Black Lobo

I just finished guiding for the Fall season at Rainy Pass Lodge in the interior of Alaska. I talked to my boss Mike Brannon into letting me bring my good friend, Jerry Taft, up to go Caribou hunting. He flew in and was naturally very excited. Rainy Pass Lodge is one of the few hunting camps in Alaska that uses horses.

The next day Jerry and I took a couple of horses and headed towards Halfway Camp, where there was still a wall tent set up. Everything was great. I took the horses where they had some good grass and eventually I got them tied up good. That night we had about 4 inches of snow and when I went out to check the horses, I was glad I tied them up. That morning I saw tracks of wolves that had circled the horses many times. If they would’ve broken free I think we would have been in trouble. The wolves would have taken a single horse but not when they were together and next to our camp.

In the morning we got our hunting gear ready and broke camp, saddled the horses and took off upriver.  We stopped at a little vantage point and glassed. I spotted four wolfs that had killed a cow caribou a mile out. We rode the horses up halfway and tied them up and looked where we last saw the wolves, but nothing. We hid behind a little alder bush and I started blowing on my predator call. The wolves were nearby and in five minutes four big wolves came running up the canyon within 175 yards of us. Jerry shot and killed a nice one. They took off quickly.  There was one black lobo that I really wanted bad. Maybe I was trying too hard as I just couldn’t hit him. He was a beautiful jet black lobo. We packed Jerry‘s wolf back to the horses. The horses were used to being packed with wild game but not happy when they saw the wolf. I blind folded my horse and tied the wolf onto the saddle. I put wolf blood on my hands and rubbed on the horses nose. My horse didn’t like it but he let me tie the wolf on the saddle and carried him back to camp where we skinned the wolf out.

We rode back upriver the next morning and saw several small Caribou but nothing big.  We figured the wolves pushed the remaining Caribou out. We then rode back to Rainy Pass. I was amazed what a good horse I had. When we came to frozen rivers and streams that were hard to get a horse across my horse just started pounding ice with his front hooves like a jackhammer until he broke the ice.  We could then walk on through the water and not on the slippery ice. When we got back, we wanted to fly to Stix Lake as it is a much better caribou area but unfortunately that lake froze up.

Weather was bad that time of the year. Weather in Alaska is not in a hunter’s favor. When the weather broke Mike Brannon picked us up in his 180 Cessna and flew us back to Anchorage.

Happy Hunting! 

Jaret Owens - 805-551-6815