YELLOWKNIFE - With a few quick rifle shots, the easiest part of the bison hunt is over.

The huge beast staggers and then leans against a stand of willows. Another shot finishes it off and it drops quietly into the snow.

The next three hours will be spent skinning, quartering, and removing the animal's massive head. Then it's a slow 25 kilometre journey back to camp with each sled filled to the brim with meat, hide and a small army's worth of gear and supplies.

The 11-foot hide from this bison, bagged by Shawn Roper, will be tanned into a blanket. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo

"Boulogne Lake, that's where you got to go to get the bulls," says Bryan Rendell, a veteran of six hunts to the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary on the northwestern shore of Great Slave Lake.

Rendell is the designated backup shooter to Shawn Roper, who won one of 15 available tags on his first try through a government lottery held for NWT resident hunters each year.

"It always seems like guys get lucky their first time in the lottery," says Rendell. "Some guys have been waiting 15 years for a tag."

The wood bison is the largest native land mammal in North America. A fully-grown bison bull - the only bison that are allowed to be hunted - can weigh more than 2,200 pounds and measure over 10-feet long.

In 1963, 18 wood bison were captured at the north end of Wood Buffalo National Park and transplanted on the west side of Great Slave Lake near Fort Providence.

The animals flourished in their new home, and today the herd numbers around 2,000 animals.

Its range now stretches east almost all the way to Yellowknife. It is the mostly commonly seen animal on the drive between the city and Fort Providence.

Unlike the roadside bison, however, many of the animals seen by hunters deep in the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary are understandably wary, and the bulls are difficult to find.

The first day of the hunt sees many bison, but most are cows or their young.

"The bulls are never with the herd," says Rendell. "They come in ones or twos by themselves."

Resident hunts are booked for five days for groups through December and January.

The first day starts with a hunter orientation meeting in Fort Providence, where a tag holder is given a crash-course lesson on how to tell the difference between a bull and a cow.

Bulls are often twice as big as a cow, and their horns jut wider out of their heads.

If a cow is shot, the hunter has no choice but to skin and butcher the animal, and take all the meat back to Fort Providence where it would be claimed by Environment and Natural Resources officers.

"If you shoot a cow, bring it back here," says resource officer Evelyn Krutko, before Roper and his party heads back up Highway 3 to a spot where a snowmobile trail takes hunters 27 kilometres into the bush to a five-cabin hunting camp.

The hunt begins the next day.

Special hunt monitors, whose job it is to make sure no cows are inadvertently targeted - lead hunters to Falaise Lake where bison graze along the edges among the willows.

The snow is deep and the numerous trails are a maze. It wasn't until his hunting party decided to make the long trip out to Boulogne Lake that Roper's luck begins to change.

A half-hour later, a single bull is sighted on the shore standing within a clear shot at about 115 yards.

A few seconds later, the animal is dispatched with a borrowed 45.70 rifle, and an insurance shot from Rendell's 300 Mag.

"I listened to the folks that have been doing it for a while and just mentally prepared myself for the moment," says Roper.

The bonus, says Roper, besides enjoying several days in some beautiful country, is the hundreds of pounds of meat to fill the freezer, and the 11-foot skin he intends to tan into a blanket.

Before leaving camp, hunt monitor Dennis Bonnetrouge brands the bull's horns.

He uses the heated end of a door hinge to mark the number: it's bull No. 1,761.

It's been a pretty good hunt so far this winter. "A couple guys got no animals, and that's it," says Bonnetrouge.