Original subtitles

NARRATOR: On this episode of Life Below Zero,

as winter fades, Alaskans take their final shots.

A crafty predator rattles the Hailstones' strategy.

I got ripped off by a wolverine.

NARRATOR: Glenn races against the wild to protect his food stock.

GLENN: My main concern is that nothing finds these caribou before I get them back.

NARRATOR: The Salitans hunt for big game in winter's twilight.

ERIK: These are the most nourishing animals that you can harvest.

NARRATOR: And Sue's escape from Kavik leads to a grave mistake.

SUE: I want to get the hell out of camp.

SUE: Some things, some chores build up.

Is it gonna kill you if it builds up?

No, but it's unpleasant.

My chores are just on a different scale.

It's happy with the bucket going down.

Lifting it is inconsistent.

Dumping overhead, it's a little inconsistent.

I'm not sure what causes that.

NARRATOR: The unforgiving landscape in the tundra

forces Sue Aikens to complete a variety of tasks

to ensure her safety at Kavik River Camp.

Drifts are a constant hazard throughout,

and to clear them,

Sue relies on one of the most important tools, the Bobcat.

Come on, pig!

Come on!

All right.

Walking up to it, I see...

"What the hell is that?" Is what I'm thinking.

It's not oily.

My Bobcat is done.

I need to look at the manual.

I need, I need to dig into it more.

Um, just another can of worms

in Sue's worm farm.

When I first noticed the issue,

I said, "Man, that doesn't smell right."

I thought it smelled like burnt hydraulic fluid,

um, which was my panic about the hydraulics,

and that would answer why things weren't working right.

Nobody should get emotionally trashed

over a 24-year-old frickin' Bobcat.

I don't look at what does it cost

when it was brand-new, I look at replacement cost.

These things are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I don't have it.

I don't wanna whine about it. I wanna get on to my next job.

GLENN: It's not all adventure and excitement.

A lot of times it's really quiet out here,

but that's just as important to me as the other times.

All through the winter I'm butchering meat.

I produce quite a lot of scraps and bones, crust on my moose.

What I do with them, when I've got a bone that I'm done with,

I just throw it out the window.

And they accumulate out there.

I got quite a pile.

This is my bird feeder.

I got an ermine that eats on it. I really enjoy watching

the little critters coming up and eating.

But, at this time of year, the bears are starting to come out pretty soon,

so I have to clean the yard up and I've gotta move all this stuff out.

'Cause it's just likely to attract bears.

NARRATOR: The warming weather in the Brooks Range

is a sign bears will soon awaken from hibernation.

It is crucial for Glenn to move his food scraps

offsite for his own protection and survival.

So I'm gonna take all of this, load up the sled,

and bring it over to that island out on the lake.

Nothing goes to waste.

I got everything I could use off of this.

But a wolverine or a bear will come and eat up the rest of it.

There is no food that evolved

in order to feed something else.

Even the plants, well, they're trying to survive,

and then something comes along and eats them up.

A moose is trying to survive, and something comes along and eats it up.

That's what food is.

Food is one species taking another and turning it into itself.

Suffering is part of life. I suffer, too.

Someday I'm gonna die and things are probably gonna eat me up.

Hopefully.

The cycle of life and death

is what makes life real.

I cleaned the scraps and the bones up from my front yard.

Right here is where I dump.

At the end of this island. I've been leaving bones

and scraps of meat here for years.

The wolverines, the bears, they know this spot.

They come over here and clean it up in the spring.

I'd rather have them eat it over here than right at my front door.

So it's a real hungry country, and everything gets used.

You just can't leave something laying on the ground

for more than a couple of weeks

before something cleans it up.

AGNES: I never, ever am scared to be out here or anything like that.

I don't ever feel lost.

I always know that I'm on top of the world,

way up in the north.

We woke up, and it's a pretty crappy day.

It's overcast, it's hard to see,

there's been blowing snow, and there's a lot of wind.

So we got our traps out of our cache.

We're gonna go make at least one set.

NARRATOR: Last summer, the Hailstones built a cache

at their camp in Kiwalik to store hunting

and trapping gear for the winter harvest.

CHIP: We are always getting ready.

We're always getting ready for the next season.

All of summer is just nothing but a preparation

for the winter ahead, and the winter is nothing

but a preparation for the summer ahead.

NARRATOR: Today, they will set traps for game fur,

a vital product for income and trade within their native community.

Okay, I think I'm good up here.

We actually make more money and catch less animals

because we do a lot more work to them.

And for us, we don't need to have 20 wolves to make our year.

We need five or ten.

And we can make more money than the guy that got 20 wolves.

If the goal for somebody is $1,000,

and it takes 50 foxes to make that,

they'll have to catch 50 foxes.

If we wanna make $1,000, we'll catch five foxes, and make five hats,

and we'll have that thousand bucks.

So we're actually impacting a lot less

because we take the, um, process a lot further.

Let's go boil some water.

AGNES: When we're out here, um, dealing with traps and stuff,

we try not to put our human scent on them.

Take this pot and fill it up with snow.

Get the tops of these willows and throw them in.

Prop even some of these right here.

They'll make it like scent-free from humans.

Not everybody can live this kind of lifestyle.

For most women, it would probably be hell. (LAUGHS)

So while I'm in here making the water for Chip's traps, he's out there making sure

our sleds are gonna be running fine.

We're out in the wilds of nature,

so the chances of us seeing anything are pretty good.

You never know what you'll see,

and you don't know until you see it.

We're kind of curious. We want to get going.

The nice thing about leaving our traps in the country is

they never get any human scent,

or fuel, or anything on them.

AGNES: There's hardly any people around this area,

but, uh, they kind of know where me and Chip trap,

so hardly anybody ever bothers our trap line.

I'm just gonna stay right here, so I don't put my scent

-all over your trap line. -Yeah, good idea.

This is old salmon and bacon.

Ugly, yucky, chunky pieces of bacon.

And foxes love this shit.

Gonna set this aside.

Gonna make a place right here where I can set it into a groove.

We offer them a little something to munch.

We want these foxes to

come over here and check it out.

They'll be able to smell stuff around here,

little pieces of this and that.

We'll even give them a little freebie or two.

They'll have to come over here and figure it out themselves.

We come here in the summer, so we kind of know where these foxes live.

We know where the dens are.

Just stick some fur here,

cover it up.

And they can think it's a kill.

And then here I'll make a tassel for the wind,

that way I can find my...

My trap if I need to.

Now I'm gonna go set another one over here.

This is what we call a killer trap.

What will happen is, a fox will come over here

and he'll, he'll take a bite of that

or try to get a hold of that, and it will spring the trap

around his head and break his neck.

It's a quick, it's a quick death.

It's a humane way of killing it.

And we'll just check this every day. Because if they get killed,

um, we don't want ravens pecking on them,

we don't want other animals running off with them,

and we don't want, uh, stuff to happen to them.

So, since we're pretty close, we'll just go check these every day.

At least maybe a couple of times a day.

AGNES: That was the last one, yeah?

Yep. That's two of them.

This is just the first of many.

We'll get them all set, and they'll start producing.

It's like a fishing line.

You don't just cast it and get a hit,

come on, that's a pretty rare day.

You gotta let that bait soak for a while.

And then the fish come along, and you go home with something.

ERIK: This is an awesome time of year.

I get to go out and enjoy this great country,

and just get to love nature out there with my wife,

and just have a kickass time.

(MARTHA LAUGHS)

This time of year, large herds of caribou

come through the south side of the Brooks Range here,

near where Martha and I live.

NARRATOR: In Wiseman, the transition from winter to spring

offers a brief window to hunt caribou as they migrate.

It is an essential source of meat and protein for the Salitans.

ERIK: We've seen some tracks up high.

Martha and I are gonna hop on the sled.

We're gonna go up the valley,

go to a likely place where the caribou first start to congregate usually,

and see if there's anything around yet.

The caribou is the animal to hunt at this time of year.

You always look forward to eating some

fresh caribou meat after eating moose all winter.

At this time of year, we're gonna target large, mature bull caribou.

Martha shot some fox this past winter.

(GUNSHOT)

That's all good and that's fun.

Predator hunting in the winter is one of my favourite things to do,

but it's cold.

It's not really fun 'cause you're like,

always, "I gotta stay warm, keep my hands warm,

"keep my face warm. Oh, shit, my nose is falling off. I'm frozen."

Life is good in the spring in the Arctic.

This is easy. There's no bugs, and it's not cold.

MARTHA: If we come up on any caribou,

I'd like to be the first person to fire off a round,

being that Erik's killed a lot of animals in his lifetime,

so it's nice for me to be able to pull the trigger now and then.

ERIK: I see lots of tracks, lots of diggings.

Ooh! Ooh!

-You know what I see? -What's that big old thing over there?

It's a muskox!

-No way. -There's a muskox over there.

There's a caribou in the bushes

like ten yards away from the muskox.

-Do you wanna... -Yep. There's two cari...

I take that back, there are three caribou.

Let's see if we can't get ourselves a little bit closer.

(ERIK WHISPERING)

(GUN FIRING)

ERIK: You got one, I got one.

Good shooting.

The really awesome thing about what just went down here,

outside of my wife just shot a caribou,

I just shot a caribou,

is these caribou were hanging out with this muskox, which is totally unusual.

There's a muskox 100 yards away from us,

just hanging out, doing muskox things, and that's awesome.

Walking over to check out the caribou Martha and I just got.

She shot one. I shot another.

Gonna have some good, fresh spring meat.

Here we are at springtime in the Brooks Range of Alaska.

I'm with the best hunting partner I've ever had in my entire life, my wife.

She just made a really awesome shot.

Perfect heart shot on this adult bull caribou.

The other caribou ran,

I hit one, and then I had to shoot it again, and then the third one got away.

You know, as a guide I get to do a lot of hunting.

I'm used to taking other people and letting other people shoot.

Martha likes to shoot, I'm cool with that.

But as soon as she gets her animal down,

I'm pretty quick to grab the gun away

from her and shoot one for myself.

MARTHA: Look at that heart.

ERIK: We got two on the ground.

We can use more than two probably,

but two will definitely get us going.

SUE: The comfort of your own life

has a direct relationship to how hard you work

to keep it the way you want it.

Chores are something that you keep up on to keep your quality of life.

I was having a problem with the Bobcat.

I thought the hydraulic system.

Everything pointed to hydraulics.

I busted out the old manual, looked at it.

It's the radiator itself that's shot,

and that's not an easy fix for me right now.

NARRATOR: Even though clearing the camp has been put on hold,

Sue has to turn her attention to another essential task

in order to keep Kavik up and running.

SUE: I've got a generator I need to do a change on.

Um, you know, I've got some other chores.

This is the new oil filter.

I worry that, what if this son of a bitch doesn't wanna start back up?

Did I catch all the problems? What? What? What? What? If? If? If?

I mean, you make yourself crazy with that.

I put oil already on the seal any time you're putting a new filter on,

so that as you're slipping it against your hard plate,

it can slip and snug tight.

This old oil.

And then I take my waste oil, and I throw it in here.

You know, always under the impression try to leave things clean.

Leave it ready and set up for the next time.

And it's just a little bit higher than my dots,

which is good, and that gives me enough fuel,

enough oil in there that it needs to fill your filter.

Now the test. We'll go around, see if we can turn him over.

(GENERATOR STARTING)

Now we'll let it run for a moment.

That allows the oil to circulate through the motor

and also fill up that oil filter,

so it will be nice and warm

when I ask it to deliver the power.

Then I'll run out and check if the lights came on

in the front of camp.

And then this job is done.

All right. I see a light there.

I see a light there.

It is running. Power is being delivered.

Both spotlights in front have come on. Good enough for me.

So, boom, one job done.

The equipment in camp is my spouse.

I'm having an emotional response

to my equipment having a headache.

I want to get the hell out of camp.

No expectations, no jobs, just get out and yay! Have some fun.

AGNES: I don't really like working for other people.

Me and Chip, we enjoy living out here, and we work for ourselves,

and it's a cleaner living, we think.

We're happy.

So whatever makes you happy.

(CHIP SPEAKING)

I'm gonna go out and come back. Same circle.

I'm not gonna go far. I'm just gonna go off and go see

if I could catch a couple ptarmigan for your trap.

I love you.

I'll see you later. Be safe.

You be safe, too.

-Yep. -(ENGINE STARTING)

NARRATOR: After recently crashing her snow machine...

AGNES: There goes my ride.

My handlebars won't even turn.

...field repairs have Agnes' vehicle up and running

and will allow the Hailstones to divide and conquer.

While Chip inspects the trap line,

Agnes will hunt ptarmigan for food and bait.

Huh.

Well, I don't see any prints, though,

so nothing's come over here and disturbed it.

I guess I'm gonna let this one soak some more.

Look at that.

It got the bait and all.

Oh! Look at this!

That's about the size of a wolverine.

They're real faint 'cause... What can I say but

I got ripped off by a wolverine.

(LAUGHS) The wolverine came over, he saw it was a trap,

and he beat it or he hit it.

He moved it completely out of the way.

Ah, such is life.

I'm gonna get on the snow machine and go check the next one.

(LAUGHING) I think he's checking my traps for me.

AGNES: I saw a few ptarmigan,

and I decided to go try and catch dinner

and at the same time get some feathers

and, um, some of the skin for the traps Chip's setting.

I'm looking for white ptarmigan on white snow.

Look for that one white head.

I know they're around here someplace. I just gotta find them.

Ptarmigan. Yay.

I should have two around there somewhere.

Yes!

I went and took a couple shots, and I just scored a couple.

You gotta really keep your eyes on them. They're white.

Hey!

I knew I got two of them.

I'm gonna take these two, and I'm gonna go find Chip.

He'll breast them and, um, he can use the rest for bait.

And then we can go home and go make us some ptarmigan dinner

and call it a day.

CHIP: I'm just checking my trap line.

Basically, I check on it, I see if there's animals in it,

or I see if they've done any damage.

Um, I see if they're covered over,

and I maintain them so that they're still easily snappable and operable.

And when I can, I put in new ones and expand my trap line.

AGNES: You were right. If I kept on trying and kept on trying,

I'd score. I got two of them.

-CHIP: All right. -(AGNES LAUGHS)

Instead of eating the whole thing,

we breast them out and use the backs,

the wings, and the heads.

-Hang on. -Look, there's a perfect breast.

That one that you shot, look at that, it went right there.

-Almost ruined it. -No.

Almost doesn't count.

Now look at all them guts and that backbone,

and I'm gonna make a link set out of this guy.

I think out of each ptarmigan I can get two sets.

I can probably cut them right in half and use a leg

and wing on one, and the back end.

And then I could use the head and wing and leg on the other side.

Right on. Now we even got bloody gloves to work on our traps.

Yep. They smell like ptarmigan.

Tear off these feathers.

Just scatter them around.

Okay. That's about the way it works.

-Pretty good, eh? -Yeah.

-You wanna go home, call it a day? -Yeah.

We'll come back out here tomorrow, have a look.

SUE: The older I get, the more I break myself.

I slow down, everybody does. Age happens.

Show me the expiration date, then I know how to live.

Look at the sky, Ermie!

You know, I've had a lot of frustrations this winter.

With the Bobcat, you're talking a 24-year-old

piece of equipment that's been beat harder than it should be beat,

asking it to do things that a big loader does.

So I can't see the solution right now.

I kind of wanna put Kavik on the back burner in my brain,

grab the snow machine, and go camping for a night.

Have a fun little night and camp out, get some perspective back.

This is just a day trip.

I haven't been out of Kavik for personal reasons in a long time.

I haven't been able to get out and camp

since, I don't know, last summer.

I got to go for what? Another over-nighter?

Um, it's nice to get your head out of the game.

Okay.

I think I'm ready to get the... Zip this up.

All righty.

(ENGINE REVVING)

MARTHA: As long as you go outside and you keep yourself busy,

be independent and do your own thing,

the wilderness will give to you.

ERIK: You couldn't have made a more lethal shot.

You got the heart and lungs.

MARTHA: It's a savage world out here in the wild. You got to fend for your own.

NARRATOR: This time of year, Erik and Martha have a limited opportunity

to hunt caribou as they pass through camp.

Each kill is vital to their supply of meat for the coming months.

MARTHA: Oh, yeah.

Oh, you made a perfect shot, too.

Why don't I gut this last one, and you

walk back and get the snow machine?

-Okay, sounds good. -Go get it.

ERIK: Martha's going to grab the sled.

I'm just gutting this last caribou, and then we can

load them up and get out of here.

These aren't good animals to eat throughout the winter,

but come springtime, they're fattening up again.

They're real run down throughout the winter,

after the late fall breeding season.

But by this time of year, the cows,

their bodies are stressed with reproduction

and these are the fattest, healthiest,

most nourishing animals that you can harvest.

Got the second one gutted out.

I'm going to go follow up the tracks here on that third one now,

and make sure that I didn't wound it.

I sure thought I hit it, but it didn't look hit.

It ran off into the forest there.

There's its track right here.

I'll follow this caribou up a little bit

and make sure I didn't hit him.

This is where I shot at him right here, he was running.

I followed the tracks about 100 yards, and we got blood.

You can't leave a wounded animal behind.

(WHISPERING) I knew I hit the third one.

There's a bunch of blood there.

-It's right up there. -Where's it at?

I already saw it, it's over there.

(GUNSHOT)

I know I hit it, but it's still moving. We're out of bullets.

But you have that knife still.

Yeah, maybe it's slowed down enough I can get him with a knife.

Let's go. Come on.

(PANTING)

NARRATOR: In Alaska, leaving a wounded caribou to suffer is illegal and unethical.

The Salitans are out of ammo, so Erik is forced to harvest the animal

in an ancient fashion.

I wanted all three.

Three's the number we need, so I didn't have any

choice but to try to get this caribou with a knife.

And I just kind of eased up on it and

finished it in the most humane way I could, which was across the throat.

That's nature. It's not real pretty, but he'll eat all right.

We got a lot of caribou to cut up.

MARTHA: This land here provides a lot of opportunity.

You just got to go out and find it as far as animals go.

You know, Erik and I can't go to the grocery store and be like,

"Oh, that's what we want for dinner.

"Oh, that's what we want for dinner."

We got to go out and get it ourselves.

So it's very fulfilling to be able to go out

with the person you love, you know,

and go and spend time out in the woods

and come home with some fresh meat.

It's way better than getting in your car

and going to the grocery store.

The good is we're all squared away on red meat for a while.

The bad is, it's a lot of work to do in one day.

One, two, three.

SUE: Life can surprise me by showing me my wall and

reminding me not to get too proud and too full of myself.

I am pleased that I still have a mind

that can come up with the ingenuity

of, "Yeah, so I can't do it your way. But I can do it this way."

I'll get my stuff, throw it on, find rope, tie it down...

Boom! Out of here.

I'm not going far. I'm just going to get away.

You know, if it gets too dark and I worry about it, I'll stop.

You know, that's the nice thing about going for fun

instead of going on a mission.

On a mission, you got to get somewhere.

There's, you know, something pulling your strings.

(ENGINE STARTING)

NARRATOR: Sue is awaiting parts to fix her machinery.

In the meantime, a night away from Kavik is a much-needed retreat.

I kind of like this spot.

I saw a bunch of birdies. I can see some roosting over this way.

It's kind of nice. I'd like get the tent up before dark.

You know, right in here would be a good little spot.

I may have to get my other little hat on in a second.

It's easy, you know, the sun's going down.

It's going to get cool fast.

So that's why I wanna get the little tent set up.

The sun sets here, sun rises there.

This is a real quick trip for me.

This is just what the doctor Sue ordered.

I am even more remote than I am at camp.

This is just me and whatever nature's going to give me.

It's just meant to be, "Don't stress,

"It's not a major expedition. There's no focal point I have to achieve

"other than a little R and R."

Even though I've got some stuff going south at camp,

meaning my equipment and whatnot,

maybe I'll just have a nice day and have some fun.

No major point to my activities other than my enjoyment.

GLENN: I just feel really well living out in nature,

and this is a place where I can do it.

There aren't that many places left in the world

where you can still live this way.

There's a lot of freedom out here.

NARRATOR: After moving his food scraps to a nearby island

to protect his camp from bears,

Glenn must now retrieve the last of his buried caribou

before predators can discover it.

A few days ago, I killed five caribou

to the east of my camp here in the forest.

Since then, I've been moving them back to camp.

I'm headed out to get my fifth load, the last caribou.

There was no way I was going to get them all back that night.

So what I had to do was, I decided to just gut them.

The only thing I could do to protect them was bury them with snow.

I'm coming over each day and getting more caribou

and bringing them back to camp.

It's a lot of weight to move. It takes a lot of time.

And time is of the essence because my main concern

is that nothing finds these caribou before I get them back.

What's this here?

It looks like a wolverine came right through here.

Wolverines are gluttons, they'll eat a lot of meat.

And even if they can't eat it all,

they'll just take pieces of it and hide it in different places in the snow.

They'll urinate on it, poop on it, make a mess of it.

If he finds that caribou before I get to it, that's going to be a problem.

I just saw a snowshoe hare running through here.

I think it disappeared into that tree well right there.

(GUN COCKING)

There it goes.

(CHUCKLES)

They're pretty fast.

He was over there.

NARRATOR: On his way to retrieve a stash of caribou meat,

Glenn has encountered a chance at adding to his spring food stockpile.

There's lots of snowshoe hare sign here.

There's some droppings. See where he's been sitting here.

It looks like that one got away.

Right here, this big pile of snow,

that's where I left the caribou.

I don't see any tracks around it.

Other than the ones I made when I was burying it,

I don't see any fresh tracks in here.

It doesn't look like anything found it.

This looks good. Nothing got into it.

The snow is really hard now because I disturbed it,

and I piled it all up here. It set up hard.

I'm going to have to dig through that. It's not going to be easy.

When I buried the caribou, it was soft snow like this, but now it's really hard.

It's all set up. I'm going to use this snowshoe to uncover it.

There it is.

A caribou hoof.

A caribou's right under there.

It looks good.

I just got a lot of work to dig this all out with a snowshoe.

But nothing else dug into here.

The snow kept the sun off of it, preserved the meat,

it kept the birds from finding it,

and luckily, the wolverine didn't smell it and get to it before I did.

That caribou is really frozen in.

There's no way I can pull that out of there.

The snow is good for protecting the caribou, but it's hard to get it out.

It's starting to come loose.

I think I can get it now.

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

I got it.

Caribou.

One caribou.

Whole, frozen, ready to take home.

My guess is this weighs somewhere around 250 pounds.

It's a lot of weight.

I'm going to get it home, protect it there where I can watch it,

keep an eye on it, make sure nothing gets to it.

All the time it was out in the field, there was a chance of

something getting it. But now I got it, it's secure.

Of course pulling a load like this, it's a lot of work.

Of course it's a little easier now that I got the trail.

Without a trail, it's pretty tough getting around,

especially if you've got a load to carry in the sled.

Got the caribou back.

I got to it before anything else found it.

I got enough meat there to last me a month, so I'm happy about that.

CHIP: Instead of being rich, we went for happiness.

So to hell with money.

I mean, we need it, but it's not the centre of our life.

Hi, fox. What's up?

He's watching us, but he's not really afraid of us.

That is a nice cherry fox.

It would make a nice, warm hat and a nice, warm pair of mittens.

He knows I'm a predator, and he's going to get

fairly close, but not too close.

He's got a really nice skin, and if we happen to

get him incidentally, we'd rather get him in the trap

rather than shoot him. We don't want holes in him.

We don't want the bruised part to the leather.

We'll just leave him be for what he is.

This guy right here is just cleaning up our mess. It's all good.

Once we check our traps, we'll just stay low, too.

It's not a good day to hunt up in the ridges.

The satisfaction I've gotten out of my life

has always been probably personal satisfaction.

I don't know what makes other people tick.

I don't even give a damn, actually.

But this is what I like to do.

This is where I like to be. It's a lot of fun.

I'm my own boss. I get to go where I want, when I want.

I take my snow machine where I think I can take it,

and I'm pretty much left alone to it all.

(AGNES SPEAKING)

(CHIP SPEAKING)

(AGNES SPEAKING)

AGNES: Watch out!

CHIP: Get him down. There you go.

Good one. That's a good shot.

Too bad for the raven.

The raven must have come for the skin, too.

So the fox looks nice.

He's not even frozen on his leg.

He hasn't been here long at all.

This is nice.

This is a nice red cherry fox, real easy for our little,

young girls to start sewing with.

Our daughters can make a hat.

If you had to put a value on it,

at probably $250 to $300 apiece for a hat

just like they made for their mom that she's wearing right now.

AGNES: You can make a real pretty hat.

CHIP: Yep.

Put him on the ground if it's fine with you.

-(EXHALES) -AGNES: There you go.

CHIP: No holes,

except for where you hit it with the .22.

So this guy here, he's not going to be a bit wasted.

There's no problem with it.

His meat will be fine. His skin is fine.

He's profitable to us, and he's a good start to some trapping around here.

That's pretty nice.

It's a little tacky right now, but

we'll take it inside and we'll wash it.

-Stretch it. -And we'll stretch it on a stretcher,

and we'll start cleaning off the flesh.

You cut the throat so their spirit

can go to the happy hunting grounds.

CHIP: We are the top predator.

We hunt the wolves, we hunt the bears, wolverine, everything.

That's us. So we're a part of this.

We're just the apex of this all.

When our time comes, we'll be recycled back into it.

I think in the very end, just becoming a turd in the tundra

is going to be like the best thing we can hope for.

Leave no mark behind.

MARTHA: I would prefer that when Erik and I

are driving around on our snow machine

and we come to a crossroads, that a wolf runs across

instead of a car driving across.

You know, that's what's great about living in the wild out here,

is that every day you walk out your door

and something is different, instead of every day

you walk out your door and everything is the same.

Martha and I just got back to the house.

We put on some pretty good miles today.

Got some premium spring meat here, some big bull caribou.

Oh, these are nice, big ones you got, honey.

Let me help you out here.

There's king crab,

there's lobster, there's foie gras,

there's oysters.

-I love oysters. -That's all shit.

Caribou tongue is the best thing there is.

The best way to get at the tongue

is to cut along the jaw here and get back to the larynx.

I love my wife.

I don't think we fight more than any other couple.

But every time we kill an animal we get in a fight,

'cause we're always fighting over the tongue.

(BOTH CHUCKLING)

MARTHA: I grew up eating these kinds of things,

so I guess you kind of require a palate for these kinds of things.

Tongue isn't something that most people probably wanna be eating for their dinners.

ERIK: Whoo! We'll be eating good tonight.

What do you think? Not too shabby.

So two are mine, one is yours?

No.

We'll arm wrestle for that later.

MARTHA: Just boiling it in a little bit of salty water, that's all.

Plain and simple, the best way to eat the tongue.

You could put it in a soup or do what you wanted with it,

but we just like straight tongue.

I'm going to let them boil for about an hour and a half.

The longer you boil them, the more tender they'll be,

so usually we get impatient and only let them boil for an hour.

How's those tongues coming?

Good. They've been boiling for an hour and a half.

ERIK: Oh, boy.

Let's eat them. I can't wait any longer.

This is the fattest part of the animal.

This is what the animals go for on a caribou, too.

The wolves always eat the tongue.

I'm so excited right now.

ERIK: It's a really complicated recipe.

It involves boiling and salt.

-MARTHA: Mmm. -(PEPPER SHAKER RATTLING)

ERIK: This is candy.

This is a candy meal.

This doesn't even count as a meal.

I could eat 50 meals and be so full and be like, "Mmm, tongue?

"How much can I have?"

You're going to burn your mouth.

Mmm.

Winter's pretty much over, the light's coming back, caribou coming through.

Pretty soon the birds will be here.

The bears will be coming out. We'll be guiding bear hunts.

Before you know it the salmon will be in,

and we'll be guiding fisherman and netting fish.

And this was a nice cap to the season though.

Yeah, it was.

We're about to pass out of a tongue coma.

Eep!

-(EXHALES) -Ugh.

SUE: I'm just packing up camp.

Um, it was just supposed to be a little shorty trip.

And I needed it. It was nice.

Get out where there's absolutely no noise,

absolutely no lights except the ones nature provides.

-I still want to explore. I'm not done. -(ENGINE STARTING)

But in the background, camp is on my mind.

But it is definitely time for me to get back and get that ball rolling.

That's where I've got to concentrate my brain power right now.

I've got a whole lot of gnarly to get through before I can get to the nice.