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As far as I can see, there is no top and no bottom to this central Alaskan mountainside. The clouds are low and solid, and the blowing sleet is almost horizontal. My field of view is about as expansive as it would be inside a living room. This is terrain where you could walk off a cliff in the dark. But the mountain’s 60-degree pitch, and a heavy backpack loaded with a rifle and 10 days’ worth of food and gear, has me moving slowly and carefully.

The hood of my rain jacket is pulled down to shield my eyes. I lift it a bit to check on my hunting partners. My brother Danny, an ecologist with the University of Alaska, is behind me. To my right, I can make out the shape of Chris Flowers, a buddy who flies 737s for Alaska Airlines. When Flowers isn’t working in airplanes, he plays in them. He and his Piper Super Cub live in a private airstrip community in Anchorage. (Imagine a golf-course community except there’s only one fairway, and it’s 100 feet wide and 1,300 feet long.) Two days ago, Flowers shuttled us to a gravel bar along a glacial river about 40 miles into the northern end of the Alaska Range.

We’ve been walking since. The first day we waded through spruce bogs and alder thickets while downpours flooded the game trails with calf-deep water. On the second day the rain let up, but the brush got nastier: The spruce gave way at higher ele­vations to willow and dwarf birch so thick we had to pry it apart and walk through sideways. Now that we’ve entered the alpine tundra, we’re climbing into clouds and snow.

Finding a Dall ram in this weather is tough. I don’t care how good your eyes are; it’s difficult to spot a white critter against a snowy background in the middle of a whiteout. We could spook sheep without even seeing them, so we agree to hole up. Before long we arrive at a shoulder of flat land on an otherwise steeply rising ridge. We scrape away enough of the slush to pitch a tent. Later, during a break in the snow, I open the flap and stick my head out. We’re camped on a narrow saddle between two cirques. Within 10 feet on either side of us is land too steep to stand on. It occurs to me that a ram’s survival strategy relies on its willingness to go places where you won’t. It’s sort of like a game of chicken, but I can’t decide if the game is played against the sheep, the land, or your own mind.

Game From the Ice Age

Dall sheep are creatures of the cold. Their genetic ancestors first crossed from Siberia to the New World during the Pleistocene Ice Ages, following routes along the now-vanished Bering land bridge. For millennia after their arrival, there was probably just one species of sheep ranging from Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula down into what is now the Lower 48. Eventually, the population diverged into three distinct species: the snow sheep of Siberia; the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (including the desert bighorn subspecies) of the western United States and southern Canadian Rockies; and the Dall sheep (including the stone sheep subspecies) of Alaska, northern British Columbia, and southern Yukon.

Hunting Dall sheep is more complicated than simply locating them. The real trick is finding a legal-size ram. In most of Alaska’s hunting districts, a legal ram must meet at least one of three requirements: (1) Both horns are “broomed,” or broken; (2) one of the horns shows at least eight annuli, or annual growth rings; or (3) one of the horns is full curl, describing a 360-degree circle when viewed from the side. These requirements describe only about 3 to 8 percent of the sheep population across the seven Alaskan mountain ranges where they live. Many guided sheep hunters obsess over additional attributes, such as extra length or mass, which might signify a ­trophy-​size ram. Most do-it-yourself hunters operating on a limited budget, however, will agree that any legal ram is a trophy.

To reliably find rams, you need access to a lot of land containing a lot of sheep. If you know of such a place, it’s not the sort of thing you advertise to strangers. In fact, Danny was tipped off to our current hunting area when he overheard a snippet of conversation between a bush pilot and an outfitter. They were talking about a valley—I’ll call it Sheep River—with a good supply of rams and an absence of hunting pressure. A year later, Danny happened to fly over said valley. He was impressed by the terrain, but most exciting was the absence of landing strips. There was only one way to get into the area: land in a neighboring valley and bushwhack through a couple of thousand vertical feet of nasty terrain. We began making our plans.