Hunting Caribou | Life Below Zero
We had a really tough year this year. The Yukon River is kind of our life blood here, and we no longer have it as an option for getting food. So we're relying on getting moose, bears, and caribou. We had no luck getting the moose this year. The caribou have not shown up in this country until just recently. So Denise and I are on the hunt. There's fresh caribou tracks. I'm seeing a lot of sign today. We just had a fresh snow last night, so anything that we see out on the trail right now is gonna be fresh. So this is pretty exciting. It looks like there's at least two, maybe three. Small band. Small bands are harder to hunt. They're a lot more wary. So I'm hoping I can kinda come up on some that are maybe grazing. And if we can do that, I might have a chance of getting a little bit of meat. We're just gonna keep poking our way upriver and see if we can't find one. Get a shot. I'm at a big disadvantage right now. We're on a small river that has a lot of bends and so you come up on 'em before you can really see 'em to stalk 'em. So, it's really challenging.
DENISE BECKER: The animals notice absolutely everything. They're extremely in tune. The only chance we're gonna have when we're on snow machines is to come up to a corner and get a long view down where they haven't had a chance to hear us yet.
ANDY (off screen): I just ran into a bunch of caribou. They came out this way and then they went back this way. They heard Denise and I before we could get the machines stopped. Looks like I scared the (bleep) out of those caribou. There's a bunch of 'em. Well, not a bunch. It looks like maybe five or six or whatever.
DENISE: Nice.
ANDY: A few more seconds, and maybe we would have got a shot off. It would have been an awful long shot though. It's really hard to hunt caribou in this kinda country because it, like, they're so fast.
DENISE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
ANDY: You know. Thirty seconds and they're in this brush and you'll never see 'em, so...
DENISE: Well, let's keep going.
ANDY: Yeah.