The Caribou Hunter

A man in a trucker’s cap and a green quilted shell over a beige wool sweater came around the back of the truck. “Saw two moose about a half-hour ago.”

“You’re after moose, then, are you?” Michael’s accent changes a bit when he goes back home.

The alder bushes parted with a noise of scratched plastic, and another man walked out in a green and navy windbreaker, also wearing a trucker’s cap. Not a spot of orange on him anywhere. A gaunt man with porridge skin. He was carrying a rifle on his shoulder. His face was tight, and his eyes were wide, and he was breathing hard. “Jeez, boy, I almost got him. Would’ve had the two of them if we’d been here sooner. If you sees them, shoot one of them for me, will you?”

The men got back into the cab and slammed the door, the woman started up the truck, and they drove off down the road. They stopped again after a couple of hundred metres. The men got out again and rustled back into the bushes.

“Interesting method,” Michael said.

“What do you mean? ”

“All that noise.”

For a moment, I had felt a wary camaraderie — competition and brotherhood. The exhilaration on that man’s face spoke of the wild life off road. The bleak desolation of the open marshes, then bordering these the dark woods, and in the woods, the silent herds of caribou tucked in along the treeline, breathing quietly in the exact spot you’re staring at, but all you see is nothing.

We walked into the woods, where it felt darker, and we got lost for a little while, cracking our way through a web of spruce boughs, over moss-covered logs, holding the compass ahead of us. We checked the map. But things looked the same in all directions — dark green. There was a grey sky growing lighter overhead, above the treetops. We came across a patch of flattened grass in a small arbour. “That’s where they slept,” Michael whispered.

We found our way out and onto the open marsh. The ground was soft and made a soggy suction against my rubber boots. Or else it rose in a dry hump, crunchy with lichen. The sky turned white, and a breeze sighed over the land, making the shadows move. I felt like I was breathing with my eyes. “There,” one of us would say, and then, “No.” We walked slowly and stopped often to raise the rifle and scan the treeline through the scope.