CHAPTER 7

 

Moon Month of Amiraijaut (September–October), “Velvet Peels from Caribou Antlers”

Hunting with Heimo

COLEEN RIVER, ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, ALASKA

 

“We’ll be sitting over there,” Heimo announced, indicating the whereabouts of “over there” with a wave of his ungloved hand. It was cold. Temperature in the single digits. Yet the trapper’s words were unclouded; heard but not seen. The parched Arctic air had taken his breath away.

“All right,” I acknowledged.

“There’s a lake just beyond those trees. Game trails on both sides. I’ll come back and see how you’re doing after we get settled.”

“That’s fine,” I agreed, noting anxiousness in Heimo’s voice. Seeing, beneath age-lushened eyebrows, the look of worry in his eyes.

I knew he was blaming himself for not finding caribou, and I didn’t need to underscore this with the truth that was known to all of us. This was the last day of our six-day hunt. Weather permitting, Bob and I would be flying out tomorrow with or without a cooler packed with caribou.

We’d been hunting both sides of the Coleen for five days now. Five days in one of the most unpeopled parts of Alaska (not to mention the southeastern corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

We hadn’t seen a caribou. Only cut a single track. Heimo had warned us, when we were planning our hunt, that there were no guarantees. Some years the animals of the Porcupine caribou herd wintered near his cabin, sometimes in neighboring Canada. “You know more people have starved to death waiting for caribou than any other animal,” the fifty-three-year-old trapper cautioned.

We did know, or at least accepted the uncertainty. That’s why it’s called “hunting” and not “killing animals.”

Heimo’s concern was misplaced for another reason, too. We were friends and guests, not clients. Any personal obligation Heimo felt was unwarranted. But it’s funny how hunters, even hunters as experienced as Heimo, find it hard to surrender to the cold, hard reality that effort and ability are sometimes trumped by luck. Unless you don’t believe in luck and affirm, instead, the leveraging force of fate. Either way, luck or fate, it’s still every hunter’s privilege and obligation to go out and meet it. Just as we were doing now.

“I’m going to head out past the place I was sitting the other day,“ I told him. ”Saw a stand of spruce I liked. It will let me glass more ground. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Okay,” Heimo said, turning, walking in a northeasterly direction. Leaving hip-boot tracks so obvious they could probably be seen from space.

I’d already witnessed Heimo’s uncanny ability to detect and decode animal tracks not merely in snow but beneath it. Watched him stop, yesterday, in the middle of a game trail and follow, with his fingers, the buried tracks of a pine marten, showing us where the small weasel had crossed the trail and exited up a bank.

Clearly, The Final Frontiersman, as his biography recognizes him, would have no trouble following my trail in the three inches of new snow that had ended just before dawn.

A beautiful snow. A hunter’s snow.

“See you later,” I said to Bob, whose camouflage hunting jacket had lost much of its off-the-rack newness. “I’ll be waiting for your shot.”

“Be waiting for yours,” he said, smiling, turning, shifting the vintage .30-06 military rifle onto his shoulder. Months earlier, when Bob had decided after sixty-two years and no small amount of soul-searching to go hunting for the first time, he’d taken the rifle to a gunsmith to have it fitted with a rifle scope only to have his request refused.

The rifle, he was told, was a collector’s item. Tapping it for scope mounts would destroy its value. If he was willing to trade the gun, he could have his pick of just about any modern hunting rifle in the man’s shop.

Bob refused. The gun had been a gift from his late father, a career military officer. Bob wanted to hunt with his father’s gun or not at all. That was that and there he was. Walking quickly to catch Heimo. The world’s newest caribou hunter armed with an open-sight rifle. It wouldn’t have raised the eyebrows of Native peoples, who have, for decades, been using military rifles to good effect, but many sportsmen might have scoffed.

Without basis.

Bob had taken the rifle out on a range a number of times before our trip. Figured he was fine with it to about two hundred yards. Which is, depending again on whether you believe in luck or fate, good news or bad news for caribou. Bad news if caribou believe in luck and a poor shot means you live. Good news if caribou subscribe to the notion of fate, and all any animal can aspire to at the natural end of its life is a quick death.

Me? I have at times subscribed to both schools—i.e., that the universe operates under a rigid system of clockwork predictability and the notion that the universe is a vessel of infinity, random possibility—and I’m not certain, given a universe of infinite possibility, that luck and fate cannot exist side by side (as illogical as that might sound).

I waited several minutes to mark where my companions entered the woods. Picked out a distinctive cluster of trees to the left, making a mental note to direct no shot to the right.

Then, unslinging my customized .280 Remington, I started off in the opposite direction. Heading for the predetermined stand of trees and whatever luck (or fate) would meet me there.

What I very much hoped for was a caribou on the ground. My first. Like Bob, I’ve never hunted this celebrated Arctic deer. Also like Bob, I came to hunting only after a great deal of deliberation.

Where Destiny Meets The Horizon

It took less time to reach the place than anticipated. Half an hour, with stopping and glassing, but a straight walk would have brought me there in half the time. It was about midmorning now, by the lie of the sun, which was, on this date—the first of October—and at this latitude, less than 23 degrees above the horizon. The north was losing sunlight at the rate of eight minutes a day now. This, and our desire for good shooting light while we walked in, explains our late start.

The spot I’d selected faced west and offered good visibility north and south. Only east, toward the river and Heimo’s cabin, was my view limited by trees. This, and the absence of any caribou sign in that direction, made east the direction I would monitor least.

Winds were light, steady out of the north. Animals coming from that direction or from the west wouldn’t scent me. Tucked against the silhouette-absorbing backdrop of spruce, I was pretty nearly invisible.

It was a good spot, conditions favorable. No predator could have asked for better.

The land in front of me was mostly open, tundra dotted with stunted spruce, ground-hugging blueberry and tussock. Four days earlier, when I’d first hunted here, it had been an autumn landscape, rich in reds going to brown. Now, after two snowfalls, it was a canvas primed for winter’s full brush. The four inches already on the ground constituted the undercoating. The first snow to fall, it would also be the last snow to melt in the spring. Given the freezing temperatures, what was here was here to stay.

Beyond my stand, about eight hundred yards off, was a protruding finger of forest and beyond it, two, maybe three miles, a rising plain of open, rolling tundra pocked by boulders and trees.

I glassed the near ground, then the far. Searching for the pale forms of grazing animals or dark lines of parallel tracks that mean caribou on the move, finding neither.

Part of me was glad. If I’d spotted caribou out past the trees, I’d have gone for them. But three miles is a long way to portage a couple of hundred pounds of meat (even when the weight is distributed among three). Besides, I much prefer hunting over a strategic crossing point to “still hunting,” as walking up on game is unaccountably called.

The only thing my glassing disclosed was a single raven, heading south, and several northern hawk owls that were, as I was about to do, sitting in strategic locations, hunting. Two distant, one close. We’d run into a number of these medium-size, long-tailed northern owls already. Yellow-cheeked vole numbers seemed at their peak. Evidently a goodly number of hawk owls had chosen to take advantage of this bounty and winter in what is, even for these northern owls, the limit of their range.

Choosing a level spot just in front of the largest spruce, leaning my rifle against one of the smaller trees, I shook the snow from the branches and, using my frame pack, scraped the snow down to bare tundra. Snapping off spruce branches, building a mat to keep my seat at least dry, if not warm, I propped the pack up against the tree for a backrest, reached for my rifle, and settled in.

Checking first to make sure everything I might need was in reach: water bottle, binoculars, snacks, laser range finder. Checking next to be certain that the piece of tape I’d put over the muzzle of the rifle was still in place, and that the barrel hadn’t become fouled by snow. Checking then to be sure that the rifle scope was also clear, and finally, working the bolt, making doubly sure that I’d remembered to chamber a shell after leaving Bob and Heimo.

Clack. The sound of machined metal on metal was painfully loud in the near silence of the near-winter Arctic. The lubricant-softened glide of the bolt being drawn sounded more akin to a whisper. The slender brass cylinder that winked in the morning sunlight said, Yes, everything is now ready. Two more rounds, snug in the magazine, gave added assurance.

With good luck (or auspicious fate), they would remain there, unused. If my luck was bad, it could go either way.

Clack-clack. I closed the action. Thumbed the safety back, on. Laid the rifle across my lap. Just two tasks left. Then I’d be ready.

Pictograph

The sun was only slightly moved, still short of its midday arch and span. It was a beautiful day, despite the cold. Gray, maybe snowing over the Brooks to the north, but sunny with an ice-crystal-muted blue sky here in the valley.

It looked like more snow tonight. That was a concern. Three inches more and Kirk, our bush pilot, wouldn’t be able to land. We’d be stuck until enough snow fell to accommodate skis, and that might take days, even weeks.

Raising my binoculars, mapping a careful search, I struggled to make a mental imprint of the terrain in my mind. Shadows and trees, rocks and blowdowns. A weathered branch that looked like antlers there. A bush that resembled a shadow-colored animal bedded in the snow over there.

This was my search image. As any predator entering a new area might, I was gaining familiarity with my territory. Any change was something I hoped would draw my eye.

Reasonably confident that no obvious shot was being missed, I exchanged the binoculars for the range finder and, looking out, seeing a spruce that seemed about the right distance, I centered it in the viewfinder, pressed the button, and read the number on the screen.

Two hundred and forty yards. Almost perfect. My rifle was sighted in for 230. At this point, the impact of the bullet would be right where the cross hairs in my scope fell. At this distance, the 150-grain Nosler bullet would be traveling at a zippy twenty-six hundred feet per second and packing a knockdown punch of almost twenty-four hundred foot-pounds of energy. That’s plenty for caribou.

When a bullet strikes mass, whether it’s a block of gelatin in a ballistics lab or an animal’s boiler room, it flattens or mushrooms. Without this engineered deformation, the sliver of metal that is a bullet might pass right through the animal (taking much of the bullet’s energy with it), causing damage but not necessarily lethal injury or quick death. When the bullet is expanded, its force is more broadly distributed and absorbed by the body. Quick death from shock, caused by a well-placed bullet, is the objective and hoped-for result.

Why tell you this? First, to make you aware that I am fully aware of the consequences of my action when I train my sights on an animal and direct a bullet that will end its life. Second, and closely related to this, to impress upon you how seriously I, and all serious hunters, accept the responsibility of that action.

Because the rifle in my hand, which I spend hours on the range practicing with, is capable of killing animals larger than caribou at distances greater than 230 yards. I am not.

When I am shooting from a sitting position, without a rest, I have determined that 230 yards is the limit of my confidence and my skill. The spruce tree, in front of me, was my preset marker. Any caribou I might shoot would have to be closer than the spruce. Or I would have to find a support (a stable limb, my cushioning pack) to steady my aim. Or stalk the animal until I was close enough for confidence.

Or more likely, based upon past experience, I would simply hold my shot and let the animal walk away. I’ve calculated that even with shots that offer a comfortable degree of confidence, I take one in three.

Why that one? I don’t know. It remains a mystery.

So maybe, now, you can better appreciate the final step in my preparation. A ritual I have performed every time I’ve hunted large game since . . . well, I don’t know when. But for a long time.

Reaching for a spruce branch, stripping it of needles, I traced the crude outline of a caribou in the snow. A bull, double-shoveled with sweeping antlers. Too small in the chest, maybe, but, like I said, I’m new to hunting caribou and, to date, have drawn only five—one for each of the preceding days.

I’m better at drawing deer.

Still holding the stick, I touched the pictograph with the tip, planting it at a point below and behind the shoulder; the place where an animal’s life is housed. Then, focusing my mind, I promised to myself, and to the animal, that I would do everything right.

That I would wait until the range was good, and the path of the bullet clear.

That I would not rush the shot.

That I would wait for the calming assurance, the knowing that precedes shots that are true, before putting into motion things that cannot be called back and whose impact will alter the universe, moving life from one side to the other.

I don’t know whether other hunters have similar rituals, but I am sure that the thoughts of good hunters are similarly resolved. I’d just completed my mental checklist when my meditation was shattered by what is, in the minds of things that hunt and are hunted, the most riveting sound in the universe.

The sound of a branch parting beneath the weight of an approaching animal.

Snap

I have never died, not, at least, in the memory of this lifetime, but my belief is that death will result in a broadening of awareness, that my senses and being will expand to engage a universal totality into which the I that was me will dissolve into a seamless, sensory All.

The snap of a branch is the very antithesis of this. It is riveting. In a synaptic flash, it heightens and concentrates every sense you have on a single point. It cancels out the rest of the universe. It brings your being to bear.

Snap. For millions of years, whether you fall into the ranks of hunter or the ranks of hunted, it has meant life and death. We, as humans, have been and biologically still are both. Several generations of natural estrangement have not been enough to deactivate several million years of evolutionary hot wiring.

My first instinct, as a creature who has been hunted, was to swivel. Perceive the threat. React.

My discipline, as a hunter, was to freeze, reach out with my senses, gain more information, so that, when I did react, it would be with intelligence and directed action.

The sound was behind me and to the right. The direction from which I’d come.

It was loud enough to be heard through the snow. So a large branch, a large animal. There was one likely possibility. A hypothesis to be tested.

I turned my head, slowly, keeping my thumb on the safety of the rifle but leaving it on, seeing Heimo walking my way, following my tracks, his hip-boot-clad legs closing the distance in long strides.

“Anything?” he asked, dropping to his knees, moving his eyes over the horizon. If he noted the drawing in the snow, he didn’t mention it (and I doubt he didn’t notice).

“Hunting hawk owls,” I said, nodding in the direction of the closest keyed-up bird.

Heimo nodded. “We had one over near the lake, too,” he said. “Any sign of caribou?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet,” I added.

Heimo nodded again, his eyes still sifting the near landscape then the hills beyond. A predator’s eyes. Set forward, in the front of the face, the way the eyes of predators are. The eyes of animals that are hunted are set on either side of the face, to facilitate detection all around.

“Kirk said that there’re twenty thousand animals just beyond those hills,” Heimo reported. “B-between ten and twenty-five miles away.”

The woodsman has a slight stutter that becomes evident when he is keyed up. I guessed that the absence of caribou was still weighing on him. And the proximity of caribou, while encouraging, wasn’t particularly helpful. Our bush pilot had both a vantage and a mobility we lacked. Unless the herd decided to move and move our way, fifteen miles was as good as fifteen hundred.

There wasn’t enough snow on the ground to take a snow machine over. Our effort, two days earlier, to go upriver in a motorized canoe had almost ended in disaster when we grounded and took water less than half a mile from Heimo’s cabin.

Cold water. The lakes had already frozen over—during our stay. The river was freezing. Dumping a canoe in water like that is nothing to be cavalier about.

“Beautiful day,” I said. “Can’t think of a better place to watch the sun go around. If no caribou wanders over, well, then I won’t make him famous by putting him in a book. His loss.”

Heimo looked quizzically at me, not sure whether I was serious or not. Animals, to Heimo and all people who hunt to live, are food. There is no distinction. Over dinner, over one of several delicious ways I was served moose, Heimo’s wife, Edna, confided that whenever she and Heimo go to a new area—by plane or canoe—the very first question she applies to her surroundings is “What do I see here that is food, and how do I get it?”

Some might consider this a very limited way of looking at the world, and from their own limited perspective they might even call it “primitive.” Actually, it is a very real and bonding way, linking people directly to the world around them. Those who think otherwise have the latitude not to be practical, to nurture bonds with living things that are more emotional than physical and spiritual.

I’m not saying this is bad. I am saying it is not natural.

The moose we were eating was killed by Heimo before Bob and I arrived. Quartered with a belt knife, packed out on foot, the animal was hanging from a cross pole in front of the Korths’ fourteen-by-fourteen cabin, halfway to the stove-heated wall tent Bob and I were occupying and right next to the cluster of snares and leg-hold traps that Heimo and Edna would soon be setting. The hanging moose was as confidence-building and critical to their survival as the multiple stacks of firewood laid down nearby.

The fruits of hunting are a major part of their diet. Trapping is their economic mainstay. Whereas animal fur was, once, as fundamental to human survival in cold climates as meat, now it mostly serves the vanity of men and women in fur-fashionable places like Greece, Israel, and Russia, and Alaskan tourists who consider wolf skins on the walls of their dens fitting rustic touches.

Is trapping cruel? Maybe. Cruelty is a human standard. You’re human. You decide.

Whether trapping is cruel is not a question any animal has ever asked. Cruelty, like mercy, has no standing or bearing in nature. Killed for food, killed to provide warmth, or killed to instill envy, it’s all the same to wolves or lynx who, as predators, deal in death every day.

Is trapping justifiable? That is something that depends a great deal upon the justification, doesn’t it? To Heimo and Edna and the three daughters they raised on the banks of the Coleen, the justification is self-evident. To the people who wear fur, you’ll have to ask them.

Me? I stopped trapping years ago. Although once I used to set traps for muskrat, fox, and raccoon in the woods and marshes behind my parents’ house. Running my traps before school. Skinning and stretching the few animals I caught in the evening. Selling the pelts to a middleman who never gave me more than $1.50 for a large rat or $4.00 for a raccoon.

In good years, when fur prices on the world market are high, Heimo might make twenty-five thousand dollars.

Gross.

Me? I lost money every year. My greatest expense was replacing the traps stolen by neighborhood kids. Still, I trapped because it was an exciting link to the natural world and to America’s frontier heritage. I read Fur-Fish-Game magazine monthly and dreamed of someday becoming Heimo Korth.

A trapper. Living off the land in the north woods. Independent. Close to nature.

I didn’t. I chickened out. It was Heimo Korth, a kid two years younger than I growing up in suburban Appleton, Wisconsin, who was running traps before school and yearning for adventure, who became the Final Frontiersman.

He left Wisconsin in 1975, at the age of twenty, and headed straight to Alaska. Blundered his way into the wilderness. Built a cabin. And when his supplies ran out (like scores of naive and romance-driven kids before him), he engineered a rescue by forming an SOS out of aluminum foil that could be, and luckily was, seen from the air.

Most people would have quit at this point. Maybe Heimo was just stubborn. Maybe terminally naive. Maybe the Fates were out having a beer or decided to just string the crazy white kid along and see how far his luck would carry him. It carried him, ultimately and unaccountably, to the native village of Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, where his unbridled eagerness and pluck earned him a place among the 250 Yupik people. For six years, he was tutored by some of the finest hunters evolution has ever honed, hunting polar bears, walrus, seals, bowhead whales, and . . .

He met Edna, a pureblood Yupik, who agreed to accompany Heimo into the bush, to build and live in a cabin on the Coleen River, about 150 miles north of Fort Yukon and in what would later become the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Their residency and subsistence rights grandfathered in, the Korths are the only year-round residents in an area the size of South Carolina. Their nearest neighbor, a seasonal trapper, is fifty miles south. Their umbilical cord to civilization is the gravel airstrip they cleared themselves.

Edna, or miete dahwa, her Native name, brought to the union not only the practical skills of a native Alaskan but the social support all people, maybe especially those independent few who live at the social rim, crave and need. She also gave Heimo three daughters, who were raised in the bush. What goods they purchased and what amenities they had (including school supplies) came from the money generated by trapping.

Two of the girls, Krin and Rhonda are grown now. “Bush kids” living adult lives in Fairbanks.

One, Coleen, went down to play on the banks of her namesake river one day and never returned. Her framed photo is affixed to the wall of the Korths’ cabin. And while in recent years Edna and Heimo have taken to living in Fort Yukon during the summer months, they both admit they would have a difficult time leaving, for good, the river and the daughter that became and remain, in their minds, one.

I looked over at Heimo. Taking him in. A suburban kid’s dream come true.

Lightly dressed (by my standards). Wearing a stocking wool cap, use-stained barn jacket, and jeans beneath his insulated hip boots. The cap covered a head of dark hair that was thinning quickly. Beneath his coat, poking from his hip, the .44 Magnum that he wears inside the house and out.

Edna’s .44 Magnum, actually. Heimo’s revolver was in the shop being repaired.

Six feet and solid, he looks a bit like a bushy-eyed, side-burn-sporting Bill Murray. His beard is going gray. His eyes have an intense, puppy-dog eagerness that matches his personality. Whether you’ve known Heimo for thirty years or thirty seconds, what impresses you most about the man is his pure, unbridled, childlike enthusiasm.

We met in 1990. Bob, Linda, and I were coming off a backpacking trip in the Brooks Range, an adventure recounted in our book The Feather Quest. We’d just been dropped off in Fort Yukon by our pilot, Roger, who invited us to crash at his place for the night and radioed ahead for someone to pick us up at the airstrip and drive us to the cabin.

That someone, it turned out, was a big, friendly, eager guy named Heimo, who took one look at our binoculars and blurted, “Are you guys bird watchers?”

Somewhat taken aback by his enthusiasm, and not sure what our answer committed us to, we assured him we were.

“I’m a bird watcher, too!” he said. “Let’s go bird watching!”

And we did. Hopped in the back of the pickup. Rode out to the edge of town. Followed Heimo along a dirt track and watched as the local birding expert pointed out local breeders such as myrtle warbler . . . northern waterthrush . . . slate-colored junco . . .

The guy was as excited as a little kid showing off his collection of baseball cards and good, too. He wasn’t wearing binoculars. And his identifications (if not the dated names) were spot on.

After eight or ten birds, he paused. Turned somewhat anxious eyes our way and asked: “Am I doing this right?”

We assured him he was.

Now, he was showing me how to hunt caribou.

“I’ve killed caribou just over there,” he said, nodding toward the western trees.

“You’re okay here,” he added. I didn’t know whether it was a statement or a question.

“Yeah, fine. Figure I’ll spend the day. Wind’s good.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to see how Bob’s doing. We’ll probably build a fire later,” he confided. “You’ll see the smoke.”

“I’ll look for it. Thanks.”

It was actually one of the shortest conversations I’d had with Heimo, whose mind is as facile as it is inquisitive, as it is contemplative. In fact, his rapid departure prevented a return to a conversation we’d had earlier in the week. One I wanted to explore again with a man whose life is so clearly and naturally wedded to the animals he hunts.

“Have you hunted ducks?” he’d asked the first time we’d hunted this opening.

“Sure.”

“Have you ever wondered why you shoot the bird you do? How out of an entire flock you pick that one.”

I never had. And it surprised me that there was a facet of hunting that I hadn’t explored. But the answer seemed straightforward enough.

I started to answer. Opened my mouth to express just-formulated causal links relating to proximity, angle, speed, size, color, eye-catching pattern . . . then shut it, realizing, with a start, that while all these things were true, they were also not the reason the muzzle of my gun fell on the bird it did.

Accepting confusion, instead of false certainty, I was brought to conclude, after several days of thought, that I honestly could not say why I choose one bird in a flock over another.

I only know that a choice is made. That it feels certain and natural, not random.

And I am open enough in my thinking to consider a metaphysical possibility when no practical or logical one presents itself. The possibility that there is some bond, or link, or maybe reason that the point of my gun falls upon this bird and not that one or any other.

I just know that in all my years of hunting, and in all my contemplation of hunting, it was a question I’d never asked. The person who posed it to me was the “primitive” person who thinks of animals as food.

Hunters

The sun was as high as it was going to get. Its light, falling warm on my face, balanced the cold that was creeping into my boots.

It was also as warm as it was going to get—in the low teens, I guessed. My feet were just going to have to accept that. Cold feet, for as long humans have lived and hunted the northern regions, are the price of admission.

One of the northern hawk owls had worked its way to a tree less than thirty yards away. Sitting at the very top of a spruce, its head moving in swiveling jerks, it looked like an animate Christmas tree ornament, a dark-winged, yellow-eyed angel atop the tree. Studying, intently, the snowy landscape below. Senses alert for motion or sound.

Consummate predators, armed with more pure hunting skill than any human hunter could bring to bear, raptors have always ranked among my favorite birds. We’d been lucky on this trip. Encountered lots. In fact, with so many northern breeding birds already gone, raptors constituted a large, and exciting, percentage of the birds we’d seen.

On our first day, we’d run into a large adult female goshawk. The bird flushed from the ground, landing not far away. When we investigated, we found a dead snowshoe hare, already dressed in its winter white fur, still warm as life. The kill was so recent the bird had yet to feed. We left quickly, sorry to have disturbed the bird but confident it would return.

As much as human hunters, feathered hunters are bonded to their prey.

Heimo’s cabin (and his dog, Kenai) was haunted by a particularly territorial boreal owl who made a practice of dive-bombing the 140-pound Akita (who would take undignified shelter in his kennel and bark in protest). The night of our arrival, Bob and I were awakened by the sound of two great horned owls dueting above our tent and the next morning entertained by a Heimo Korth who was near-giddy with excitement.

It marked only the second time in almost thirty years he’d had great horned owls along the Coleen. The Arctic birds, pale unto white, were very obviously a mated pair. Like the hawk owls, they seemed drawn to the bloom of rodents. Maintaining here, at the very limit of the species’s range, what must have been a huge territory, the owls had likely shifted their base of operations in accordance with the availability of prey. Heimo and Edna did much the same, rotating among three different cabins to give the populations of fur bearers they trapped two seasons to recover.

On succeeding days, while hunting, we saw late-migrating rough-legged hawk, golden eagle, northern harrier, as well as great gray owl.

Eight raptors (not counting northern shrike and common raven, honorary raptors) out of a total of twenty-four bird species seen. Come winter, the ratio between predatory birds and birds that are prey would be similarly tight, with six wintering raptor species and a maximum of sixteen non.

When it comes to pushing life right to the sustainable edge, you can count on predators to be half a feather’s breadth behind their prey. Sometimes the evolutionary refinements that give hunters their edge even allow them to push life’s boundary past its natural limits.

When I led my first bird tour to Antarctica and was, as people tend to be, overwhelmed by the vast array of living things, I realized that all the creatures that had managed to gain a toehold on this most inhospitable of continents were predators.

Not most. All.

There are no seed- or fruit- or even insect-eating creatures in a land devoid of seeds, fruit, and insects. The sole source of food is the sea, and from this resource footing, it gave those creatures evolutionarily refined to utilize it the latitude to colonize the land.

The resource is meat. The colonization, by penguins, skuas, terns, gulls, and assorted nesting seabirds, extends, in some cases, one hundred or more miles inland.

Because I was taught to believe that plants and primary consumers form the base of life’s pyramid and are therefore life’s all-important foundation, the realization that predators are the colonizing shock troops of life came as a pyramid-tipping surprise.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I was surprised. After all, it was the hunters and trappers who pushed first into the American West. Farmers, whose lives are wedded to plants, came later.

A sound, or movement, in a snow-shrouded cluster of blueberries near my feet drew my eye. A yellow-cheeked vole, its namesake cheeks showing, bolted from cover, ran two feet, and disappeared, once more, into the snow.

The owl, looking the other way, saw nothing—or, more correctly, was distracted by other possibility. As I watched, it dropped from its perch, silent as a suspended breath, and fell talons first into the snow.

It lifted off. Talons empty. Took another perch.

Several minutes later the owl stooped again. Once again, finding nothing in its talons more gratifying than snow.

Probably a young bird, I surmised. Hunting for the first time in snow. There were plenty of voles around. Plenty of owls, too. Not a coincidence. The dynamic linking predator and prey makes them partners. What moves one moves the other.

Both partners lead; both partners follow. The universe calls the tune. Life and death join hands, and the circle goes round and round.

It doesn’t get more natural than this. Or more real.

The owl flew closer now, taking a perch less than fifty feet away. Seeing me. Dismissing me. Prompting me, maybe, to take sides, even though, as a bystander, I had no standing.

“Hark! the herald angels sing,” I sang to the vole, who I figured must still be in the vicinity. “Dark angel,” I added. “I’d keep my head down if I were you.”

The owl, hearing my voice, turned yellow eyes my way.

The vole? Couldn’t say. But two minutes later, the owl flew off, the vole had not emerged, and what might have happened became what didn’t happen, which is, after all, not the exception in hunting but the norm. “More people have starved to death waiting for caribou than any other animal,” I heard Heimo say, once again, in my mind.

But I wasn’t going to starve. Not today, anyway. Edna was working up a batch of chili for tonight. Moose chili. The thought of it made my stomach purr in anticipation, and the granola bars sitting in my pack were reduced to a poor substitute. In one week’s time, moose had vaulted to the very top of my epicurean ladder, eclipsing venison, which has, for many years, held first place in my esteem.

Better than barbecued beef. Better than turkey with all the trimmings. Better than lamb or pork or fish; or horse or dog or guinea pig or monkey or murre or long-tailed duck or any other protein centerpiece that human societies wrap meals around.

Oh, yes. And absolutely better than tofu.

So I hunt in order to eat? No. That’s as wrong as saying I hunt in order to kill.

Linda and I eat deer because, like the bloom of voles that had drawn the volume of hawk owls, they are abundant enough in twenty-first-century New Jersey to be depended upon (providing you have the time to dedicate and the skill to hunt them successfully). They are more economical, pound for pound, than even feedlot-raised beef.

It costs me $28 for a New Jersey resident firearm hunting license, which entitles me to two deer. Even if I take two one-and-a-half-year-old white-tailed bucks, weighing, dressed, approximately 110 pounds, and not something in the two-and-a-half-year-old, 145-pound class, I’m still going to trim about 100 to 120 pounds of very usable meat off those animals (50 to 60 pounds each). Even if I choose to have those deer professionally butchered (which, in the name of maintaining the pristine integrity of Linda’s kitchen, not to mention matrimonial harmony, I commonly do), the total cost of putting two deer in the freezer comes to $1.58 per pound.

When is the last time you saw ground chuck (much less loins, chops, steaks, ribs, and roasts) for that?

Being environmentalists, we also eat venison because it is more energetically efficient and environmentally friendly than meat (or even produce) in the store.

Very probably you have never stopped to calculate the real, cumulative energetic price tag that stretches back from the grocer’s shelf to the item’s point of origin. Lamb raised in New Zealand and beef raised in Argentina are shipped here. Asparagus grown in Chile and tangerines grown in Israel are flown here. Add to this the cost of transportation to the slaughterhouse, processing, packing, distribution, and the fuel you, the consumer, expend getting to the store.

The deer I take every year walk up to me. The energetic cost, per deer, is, on average, four tanks of gas (I hunt some distance from home, and it takes multiple trips to kill two deer), plus the energy and material used by a local butcher, plus the energetic cost of the production and discharge of two twelve-gauge Lightfield two-and-three-quarter-inch slugs.

The energetic production cost of my Remington 11-87, now over twenty years old, has long since been amortized.

As for agriculture, and its energetic and environmental impact . . .

Modern agriculture has accomplished its celebrated productivity at the cost of millions upon millions of acres of what was, once, natural habitat. Habitat that sustained thriving ecosystems supporting a rich and complex mix of plants and animals and who knows how many billions, even trillions of living things.

Some of it was mature hardwood forest that was cut and burned. Some of it was native prairie that was turned and disked. More and more of it is tropical rain forest falling in advance of the plow. All of it was natural. All of it supported a wealth of living things. Almost all that was logged and turned is now gone.

High-intensity, single-crop agriculture strips the land. Changes the soil composition through mechanical manipulation and the addition of growth-boosting chemical fertilizers (most of which enter the water table). Necessitates the multiple and varied applications of insecticidal and fungicidal and herbicidal chemicals (which also enter the water table).

All this requires an enormous cost in fossil fuel consumption. It has resulted, in many places, in the serious depletion of fossil water reserves. It has cost you, the taxpayer, lots and lots of money, because a fair measure of agriculture in the United States is subsidized.

This is not to say that some wildlife—most notably waterfowl and other seed- or grain-eating species, which consume waste grain, and deer and other animals that enjoy cereal grains as much as humans do—has not benefited from agricultural practices. Nevertheless, those cornfields in Nebraska that are a boon to migrating cranes and wintering waterfowl do not, in any compensatory way, come close to supporting the wealth of animals that thrived on the prairies before they were supplanted by agriculture.

I applaud those who embrace a vegetarian lifestyle. Because of its low-impact ambition and, yes, because of its ethical concern for animals. Surprised? You needn’t be. Just as politics right and left resemble each other at their opposing extremes, hunters and vegetarians have, at their core, the same motivational regard. Both have modified their lives to embrace other living things. Both care greatly enough about wildlife to defend it. Both share a reverence for life.

But if you are a vegetarian because you think that buying vegetables in your grocery store is making life better for wildlife or minimizing your impact on the earth’s environment, sorry. Think again. Unless you are putting up your own organically grown produce, you are a shareholder in the earth’s growing environmental debt, and you are helping to pull the habitat out from under wildlife.

Linda and I, by consuming two deer—New Jersey–grown and naturally fed—per year, are much more friendly toward and respectful of the environment than anyone whose life is dependent upon a store-bought subsistence.

But having made my case, and saying nothing that is not true, I have one more thing to add.

Being earth-friendly isn’t why I hunt either.

Endless High Noon

At this latitude, in late September, the sun seems to hang in the sky. Not rising, not falling, just tracing a course that hugs the horizon. Noon lingers almost to nightfall.

A raven, flying with slow, measured wingbeats, came up from the south, navigating a course that would carry it over the distant wall of trees. For days now, ravens had been coming to investigate my bright orange cap. This one ignored me, but when it drew abreast, it suddenly turned and started circling. Half a mile away, its call, underscoring its curiosity, reached me as it began its second circle.

Aaaah raah.

It sees something there, I thought; I knew. Hunters, even more than most birders, come to appreciate and heed the actions of wildlife. I’ve had perched hawks disclose to me the presence of high-circling birds beyond the reach of my unaided eyes. Seeing turned heads, drawing a bead on the corner of sky they studied, then training binoculars there, I’ve found more than one eagle and peregrine with their assist.

While hunting, I’ve noticed that the normal conversational vocalizations of small birds increase in substance and volume when large animals (like people, like deer) move through.

So I watched the raven and glassed the woods below it. Finding nothing. Ten minutes later a second raven traced the same course, and this one, too, paused and circled. Again, nothing. But it was a place to remember. A place to keep a watchful eye on.

Not, of course, that ravens prey upon caribou, not healthy, living caribou anyway. Ravens are like humans who do not kill their own meat: carrion eaters.

I watched the raven because ravens are commonly the first to see things in lands where any living, moving thing might mean opportunity for a raven. There was something there. Perhaps a bear sleeping near a kill. Perhaps caribou walking this way, flushing voles as they walked.

The hawk owl, shifting perches now at the rate of a new tree every thirty seconds, was faring no better than I was, and, while I am not defeatist, my mind was beginning to stalk the high probability that the trip would end with no caribou.

It was past midafternoon. The sun was weaker. The wind was still. Only a couple more hours of good shooting light. The shifting sunlight was transforming the landscape. Turning weather-bleached blowdowns into full-racked caribou; transmuting the shadow-colored forms of possible bedded caribou into shadow-cloaked boulders.

Every pass of the glass fell on new possibility. Every possibility, under scrutiny, turned to clay. Boring? Disappointing? No. Simply hunting.

Suddenly, my senses went on full alert. No. Not caribou. Smoke. Coming from the trees where Bob and Heimo had disappeared. In the absence of caribou, a warming fire and friendly conversation aren’t bad substitutes. Part of me, mostly my feet, thought it a capital idea.

Still . . . still . . . there was good light, still time. Chances were, in this life, I would never again be treated to this near-perfect landscape, marred only by the absence of caribou.

The vole was suddenly back. Darting from and disappearing back into a Lilliputian blueberry thicket. Squeaking loudly enough to be heard by the owl, who, nearly a hundred yards away, dropped from its perch, leveled out just above the ground, and lofted atop the spruce it had used before.

The vole appeared again . . . scampered right toward me. Followed almost immediately by another. Passing me, the preoccupied Microtus darted into the skirt of tree branches within arm’s reach. The owl flew in, took a perch on the tallest spire above my head, and, turning his eyes down, studied first the place the voles had disappeared. Then me. Then the snow again.

“Not my type,” I said to the bird. “You’ve got first dibs.”

The bird wasn’t troubled by my voice or my presence. Wearing camo, being still, I’m habitually investigated by birds and other animals when I hunt. On multiple occasions I’ve had chickadees land on the barrel of my gun. Several times I’ve had flying squirrels scramble along the length of my body, and, once, a raccoon whose eyes were level with mine reached with an exploring paw to see what manner of creature shared its tree.

But northern hawk owls are at the extreme end of the scale when it comes to indifference to humans. Some hunters might call them stupid. An animal rights proponent might call them trusting. Me? I think that the animal, which had certainly been aware of me all day, had simply concluded I posed no threat and treated me as it would any other large Arctic creature with whom its life was tangential, not conjoined.

The owl finally flew off, and I was secretly glad. As a colleague, a fellow hunter, I probably should have been rooting for the bird. But I was secretly cheering for the voles, who, like all living things, are entitled to their time on this planet and who, like most wild things, are destined, at some point, to be come food for another.

If not today, then tomorrow. Or next week. Or maybe, if they are lucky or it’s their fate, sometime in December. But at some point the life path of the vole and the path of another animal would cross and they would become one.

Was there anything that distinguished me from the owl?

Once again, it depends upon perspective and who you ask.

Ask me, I’d say no, except to admit that I am nowhere near the hunter the owl is.

Were the question posed to someone who is opposed to hunting, chances are he would find a good deal of difference, according to the owl the right to hunt because, being an animal and a predator, it must in order to survive but denying me that option because, being human, I am held to a higher ethical standard and because, having nutritional alternatives, I am not forced to kill other living things in order to survive.

I hope I’ve stated this position correctly. Not being opposed to hunting, I’m not positive that I understand the logic, but being human I think I at least understand the emotive foundation. Fact is, I haven’t always been a hunter. For over a decade, I stopped hunting for both practical and philosophical reasons. It was never that I decided hunting is wrong. It just wasn’t, for that period, right for me. It was a time in my life when I was too busy to hunt seriously, and hunting is something I take too seriously to do poorly.

I’ve already addressed the subject of nutrition. Why it makes ethical sense, from an environmental standpoint, to hunt. As for the question of killing animals—the matter of life and death that stands between those who hunt and those who decry it . . .

I guess I should begin by saying how close to the anti-hunt ing, sometimes called “animal rights” position I am. I think that life is one of the most extraordinary facets in the universe. Anyone who would end a thing’s life callously or for amusement is beyond my comprehension.

One time I was interviewed by a Colorado newscaster who did a weekly radio show on the outdoors. He was pleased to learn that I was a hunter, as well as a birder, and in our discussion he mistakenly referred to me as a “sportsman.” I corrected him.

“I’m not a sportsman. I’m a hunter.”

He was perplexed. The term, in hunting circles, is generally regarded with favor, denoting someone whose approach to hunting is principled and conducted in accordance with governing rules, just as sports are so regulated.

But sports are games. Anything that involves the death of a living thing is not a game, not to me. Of course I hunt legally. But I kill nothing for “sport.”

Another time I was invited to write an essay about hunting for Wildlife Conservation magazine, the publication of the New York Zoological Society. I don’t know what they expected, but what they got was a balanced analysis that came out, in the end, pro-hunting. It was enough to prompt a review by the full staff of editors, whose comments were referred to me.

One of those comments chilled me then. It chills me now. And I think it speaks, if not to the reason many intelligent, sensitive, and well-intentioned people are opposed to hunting, then at least to the gulf of misunderstanding that exists between hunters and non-hunters.

Said this individual, this editor, from her estrangement, “Oh, I get it. It [hunting] is like playing predator.”

How, I wondered, could anyone call an interaction that results in the death of a living thing “play”? Hunting is not “playing” predator. Hunting is being predator. If this is how non-hunters perceive hunting, small wonder the gulf is so wide.

End of Days

The sun was riding the crest of the distant hill now. This day was ending like the five before, without caribou. Still, dawn and dusk are peak activity periods for wildlife. It would be premature to call it quits while there was still good shooting light. Irresponsible, even disrespectful.

The thought of a warm fire was growing in my mind. Anticipation of comparing notes, and the day’s experiences with Bob and Heimo, enticing. Knowing that they were probably getting curious about my long absence and that one, or both, might be compelled to leave the fire and check up on me made me feel guilty.

I knew I’d leave soon.

The owl, too, was still hunting, changing perches frequently. Doing what hunters the world over do, but, unlike me, whose hunting is limited by regulations to the hours of daylight, the bird would hunt all night, until it was successful.

Until somewhere on the tundra before me and at some pivotal moment in time, the lives of two living things would become one.

A little earlier I asserted that my desire to hunt has nothing to do with a desire to kill or even to live in an environmentally responsible way. What I didn’t do is tell you why I do hunt.

First, because, in this day and age, I can. The stage, the natural environment, is supportive; the animals, coparticipants in the drama that is hunting, abundant enough to support the activity.

As a drama goes, there is nothing more engaging or real than that which occurs every moment of every day, on a world stage, between animals that hunt and those that are hunted (and among all the earth’s creatures, this excludes precious few). As a conservationist and an environmentalist, I’m an avid supporter of this theater. As a birder, I’m an omniscient viewer, delighting in the natural setting, the skill of the actors, and the drama that unfolds.

But when I am hunting, I excuse myself from the audience. Become an actor in the drama itself. There are many things I do in my life that have meaning or merit. Hunting is the most real thing I do.

But even this does not explain why I hunt, and the answer is I don’t know, not completely. I was asked, once, by a friend who was not a hunter, and who was surprised to learn that I was, what I “got” from hunting. And it might be because she framed the question this way that an answer came to me.

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But only on the condition that you accept that I believe what I say is true. I’m not asking you to believe it yourself. I’m just asking you to believe that I believe.”

She nodded her head yes.

“Communion,” I said to uncomprehending eyes.

And I wonder, too, as I have wondered since Heimo raised his question with me, why it is when I align my being along the barrel of a gun that falls so naturally, or maybe supernaturally, upon this animal and not that, whether it is luck, fate, or something else altogether that directs and draws my aim.

I know, and affirm, that the communion between predator and prey does not die with the dying. The question is, does the communion exist before the shot, as I believe Heimo was implying? And if it does, is it really, then, my will that brings about that shot, as I have, perhaps, in arrogance always assumed? Or is it the will of two?

Somewhat stiffly, I levered my fifty-seven-year-old frame to a stand. Collected my things and stowed them in my pack. Took one last look around. Considered ejecting the cartridge from my rifle, but . . .

Bringing the gun to my shoulder, I could still see, clearly, the cross hairs of the sight against the snow and, even, the darkening trees.

Luck favors the prepared.

Fate is fickle, not stupid.

Communion? Takes two. But my responsibility extends only to the governance of one. I left the cartridge where it was.

The owl was still there as I started toward the trees. Still hunting.