A Simple Caribou Hunt Becomes A Journey Into A Proud Past
In geologic time, Nunavik is a land of newness, because little can be old in a place that until recently was covered with ice. The people are new, the caribou are new, even the rocks are new, laid on top of the land by the melting, moving glaciers. Looking across the clean and barren landscape creates illusions in scale. The country from horizon to horizon could be a rocky scarp as big as your backyard.
Nunavik is more than a rock scarp; it lives and breathes with the life of the tundra, the lichen, the moss, the berry, the fish, the caribou, the wolf and the Inuitthe people. Lying between Hudson Bay and the North Atlantic Ocean and capping the northernmost portion of the vast province of Quebec, Nunavik is a place where natives hunt beluga whale and walrus in the spring, catch char and trout in the summer, trap wolf and fox in the winter and hunt caribou year-round. The simple lives of these northern people have, until recently, changed little for thousands of years. They are the last vestige of primitives on the North American continent, as close as you will come to knowing natives who have only recently stepped into the modern world, who still understand, and in some cases practice, the culture that sustained them here for so long.
I have hunted the caribou of the Northwest Territories, of Manitoba and the lands west of Hudsons Bay, and I have seen the people there, the Denai, almost decimated by the policies of an intrusive government. So when I traveled farther east to this peninsula that looks across to Baffin Island, I expected the same kind of natives, the same kind of disenfranchisement, a culture disconnected from its roots, from the land, the animals and its own traditions, then I met David Angutinquak.
avid is the best of the new generation of Inuit, enterprising and forward-thinking yet steeped in the richness of his own culture, and proud of it. I knew from the moment I met himfrom the time I first heard his enthusiasm for his land, for the hunt, for fishing and particularly for bowhuntingthat I had been matched with the right person.
My primary purpose for visiting Nunavik, of course, was to bowhunt, to take two caribou bulls if possible during this hunt arranged by Sammy Cantafio of Ungava Adventures. David would be my guide. In addition to bowhunting, he wished to spend a good portion of our time exploring the land together, looking for signs of the camps, the hunting grounds and the tools and markers of his people. I felt privileged to accompany him.
READING THE SIGNS Developing an eye for the arctic is like any other pursuit. At first glance the landscape is a blur, lacking detail or life, and certainly lacking caribou. Then, little by little the land reveals itself, its creases and crannies and its creatures.
David and I spent the first evening trekking to a distant, established caribou crossing. The land yielded willingly to our knee-high boots, and our gait was fueled by the enthusiasm of a fresh hunt. When a small lake of several acres blocked our path we simply forded the shallow water. David led the way and I followed, happy to see the bottom was gravelly and firm, not boot-sucking like the Midwestern sloughs Id grown up with.
A half-hour into our trek we spotted several caribou bull a mile away, picking their way across the tundra. David guessed the animals might be headed for our crossing, so we pushed on through the moss, scattered rocks, short sedge and caribou trails, hoping to intercept the band. We arrived at a muddy crossing formed between two arms of water and decided to wait out the bulls, but no sooner had we settled in than four cow caribou and two calves made their way past, catching our wind once they had crossed. Our odorundoubtedly mine in particular, smelling of Montreal, Kujuaaq, airplane fuel and God knows what elsesent the animals fleeing.
A short time later, what may have been one of the same cow caribou came straight back through the same crossing. David explained this to me. She is going back to warn the others, the bulls, about the hunters (us). I found his reasoning quaint, and though I doubted its validity, I am not one to totally discount any natural phenomenon. An hour later and long after they should have arrived, we were still waiting for the bulls as darkness settled. Hmm?
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HUNTING FOR THE PAST Because David and his relatives are coastal Inuit, much of the country we were seeing was new to him. He had traveled here overland from the Ungava Bay coast by snow machine but had never seen this country free of the cover of snow. His ancestors, however, had camped and hunted here, making long overland treks in both summer and winter. We were to see the remnants of those camps, those journeys.
Our first task was to take a caribou bull, but David wanted me to see a place a mile from camp by boat where his ancestors had ambushed caribou. We entered a small bay where David cut the motor and gently guided the boat into a cranny in the shoreline. Above us, set on a smooth-rock ridge, was an obvious cairn, the rock markers used to identify significant locations. Pointed at the top and shaped like an elongated triangle, the single rock at a distance reminded me of a perched falcon with wings folded at its sides. We would see other cairns of this general configuration.
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In geologic time, Nunavik is a land of newness, because little can be old in a place that until recently was covered with ice. The people are new, the caribou are new, even the rocks are new, laid on top of the land by the melting, moving glaciers. Looking across the clean and barren landscape creates illusions in scale. The country from horizon to horizon could be a rocky scarp as big as your backyard.
BOWHUNTER