The Caribou Hunter

On the first afternoon, we parked at the edge of a quarry to site the rifle and take a few practice shots. I was nervous about the kickback — that was all I knew to worry about. We got out of the car, and I slung the gun over my shoulder. Wearing the first warm clothing of the year, I suddenly felt like some northern glamourpuss from a Bond film; I was about to ski down an alpine slope in a tight white one-piece, with fake fir trees bouncing behind me in the background. I also had an accent. It went like this: You know nussing about me. You only sink you do.

When you carry a gun, you step into the realm of mythology. I could have stood beside the car for half an hour, with the gun strung diagonally across my back and the gravel quarry looming grey above the scrubby trees, then turned around, gone home, and felt as if I’d been on a pretty satisfying adventure. But that wasn’t to be the end of it. There was shootin’ to be done.

I managed to hit the target some fifty metres away, but what shocked me wasn’t the kickback; it was the noise — very loud and very sudden. This was not the noise cracked celery makes in a sound studio but a real detonation. This was gunpowder. This was assassination.

My ears were ringing, and there was adrenaline in my fingertips. My heart was racing. I put the gun down, as if to denounce the power of it.

“Fuckin’ hell, you didn’t warn me about the noise. My God.” I shook my hands loose at the wrists. “I have no idea whether I hit that or not.”

“Let’s go and have a look.”

I started off at a walk and ended up running. I was expecting disappointment, but as I got closer I realized that not only had I hit the box; I was five centimetres shy of the bull’s eye from fifty paces out.”

That’s pretty impressive,” Michael said. “I think you’ll be fine.”

When the alarm went off at 5 a.m., there was only wide-eyed blackness. With flashlights and kerosene lamps to dress by, we made a fry-up of greasy eggs on awkward, thick slices of bread, and bacon that we didn’t eat but made sandwiches with. We drove through darkness to a dirt road off the highway that Michael’s dad had told us about—a popular caribou crossing between the barrens. The road was like Swiss cheese, and we couldn’t go over twenty kilometres an hour. “That’s why you should never buy a used rental,” Michael said, bottoming out again. “They’re cars nobody cares about.

“We reached the spot on the map and turned off our high beams. There was a pickup truck already there. Dawn was just breaking. A woman was sitting behind the wheel holding a 35mm camera to her chin. We nodded and slowed down. “See anything?”