size of a house, which had been dumped there aeons ago by Ice Age glaciers.
From the top of the ridge we looked across a rugged valley and at last started to see caribou. A cow and a calf, then a couple of young adults below us. Some 500 yards away was a rocky knoll on which a caribou calf was grazing. We watched it for some time and as we did so, the huge shape of a 7ft grizzly bear appeared over the top of the knoll behind the caribou.
Amazingly, with the knoll in between them the two animals never spotted each other. Though I was waiting for the grizzly to catch the scent of the young calf and set off in pursuit, it did not do so. Instead, the bear headed straight for us.
Dead ground
Veronica was back with the horses and Gerry and I were forward, with a narrow ravine between us and the approaching grizzly. That was just fine while the bear was in view, but when it disappeared into dead ground below us, we realised that it could now reappear at any moment 100 yards away.
Grizzlies in these parts are strictly protected and protocol allows for warning shots only.
Unless… Gerry spoke, quietly but urgently: “How many rounds have you got in that .338?” I answered: “One in the chamber and two in the magazine. Enough for a couple of warning shots.” “Nope,” said Gerry. “One warning shot only.”
The huge bear appeared in front of us. My thumb hovered over the safety and thoughts about point of aim ran through my head. The .338 Winchester Magnum is a beefy round. I had carefully zeroed the rifle on our arrival in camp and I was confident that, in extremis, I could stop a charging grizzly with it. But the bear had not spotted us and he quartered steadily past with a slow, ambling gait.
Gerry relaxed visibly. “OK, you can take photos now.”
It was only when the bear got downwind of us that his demeanour suddenly changed. Standing up to his full height and looking at us, he turned and ran.
Tinkling bells
Evenings in camp settled into a routine. Zane would feed the horses, hobble them and turn them out into a large area of pine scrub behind the shack where we all ate and in which he, Gerry and Rodrigo slept. Veronica and I shared a tent outside. The horses carried bells that tinkled around the margins of the camp like cow bells in an Alpine valley as we washed in the morning along the shore of the lake. Food was basic, cowboy-style, but wholesome, and when Rodrigo bagged a mountain goat, Zane stripped off the loin fillets that were cooked for supper.
But I was in the mountains to hunt caribou, so the next day Zane took me up through the treeline into a high valley lined with rough grass, heather and dwarf willow scrub already turning golden and crimson with the autumn. We rode for some hours, spotting a ptarmigan and flushing
a lovely covey of willow grouse as we trekked between the high peaks, stopping occasionally at some prominent rock to spy out the ground below us with our binoculars.
At length, Zane spotted a lone caribou. It was obviously a big chap and a long way off, perhaps 900 yards. But he was slowly heading our way. We rode onwards to a small group of trees where we dismounted and left the horses with Veronica, Zane and I continuing on foot.
The caribou had dropped down to just above the treeline but was still heading towards us. The wind was good and ahead of us was a big rocky ledge below which the animal looked set to pass. He was now no more than 350 yards away and closing steadily. Taking the rifle and my binoculars, I crawled forwards on to the ledge and carefully looked down at the approaching bull. A fine beast, I thought, with his chocolate brown body, grey neck and antlers still in velvet, and I prepared a comfortable position from which to take the shot.
But there was obviously something wrong. Zane was studying him through his glasses and broke the news that we were restricted to bulls with a minimum of five crown points each side. This chap had three.
I put the rifle down and reached into my pocket for my compact camera. The bull came almost directly under the ledge where we were lying, not more than 60 yards away. It would have been a perfect shot, but that’s hunting. You can travel thousands of miles and work for days to get yourself into the optimum place, but success or otherwise is down to nature.
Cows and calves
We saw several more cows and calves over the rest of the week, but no caribou herds and no more big bulls. Perhaps those cows had become separated from the herds in the recent snowfall, but I brought the caribou tag home with me, unfilled.
On the final morning we struck camp. Zane and Gerry loaded up the gear and remaining provisions on to the horses, wished us farewell and set off with the pack train for a full day’s ride back to base camp. Veronica and I waited in the absolute peace of that wonderful place until there came the distant sound of an approaching floatplane that picked us up from the lake shore and took us back to reality.
Looking down from the Beaver at the Cassiar Mountains for a final time, I could see that in the week since we had flown out of Dease Lake, the aspens along the lakeside had turned from green to gold.
“Gerry spoke, quietly but urgently, ‘How many rounds have you got in that .338?’”