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In the old days, when I was about 12 years old, I had been hunting for quite a while then. My
father had already taught me how to kill small game, like partridges, snare rabbits and recognize
animal tracks, some that I still haven't seen, but which I was told by my father that I would be
trying to catch in make shift traps some day. I came to trap by myself in later years but not so
much with the old style of trapping as with the modern steel trap. Anyway, when I was still 12 years old, I made my first caribou kill with a friend of mine. It's a place called KAUANASHIT in Indian. This friend of mine was Matthew. That day we set off by ourselves. Usually Dad came along because he was teaching us the ways of hunting. That day was very cold. We could hardly pull the trigger with our bare fingers when we saw the caribou. Finally after much fumbling with the trigger, I squeezed off a shot. That first shot hit the caribou in the leg. The next shot killed the second caribou. The wounded animal got away from us, but we didn't let that worry us. We knew somebody would be able to track it down later.
Afterwards we were congratulated by everybody at camp. It was a good feeling to have contributed something to our families. Right there and then we became hunters as the men were. I am over 70 years old now and I still hunt. When I think of them days, that first caribou kill was the one I remember most. |
