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

We took a number of days to pack out the ram. Why hurry? The alpine in late August is beautiful, after all, and loved ones appreciate you more if you come home late. Plus, sheep meat is a pleasant burden, and the sight of gnarly old horns on top of a heavy pack never gets old.

The mount of my old ram is now in a place of honour in my home in Whitehorse. Below it is a belt buckle with the engraving “Oldest Ram 2018 taken by a Yukon Fish and Game member,” a plaque commemorating “25 Years of Sheep Hunting, Graeme and Dad,” and a framed picture I took from the treeline of zone 7-22, showing a few scraggly old alpine firs silhouetted against the azure lake far below. “It’s a Group of Seven photograph of where the ram lived,” I tell visitors.

The mounts of the two 14-year-old rams taken by my sons are on either side of my Dall’s. Their horns are also dark, battered up and broomed off. One has an old bullet hole near the tip. And in the bleak days of mid-winter, when all is frozen outside and blanketed in snow, my boys and I gather to gaze at the three old rams. We pour a shot of well-aged whisky, sip slowly and cast our minds back to the bright sunshine, high alpine meadows, towering peaks and shimmering lakes far below. Most of all, we consider the old rams, and memories of the hunts. They haunt us still.

They really, really do.