The bullet tore through the silence of the mountains like
the detonation of rolling thunder. It called out to itself and answered like a
skipping record, eventually fading away, as if the explosion happened between
two facing mirrors, the memory of it retreated into infinity.
The hunter breathed a sigh of relief. The sheep she’d been
stalking for hours lay dead. The single shot broke its neck; it was a quick
death with no suffering.
Later, when I looked at the footage I captured of the kill,
I am amazed at the appearance of life to death and back to life again, as I jog
the moment back and forth, one frame at a time. As I tapped the frame forward
key, frame by frame, from the moment the hunter pulled her trigger, I can see
the vapor trail of the bullet frozen in time and space. The bullet travelled
only several hundred yards to its destination, the otherwise unaware Dall Sheep
standing at an edge that sharply divided grass from rocks.
A single frame backward, life. A frame forward, death. The
vapor trail in between the two gave me, maybe, a glimpse of one of God’s
vantage points. Though it feels almost blasphemy and arrogance to suggest it,
may God forgive me. But I do wonder. Does God, being omnipresent and without obligation
to time and space, ever take a “moment” to frame forward and back, so to speak,
and study His creation?
Perhaps the gunshot sound that reflected itself into
infinity, (or oblivion if you’re a glass-half-empty sort of person) was a
reminder that time only marches on for us. There is no stopping it. Nobody can
cheat it, there are no buttons on life’s interface. We only go forward. We can
only go … “on”, as it were, which was where we headed eventually.
I was filming a guide and hunter in the Brooks Range of
Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. The final push to find this ram began at
9am that day. It was 8:30pm when the sheep lay down for the last time. Those
eleven and a half hours included several thousands of feet elevation changes,
stream crossings, side-hilling along loose slag (piles of tons of broken fragments of rocks) on
trails cut into the edges of mountains by herds of migrating caribou and
crawling on hands and knees up craggy chutes of falling rocks. I realized I was
crawling without bending over up the steep mountain face. My pack chained me to
the earth with an earnest commitment to gravity. Each step was a chore.
Getting to a prey animal is not easy. They react to anything
that might prove their lowly position on the food chain. We whispered, and
walked softly, wincing every time a rock popped loose underfoot and dominoed
down the slope. Stop, look through the binoculars, go higher, stop, look, go
lower and across, stop…. It went on like that for several hours until finally
the beginning of the end. “I see him”. After that, there was little stopping
until we were at the top of the cliff at eye-level and 800 yards away from the
only likely legal ram within miles in every direction. Too far to shoot.
A watched pot, as they say, never boils. Apparently the same
principle predicts that a watched ram will never rise. I was on one ridge. Our
target was dozing on the next one. My ridge had crumbling rocks teetering on a
steep angle. The sheep’s ridge had a grassy, flat ledge, called a “bench” that
was backed like an amphitheater, by a huge rock wall.
If I pause that frame, it’s easy to think the sheep was the
lucky one. Ignorance, of course is indeed bliss and luck has a way of spiraling
down the drain. Once it lifted the heavy curled horns and stood up to feed, we
began to move. Our hunter mentioned the likeness to Spider Man, as we clung to
the cliff face, stepping carefully on sheep trail to move closer to where the
ram might feed. As we closed the 800 yard gap, I thought, “no way. Spider Man
doesn’t have 30lbs of junk on his back that keeps yawing toward the 300’ drop
below my feet. My senses are tuned to their limits.
I heard my heart beat in my ears. The falling slag that
complained its way down the slope with every step sounded almost like broken
glass, or porcelain. Wind slinked around my face, then reappeared on the other
side of my head. Hot sweat in my shirt ran cold as the air found its way into
my coat. A mosquito buzzed in my ear, (I thought to myself, “seriously??? Up
here too???”) I touched the cold rock that fit together like a huge gray Lego
set. I fiddled with a piece, it slipped out, leaving a hole of the exact size
and shape. Someone shifted their weight releasing more rocks, and I thought,
“That’s what slag sounds like, I’m standing on a big pile of drab Lego’s.” I thought
of my kids pawing through their Legos. “Time to go”. The whispered words hang
there. A frozen frame that for all I know is still sitting there. The whispers
endlessly bouncing back and forth forever.
I later asked the guide how many people he would guess have
stood in that exact spot on the mountain. He had no way of knowing, but did a
quick history lesson on human occupation and cultures there and wagered, “less
than ten”.
We had one last stretch to make. The entire path to the next
hidden ridge that divided us from the ram was a 100-yard straight line that cut
through a slide of more slag that disappeared below. Every step loosed a wave
of broken rocks, each fragment tapping another which had a cumulative effect
similar to the deafening roar made by the millions of bubbles in sea foam as
the ocean expires on the shore.
Before I knew it, I had the camera set and hit the red
button, the hunter peered through her scope, her gun resting on packed down
jackets and packs, and the guide whispered in his excited raspy voice, “Now.
Hit him right in the chest…”
The bullet tore through the silence of the mountains like
the detonation of rolling thunder.
Frames forward.
We stood near the beautiful white sheep and set up for the
typical poses you see in hunting magazines. And, to quote Jimmy Buffett,
“that’s when we first saw the bear”.
He was a grizzly. A big one. Sitting on a rock about 200
yards below us. It’s hard to know if he even knew we were there, but he would
have soon enough as the wind blew from us to him. It was nature’s
can-on-a-string and would take our dead sheep scent straight to the
opportunistic carnivore. He was easier to chase off than I would think. But the
chase itself was adrenaline filled. I kept asking myself, “can this get any
harder?” We yelled, and threw rocks and fired the gun in his direction until he
finally, panting, ran off.
The sun was going down, and by 11pm the animal was skinned
and butchered. The gut pile stank. The meat, cape (another way of saying
“hide”) and horns was packed in special bags and loaded into packs and as the
sun finally disappeared and the mountain phased into its coldest hours, we set
out for our 7 hour journey through the darkness back to camp. That is an entire
other story though, and I’ll probably write it up at some future date.
I am not a hunter. I’m a story-teller. I’m a filmmaker and
merely try to observe the world as actively as possible. Sometimes that’s
turned into words, and other times it’s with images. Something I can’t shake
from this experience is the elasticity of time.
“The mountain has a way…” I’ve heard that sentence ended
many different ways. It has a way of bending time. Maybe that’s where God sits
as he takes (or makes?) a moment to witness His own doings. The bends and curves
and elasticity of time, perhaps, are where we might meet Him. Sometimes it’s in
the blink of an eye at light speed. Other times it’s a billion lingering
blinks, the bursting of sea foam bubbles – one at a time, the vapor trail of a
bullet hanging like the last dry, red leaf of a tree in autumn; just one frame
away from falling to its destiny. Whether I’m stuck in rush hour traffic or
sitting on a ledge where fewer than ten people may have ever been, it’s the
frames that matter most.
One at a time, or 24 at a time… life to death… then
back to life again.
