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It was April and I’d heard my Inuit guide’s footsteps before he said, “This doesn’t look too good!”
I had just left Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island in the Arctic on an umingmak (muskox) hunt.
We had just hit a ridge on the ice and the sleigh I was riding in had tipped over, shooting me and everything else inside the sleigh out onto the snow and ice.
I looked up and thought to myself ‘this is going to be a long week’, as out of my snow-filled goggles I could still see the (dew line) distant, early-warning building just outside Cambridge Bay that had been used during the cold war. I believe there are still some people working there today.
I looked at my guide, grinned, and asked, “Does this happen often?”
He grinned back and said that I was the first hunter he had dumped out onto the ice.
We pushed the sleigh back up on its runners, reloaded everything along with myself, and continued on. I did notice we were traveling a little slower this time.
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| The old bull muskox. |
We traveled about 60 to 70 miles out to a shack in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me of a large ice fishing shack and it was to be our home for the next few days.
The next morning, it was just a wee bit nippy, like -50 Celsius with a little wind on top of that. We had to put small lanterns under the hoods of the snowmobiles to warm them up before we started them.
We headed out to find the muskox. We stopped at a few inukshuk (stone markers); like our sign posts in the south, these markers help in the navigation of the north.
At every rise in the ground, we would stop and glass for muskox. Finally, late in the afternoon, we spotted our first dark spots that were moving across the snow a few miles away. We made our way towards these dark spots and after an hour or so, we parked behind a rise. We walked and crawled up to the top of the rise and there they were, my first muskox on the hoof. Their long shaggy hair was hanging to the ground and blowing in the wind.
I thought back to the research I had done on these shaggy beasts. The muskoxen or its ancestors have been present in North America for at least 100,000 years. In the early 1900’s, they had been hunted for their meat and hides to the point the Canadian Government passed a law against hunting the muskox.
With over 60,000 muskox in Nunavut today, there is a limited number that can be harvested every year and that was why I was here. I took a good look at the muskox and found one good old bull amongst them.
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| Darren Cooney with his muskox. |
I slid a 180-grain Nosler partition into my Remington 300 ultra mag and let it go into his lung area. He took a few steps and just stood there. I could see he was hit good and in a few seconds, he started to wobble and then tipped over.
My Inuit guide and I made our way over to him. He was exactly what I was looking for, an old warrior with a chunk missing from the boss of his horns. He had been through some wars.
We butchered the old fella up on the snow. We sure didn’t have to worry about the meat spoiling from the heat because as fast as we deboned the meat, it would freeze in minutes.
I was wearing gloves the whole time and my guide was barehanded, he had said he was born in a snowbank. Geez!
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| The sleigh used on the hunt. |
Once we returned to Cambridge Bay to split the meat up amongst some of the villagers, it was time for me to head home. I had such a good time on this trip that I thought to myself that I might just have to visit the North and the Inuit’s again.
As soon as I could, I called the people who I had booked this trip with, Halina and Jerome Knap of Canada North Outfitting and told them I would like to go on another adventure. They said they could line up a walrus hunt for me back in Nunavut.
Hmmm, I just might have to return to the Land of the North. ■
To read Part II, click here.
For previous Reader Stories click here.
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