The story behind the caribou inside Chelsea Alehouse

(Publisher’s note: This is the story about how this caribou head ended up in the Chelsea Alehouse.)

By Rick Taylor

I grew up in Canada and a large component of our aboriginal education focused on First Nations and Inuit studies. 

They are, and continue to be, revered in Canada. The education system places a great deal of respect on these wonderful people and their unique cultures. 

Perhaps it’s because they are among the best when it comes to wildlife management in ever-changing ecosystems, or because of the respect they place on the animals they kill to survive.

I’d like to think those attributes, both culturally and spiritually, wore off on me as a child and continue to guide me today. I have, and continue to feel, a deep-rooted connection to this earth.

Some may scoff at this notion, but I’m the biggest tree hugger I know … and yes, I hunt.

The date was Aug. 11, 2017. My guide Travis, a young and strong packer from New Zealand and I had made it back to our Alaskan campsite after a 15-mile hike with a Dall Sheep shared between our backpacks.

I was carrying sheep meat and personal items weighing 90 pounds in my Stone Glacier backpack and I had it easy compared to everybody else. We had hiked up and down mountains, crossed rivers, traversed through shale slides and alder tree groves.

The steepness of our terrain didn’t allow us to make any mistakes.

In fact, there were three places where losing our balance would have certainly sent us uncontrollably down the mountain and into the abyss.

My complete and total physical exhaustion allowed me to sleep very well that night. This day, without exaggeration, was the hardest and most physically demanding day of my entire life. And, that’s saying a lot, considering I’m almost 50 years old, and was a former communications lineman.

The next morning, we got up, had terrible coffee along with an MRE breakfast of scrambled eggs. An MRE, (Meal Ready to Eat), is freeze-dried food in a tinfoil bag. You add water and stir for 8 minutes and there you go – perhaps the worst food you’ll ever eat.

Travis and I went back to where we had seen this magnificent caribou twice before. Let’s not forget or take for granted that Travis was my only lifeline and my only way to get out of the rugged mountains of Alaska. I also had a Garmin Reach – a sophisticated GPS system that can also text for help if needed. But that won’t help me against a bear attack, or a host of other potential life-threatening issues on this hunt.

We are not apex predators out here and I was reminded of this numerous times.

We had this stunning vantage point high on a saddle. We were surrounded by mountains on all fronts. Travis saw mountain caribou about 5 miles away and he pointed them out to me.  We quickly decided that they were too far away to go after and to focus on finding a caribou in closer vicinity. 

Travis was far better at glassing for caribou than I was.  He always had a way of finding moose before I did, grizzly bears before I did, numerous caribou before I did and black bears before I did.  

He had “trained eyes” and I often looked to him as the professional and followed his every instruction throughout this “once in a lifetime” hunting experience. 

No matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t see a caribou in our area. I kept looking over to Travis for inspiration and his ever-keen ability to spot wild game.  And, I was growing weary as we sat on this saddle for more than three hours without any luck.

How could this be?

We had seen this bull caribou for two days in a row and today, he’s gone? 

Caribou meat is my favorite and I really wanted to come home with some.  I had been on two successful caribou hunts in Canada years earlier and I was eager to try putting more meat in my freezer. This was a 10-day Alaskan hunt and it was only day two, so I felt confident that I would get an opportunity, but hoped it would be the caribou we’d seen several times.

Not because of his antler size, but because of his close proximity to our campsite. 

I searched high and low for hours and had no luck. Travis wasn’t deterred and told me that we could come back to glass after lunch. After all, cloud cover had taken over the sunny skies and we felt a few sprinkles, too. It made for an amazing panoramic vista, watching the clouds roll in and the rain hit the mountains and meadows with a gentle swaying motion from the winds.

I felt my time on this mountain was coming to a close when I looked over to my right and saw sunlight breaking through the clouds lighting up the steep mountainside about a mile and a half away.  I should have taken a picture but chose to look through my binoculars and focus on the task at hand. 

What a minute… what was that?

Then it happened.

I caught movement to where the sunlight hit the mountain, it was like a highlighted area in a world of grey.  Out of nowhere, this massive caribou trotted down the mountain, from my 3 o’clock position toward the left heading to an open meadow down below.  It was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life. 

It was almost as if God (or fate) gave this caribou a gentle nudge toward the meadow where we had seen him before. I motioned to Travis to see what I was witnessing and pointed in the general direction of travel.  Funny, for the first time it was I who found an animal and not Travis.

He picked up on the movement and we watched the caribou settle into feeding routine at the meadow that was well over a mile away. Travis quickly told me to grab my gear as we were about to make a stalk on this caribou. 

It was happening, and it was happening right now. This is not a test. All my training started to kick in on two fronts. First, my hiking preparation as I had done so many times throughout the Arboretum in Ann Arbor. Secondly, my shooting range time at the Washtenaw Sportsmen Club where I was consistently shooting a softball sized bullseye at 600 yards. The primary terrain between the caribou and us consisted of shale slides, alders and steep downhill slopes.

We had closed the distance from about 1.5 miles away to 405 yards.  We couldn’t get any closer because we didn’t have any cover to hide behind.  However, we did have elevation on our side.  We placed ourselves in a position where we were shooting down on the caribou, this decision increased our odds of not being detected.

It really stinks being left handed, especially on this day. What really stinks is that the high side of the mountain is to my right.  Now, if I were right handed, it would’ve been really easy to lean forward into my rifle in the prone position and let the slope of the mountain act as my lever.

However, as a left hander, I had to do things differently-much differently.  I had to hand shovel shale dirt from my right side and use it to create a hill on my left side.  I would nervously look down to the caribou remembering how thankful I was that it was still there and hadn’t run off.  Finally!  I had a rifle rest that might actually work. Believe me when I say this rest wasn’t optimal what so ever.  I had to trust in my training, practice and experience.

I asked Travis, who was 10 feet behind me, to range the distance between the caribou to myself.  The ranging was 435 yards. That’s almost four and a half football fields away, end to end.  I had sustained winds to consider and elevation to take into account.  We’re talking about MOA (Minutes Of Angle) and DOPE, (Data On Personal Equipment).  In other words, how fast the bullet travels, the distance to the target, humidity, elevation, ballistic coefficients, wind velocities, among other factors. 

Travis had his video camera rolling and I prepared for the shot.  Years of experience told me to slow down my heart rate, slowly pull my trigger and stay on target after the shot so that I wouldn’t yank the shot to high and right.  The time was here and the time was now.

I got the go ahead from Travis to take the shot. I adjusted my scope turret 7 clicks of MOA to accommodate for the distance.  I waited for the caribou to stop and I slowly squeezed off the trigger.

Looking back at the video, you can actually see the bullet cutting through the air; we call this a vapor trail.  In less than a third of a second the bullet hit the caribou right behind the shoulder, exactly where I aimed from a distance so far away. 

The caribou ran from about 70 yards before falling over to its death.  Elation, empathy and relief filled my emotions as this magnificent creature made its way into another world. In a matter of 12 seconds, this animal was out of commission.

Unlike cattle, this caribou wasn’t castrated, it wasn’t fed antibiotics and it certainly didn’t live in a fenced in area only to be shot in the head at an undisclosed slaughterhouse on a conveyor line.

This caribou died quickly, and the timing of his death couldn’t have come at a better time since he wouldn’t have lived much longer.  He had two abscessed teeth, the rest of his teeth were severely worn down-some of them right down to the gum line.

I took pictures to show this because he probably wouldn’t have survived the winter.  Travis and I waited 15 minutes before we headed down to find our caribou. My guide Travis is much younger than I am, he made it down long enough to turn on the video camera and catch my reaction to finding one very large caribou. 

His video shows my first-hand reaction of this experience.  I was taken back by the sheer size of this animal, it was a huge bodied caribou. It was so large that Jim & Son’s Taxidermy in Chelsea said it was the largest bodied Caribou they had ever worked on in their facility.

Caribou is my favorite meat and I would come home with close to 200 pounds of meat if I chose to. I decided to donate 120 pounds to the local homeless shelter before leaving for home, it seemed like the right thing to do.

My Outfitter (my guides boss) had another group of hunters with a guide about 4 miles behind us.  Travis got ahold of them with his satellite phone and asked if we could borrow the packers in order to haul back the meat back to our camp, in one trip instead of two.

Thankfully, the other packers said yes (a $100 bill per person might have helped them say yes) and met with us soon after we had the meat butchered into manageable pieces.

My 10-day hunt for Dall Sheep and Caribou was now over, my trip to Alaska was coming to an end. The torrential rains came in and we were stranded on the mountain for 2 days.  We were so thankful to finally hear the engines of a Super Cub airplane.

I had 4 more days in Alaska so I went fishing for Halibut, Salmon and Cod in Homer. On a side note, please use North Country Charters for your fishing needs. Captain Ben, was fantastic and the fishing was epic. But, that’s a story for another day.

My family and friends have enjoyed numerous meals from this trip and we continue to do so. 

Most readers will be very surprised to know that I had no intention of mounting this Caribou. Seriously, I only shot the caribou for the meat and I wanted to have the hide tanned to be used as a blanket.  My guide, however, insisted that I have this caribou mounted because of its size.

(Publisher’s Note: Once back in Michigan, Taylor realized it was too big to hang in his house so he contacted the owners of the Chelsea Alehouse and asked if they’d house it there. And patrons can now see it in the Alehouse’s new location on Main Street.)

Thank you for letting me tell this story.

Rick Taylor