These two meat caribou were taken in the Shotgun Hills north of Bristol Bay AK. I have been on many hunting adventures with these two guys. Ben Tinker and Oleman of Aleknagik do a lot of proxy hunting for the village elders there. Our bag limits for caribou there is five each with a harvest ticket not counting the limits of the elders under the proxy hunting rules. On the hunts I have been involved in we never took more than 2 and the target animal was a dry cow preferably with one horn. The dry cow preference was to insure maximum body fat. I never did get the single horn thing.. I do recall the praise I received from village elders the day I came home with a small moose I had taken for meat. The praise was due to the fact this bull only had one horn. What represents a trophy truly is all in ones mind. The hunting practices of the Alaskan natives I have spent my time with are far more conservative than any rules or reg's I have ever read. Needless to say they utilize more of a game animal for food than most as well. Most seasons our resident caribou herd (mulchatna) roams the tundra about 100 miles or so north of the village in groups of 20 to 30,000. We usually combine our trips with the running of different trap lines along the way as well as fishing for whitefish at a couple different hot spots there. There are always plenty of ptarmigan to hunt as well on these trips. We have never really set a length of time to be gone on these ventures, we just return to the village when our sleds are full of meat.
~Jeff~