“I remember when I turned twelve, I remember, um, my mom told me to go with her mom - my grandmother, Rosalie Drybones - she told me to go with them to go hunting with my auntie, Lucy Zoe-Chocolate and her husband, Johnny. And they had two kids too that were same age as me, my cousins David Zoe-Chocolate and his sister Alice Zoe-Chocolate. And then they took us to their camp, I forgot where its - its almost from here to Rae Lakes, halfway. Something like Ekati, or something like that, I forgot. And then, um, anyways there’s three cabins over there, like, close to each other in that area, in the bush. And then there’s, like, lots of caribou, I’ve never seen caribou, like, maybe a hundred or more. It was on the ice, on the lake. And then, I guess they were roaming or, you know, like, running and my uncle said ‘let’s go there with skidoos’ so they all got prepared, everything was prepared already, just ready to go to the lake. And they were close so they told me ‘you gotta shoot one’, they say ‘it could be your first time’ you know? So I’m only twelve years old, so yeah, guess so. So they gave me a twenty-two, the gun, or something like, yeah, and they let me aim it and they told me how to shoot it so, you know. So I grabbed the gun and I started aiming it, and I shot one. And then I shot it again. It went down, you know, and they told me how to cut it, yeah. 

Like, that was my first time experience, you know. Like, I never did that before in my life. I was just a boy right? So, it was like, to experience it, it was…felt like…I felt like blessed or something like that. Like, I was like how you say, like, it was - I do not know how to describe that word but I felt special doing that. Like, the privilege to do that. 

I think the next generation should start studying again, to reconnect to the nature and to the animals, and to accept, like, the caribou is part of us. If it’s decline it’ll be, like, no good for us. Yeah.”