One Yukon hunter’s years-long quest for a really, really old ram

Early that August, Graeme and I did just that up in zone 7-22, nestled in the Yukon’s Coastal Mountains east of Kusawa Lake. We looked. And we walked. It was hot. The rams were also up high, bands of plentiful bright-eyed youngsters with straight backs, six-packs and light-coloured horns, thin and beautifully tipped out, some above the nose. It was quite a collection of six- and seven-year-olds. But where were the veterans? Had the warm spell in January melted the snow and covered the grass on the winter range with ice, starving them? Was it the late spring? Was it wolves?

After three days, we moved camp to the other side of the zone. We saw lots more of the same until the sixth day. Far in one corner we found them, a group of seven. Very Canadian. One ram, in particular, stood out. It was very special. Not really, really big, but really, really old. He had it all: a swayback, a pot-belly, battered up dark horns, and a face that could sink 1,000 ships. This guy had character. But we let him be.

Why? Commitment issues. It’s generational they say. Leave your options open. Besides, if we took a ram, our hunt would be over. Did we want to go home, sit on the deck for the rest of the season and watch robins hop around on the front lawn? Nope. And so we left the mountains with light packs.

Two weeks later, though, we were back. Rams move around more than you might think, so we were hoping a really, really big and really, really old ram might show up out of somewhere. It’s happened before.

Our second hunt went much like the first one, except that no hunts are ever quite exactly the same. We ran into a grizzly at 50 yards, then encountered another large boar draped over a ripe, half-eaten sheep carcass, its belly distended. Neither of them wanted us, thankfully. Why? Commitment issues. Or perhaps we didn’t smell right.

After three days of hunting, we found the group of seven again. Pure white they were against the brown sandstone next to a pale green slope, with dark fir trees below and a turquoise waterway bottoming out the valley. The ram with the dark, broomed-off horns was bedded down on a promontory slightly above the rest.

Graeme took a long look through the spotting scope. “Better take him, Dad,” he advised. “That’s a really, really great ram.”

“Let’s do it,” I said. “For sure.”

Graeme planned the stalk: stay above them, out of sight, crawl to the edge of the slope, then take care when you peek over. It took us about an hour, giving me lots of time to think about old rams and memories. I thought of an Ernest Thompson Seton story I’d read as a kid called “Krag, the Kootenay Ram,” about the haunting of a hunter remembering what had been. Then I recalled the ancient 14-year-old ram we watched a number of years earlier, getting by on buckbrush leaves he stripped off with his gums. Three front teeth, hollow haunches and little fat were what we found when we dressed him out. What would his last days have been like if my other son, then 16-year-old Jody, had not taken him that October?

Then I contemplated the old ram below us on the rampart, gazing past his cohorts over the vast extended valley framed by forest, cliff and mountain. Was he also in his last summer? I thought of the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and wondered how many more years I would walk the alpine trails with my boys, now strapping young men who could carry more and walk just as far as their father.

Of old rams and old men, dignity and endurance, courage and camaraderie, adventure and contemplation, beginnings and endings—all these thoughts pile up and mingle freely in thin air and high places.

I took off my hat and slithered forward, up and over the large, flat rock just below the rim. “He’s going to be exactly 200 yards below us when we get to that rock,” Graeme said, motioning ahead as he outlined the stalk. Interesting, I mused to myself. Twenty years earlier, I judged the sheep, planned the stalks and called the shots. Now Graeme did. How does that happen?

The wind was behind us, rising with the warm afternoon sun and taking our scent up and over the rams. No hurry here. We both took another look through our binoculars.

“He’s got good weight. Really, really heavy,” Graeme said.

I poked the rifle over the rim, rested my hand under it and waited until Graeme was right beside me with his binos trained on the ram. The crosshairs settled and I gently squeezed.

“Too high, wait.” Graeme’s voice was now my command. “He’s moving to the right. Don’t shoot. Ram in front of him. He’s the one still moving to the right. He’s furthest to the right now, in the clear. Wait, he’s coming up toward us. Wait till he turns. Gotta aim lower, Dad. Okay, now!”

The ram fell, rolled twice and stopped. I scrambled to my feet and was lifted way up into the air and squeezed with a giant bear hug. “I’m so proud of you, Dad! Good shooting—eventually,” Graeme said, and laughed.

“Just like your old ram in the glaciers,” I said, recalling the 14-year-old Dall’s he took in 2001. “Had to shoot over him a couple of times to make him run towards you.”

We slid down the shale and onto the green slope. “At least 12, probably 13 years,” I said when we reached the ram. Then I counted the annuli, starting at number three since he was broomed off past the second ring. He was 13, later confirmed by wildlife technicians at the Yukon Department of Environment.

“Twenty-five,” Graeme announced.

“Twenty-five what?” I asked.

“Twenty-five years of us hunting sheep together.”

Suddenly, that very moment—and hunt—became all the more significant.