Tundra Nutrition: Human-Powered Caribou Hunting in the Alaska Range

When summer leaves turn from green to yellow, an ancient instinct takes hold; autumn is the harvest season. All northern creatures—the bear, squirrel, muskrat, ermine, ptarmigan, porcupine, moose, caribou, and more—all know, deep in their genes, that winter is coming. Human beings, still emerging from the Ice Age, and poorly adapted for modernity and civilization, also feel the compelling siren call to store up calories for the coming cold and dark.

In the first week of September, myself, along with my fiance, Kim McNett, my brother, Clay, and long-time best friend, Mark Teckenbrock, caravanned from our homes in southern Alaska into the interior of the state to hunt caribou by human power. We would ride bikes with trailers into the enchanted mountains of the Alaska Range, camp, catch grayling, drink cold water, wake up early, try to outmaneuver cunning and fleet-of-foot creatures, and rekindle our ancestral genes. Three and a half million years of hominid, hunter-gatherer evolution laid in wait.

On our fourth day, my friend Mark and I crawled on our hands and knees on the rain-soaked tundra, gently sliding our rifles ahead of us. The two caribou we’d been watching through our binoculars and stocking for the last several hours were now just a couple hundred yards below us. Vibrant red and yellow leaves of a dwarf willow bush offered us a blind. The caribou approached the base of the hill, from the wide valley beyond, and then disappeared behind the convexity below us. They were close. We waited.