First Point Hope hunter testifies in caribou hearing

Published on February 4th, 2010

By VICTORIA BARBER

If Aqquilluk Hank could go back, he still would have left behind two of the caribou he shot during a hunting trip in July 2008, he told Judge Richard Erlich on Wednesday.

"Definitely I would without a doubt. I wouldn't touch (the caribou) I would leave it exactly where I left it," Hank said. "My grandmother told me never to bring anything (sick) home, just leave it where it is because it's not worth risking getting sick or getting other people in your family sick."

Wearing a formal white atikluk, the 31-year-old father of four was the first of the three defendants to take the stand in the Point Hope caribou trial. He is also the only one of the three to have actually shot caribou that Alaska State Troopers claim were wasted (Chester Koonuk, 30, and Roy Miller, 20, are being charged as accomplices to the waste). Whether those caribou were in fact salvageable was a topic that absorbed much of the courtroom discussion at Qalgi Hall in Point

Hope over the first two days of the trial.

Hank, Miller and Koonuk went hunting together sometime around the time of July 4, 2008. They shot eight caribou but left two behind. The first caribou, Hank said, he shot on the side of a mountain. It looked OK from a distance but Hank said when they got up to the animal they noticed it was strange. Its fur wasn't shedding like the other caribou and it looked like it had small lesions on its legs and belly.

"It seemed a little unusual and I didn't know what to make of it. But that didn't stop me from harvesting," Hank said.

Caribou's lump

When Hank split the caribou open, he said, he saw something that convinced him that the caribou was sick. A golf-ball sized lump, he said, hard and swollen around the edges, on the liver. Also, the color of the blood seemed off - paler than it should be.

"I knew it was something bad, knew it was something that wasn't safe to even touch. I felt fear for myself because I had the blood all over my hands, and felt fear for my companions. I told them not to touch it." They decided to leave the caribou behind.

On the way home they came up on a full grown bull, which didn't move when the three men approached.

"There was no question, we knew it was wounded," Hank said. "We could tell it was suffering. We all looked at each other like we needed to take care of it like we were taught."

Hank shot the bull twice, in the neck and the head. When the hunting party members began their harvest, they noticed that the bull had already been shot about nine times with what looked like a small caliber rifle.

When they reached the stomach cavity "a big mess just poured out. All bloody, all stomach matter, just everywhere," Hank said.

Still, he said, they worked for an hour to salvage the meat before concluding that it was all too bloodshot and bruised to take. Keeping only the tongue, they left the rest in the field. Once home, Hank said, he gave most of his meat to his family, elders and hunting partners, keeping just over one caribou for himself.

Aside from Hank, Koonuk and Miller, no one saw the caribou Hank killed and left behind that day. Kimberlee Beckmen, a wildlife and disease specialist with the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Service, said she was confident that the bump on the first caribou's liver was a common larval cyst of the tapeworm Taenia hydatigena, distinguished by a spherical, fluid-filled lump, which occurs in "60-80 percent of caribou." That caribou, Beckmen said, was edible, as long as the hunter cut out the cyst he could have taken the rest.

Tapeworm photo

However, when presented with a blown-up photograph of the tapeworm cyst, Hank said it didn't look like what he found last summer, which had been much larger and more inflamed. He'd seen many tapeworm cysts in caribou before, he said, and they didn't bother him.

Beckmen also said that while hunters weren't obligated to take the bloodshot meat from the second caribou, the rest of the skeletal meat was edible and should have been taken. State law allows for hunters to leave bloodshot meat in the field, but requires that hunters harvest the rest of animal. However, Hank said that the damage was too extensive to take anything but the tongue back.

"She (Beckmen) wasn't there, she didn't see that caribou so she doesn't know," Hank said. "The other meat looked coagulated ... all bruised. The ribs were bruised, the hindquarters were bruised, the front of the body was bruised, and I'd shot it in the neck. When Alaska State Trooper Erik Lorring called Hank up eight months after the hunt, Hank said he had no idea he was being interviewed as part of the investigation in the "caribou slaughter" that had been splashed all over the state newspapers. He said it never occurred to him that he'd broken the law by leaving sick caribou behind.

"It's against our oral law and tradition to consider taking a sick one home let alone give it to another. The day I spoke with Trooper Lorring was the day I found that out (that it was against the law). I couldn't believe I was in trouble for this, I was almost hysterical about it because of what I've been taught as a Native traditional

hunter and I was outraged about it."

"(Lorring) said 'look, I know you don't think it's against the law but Alaska state law says you have to salvage any meat, whether it's sick or not.'"

Hank said he's been hunting since he was 15 years old. In those 16 years he has left three caribou behind because they looked unfit to eat, including the two of this week's trial. He said that the negative publicity and comments about the case, as well as the stress of going to trial, had made it difficult for him to maintain employment since he was charged.

Hank was undergoing cross-examination Wednesday, when the trial is expected to conclude. Judge Erlich will also sentence the four men - Lazarus Killigvuk, 26, Randy Oktollik, 27, Brett Oktollik, 21, and Koomalook Stone, 19 - who have pleaded guilty to wanton waste in the Point Hope caribou investigation.