Morning Caribou before Coffee (Clip) | Alaska: The Next Generation

You can never really put your finger on exactly what caribou are going to do. They move from one place to another, and just when I think I start to understand them, they do something completely different.

So I just woke up and came outside to go to the bathroom with Java, and there's like a couple of dozen caribou, like sleeping on the lake right now. Gotta be quiet. Gotta be super quiet. The snow is really crunchy right now. Generally, this time of year, the caribou are all far gone. So I've been like subsisting off of small game, squirrels, rabbits.

There they are. It's like a fire [inaudible]. It's like can't really prepare for this kind of thing; they just go down so fast. Like I haven't had breakfast. I haven't had coffee. I haven't got anything, and they're not losing their sleep.

It's like the most incredible thing I've seen. It's gotta be one of the hardest stalks you can ever put on a caribou. I hear about six, seven hundred yards away from them. Basically, what happened was one of them felt uneasy, and it jumped up. Herd instinct, the rest of them jump up. Some of them are still laying down. They're starting to kind of go back down a little bit.

So I'm just going to let them be at ease. They don't have the best eyesight, so they're going to think that I'm a caribou as long as I'm not posing any sort of threat. So why approach this? Let them see me. So none of them get rattled and jump up like they just did.

So if they're all just looking at me and I'm kind of just walking at them slowly, not posing a threat, they're going to let me walk toward them. Let's go. Holding the gun above my head. Just kind of show it's like antlers. It's the little subtle things like that encourage the caribou to believe that I'm just another caribou.

This is the craziest stalk, man. I've gone, like, 100 yards. It's freaking nerve-wracking, man. Try to close that gap a little bit more.