--Will be Ann Sylvester, David Dominguez, Carol Ebbecke,
and Jason Ott.
For 30 years, Richard Nelson has apprenticed himself
to the north, to the relationships
between native peoples and their environments
and to the other creatures that share the land.
Beginning as a cultural anthropologist,
he wrote Hunters of the Northern Forest,
Hunters of the Northern Ice, and Make Prayers
to the Raven, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
He has also written Shadow of the Hunter, a collection
of stories tracking a group of hunters and their families
through the arctic year.
The Island Within moved his concerns closer to home,
eloquently telling the story of his family living
in the Pacific Northwest through the lens of his deep knowledge
of Koyukon teachings.
His new book, one that his admirers have long and eagerly
anticipated, and so has he, I'm sure,
is Heart and Blood: Living With Deer in North America,
to be published by Knopf in the fall.
We are all by now sorely aware of the wounding upon which
our culture has been founded, the terrible wounding
of the land and other species that our progress has exacted,
aware that had the meeting of Europeans
and Native Americans on this continent been conducted
with more respect on the part of the newcomers,
we might find ourselves living in a more balanced relationship
with the natural world.
Another way to say this is that there
are lessons to be learned from the land
and that native people have had more time here
in which to learn them.
The importance of Richard Nelson's work
is that he reveals to us that it is not
too late to integrate the knowledge of long and respectful
learning in place with our own moral and spiritual sense.
He is a writer of vision, conscience, and great heart.
I'm honored to introduce to you Richard Nelson.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's really great to be here.
Anita and I haven't been here for very long.
We just hopped off the plane this afternoon
into what seems to us sort of blazing heat of Tucson.
I don't know what it feels like to you
guys, maybe sort of like a cool day.
But to us, it was kind of a shock,
and Alison had to turn up the air conditioner in her car.
It really feels very, very hot to us
who just came from Alaska where we've
had a pretty serious winter.
And we live on the coast of Alaska
in the Tongass National Forest, an area
where it really doesn't get very cold by Alaskan standards,
but it's still--
I don't even know how you, you know, by Tucson standard time,
there was no point in even discussing it I guess.
The other thing is that where we live--
where we live, the annual precipitation mostly rain
is 100 inches.
And there are somewhere like maybe 25 sunny days a year.
So by staying here in Arizona, we're
going to at least double our annual intake
of sunny days between now and Easter, at least
we're counting on that.
And if it is cloudy, we really don't care anyway.
It'll probably be all the better for us.
Anyway, I'm really honored to be here.
The one other reading I attended here
previously was Ofelia Zepeda reading
wonderful pieces of her work.
And I came with my good friend and brother Gary Nabhan who's
sitting in right here and for whom
I have to thank for bringing in these plants, whatever they are.
Who cares, you know, you've seen one, you've seen them all.
That's for his benefit, the botanist.
And thanks too so much to my dear friend, Alison Deming,
and to the Poetry Center for making all this possible
and especially to all of you for coming out
on such a brutal night as this.
Finally, I want to acknowledge, as always,
my deep gratitude to the Alaskan Native people,
Eskimo and Koyukon and Gwich'in and Athabascan people who have
been my teachers over the years and who I always hope will be
patient with the limitations and failings in my knowledge.
And tonight, the things that I would like to read are not--
well, a lot of what I will read is from Heart and Blood,
the new book about deer.
A lot of this book is not really explicitly
about my own experiences in Native American communities.
But I want to really emphasize that everything that I do
and every way that I would look at or try
to understand anything is profoundly affected by what
little bit I managed to learn during the years
I was living in Native Alaskan communities.
I'll touch here and there on specific teachings,
especially of Koyukon Indians in Alaska,
but it's important for me to make that point about everything
that I write is very much affected that way.
I want to start with an opening part from one chapter,
the last chapter of Heart and Blood, the deer book.
Most of what I'll read tonight will be in one way or another
about deer.
And a lot of it, forgive me, please,
is going to be about hunting.
And I suppose I better excuse myself to begin with.
I know that for some people, hunting
is not only a subject of a fairly passionate feeling
but also a subject that is flat out too nasty to discuss at all.
And I'm afraid that if you feel that way,
this might not be your favorite evening.
I think there's an incredible amount
to learn by thinking about and talking about hunting no matter
how you feel about it.
And I want to emphasize that I'm not
a person who would ever proselytize
that anybody should hunt.
If I'm interested in proselytizing for anything,
it's that everybody ought to grow a garden,
but whatever it takes, as long as somebody--
as long as you do something that helps
you to understand how it is that you are absolutely and totally
connected with the earth.
And the things that I want to read about hunting really
are about that subject.
And hunting is just a vehicle for discussing it.
I'm also really into predation, you'll understand quickly here.
So this is from a chapter called "Heart of the Hunter."
The deer's hoof prints keen edged in wet black sand
couldn't be more than a couple hours old,
but the brown bear's tracks look even fresher.
I'll let that rest for a minute.
I have to tell you that this story is set in Southeast
Alaska very near our home.
And we live in a place that has lots of bears.
We do not have black bears.
We only have brown bears or grizzly bears.
And just for perspective, the island
that we live on, which is about 100 miles long and 25 miles wide
has an estimated population of 1,000 brown bears, which
is larger than the total estimated population of grizzly
bears in the entire lower 48 states.
I better start again.
The deer's hoof prints keen edged in wet black sand
couldn't be more than a couple hours old,
but the brown bear's tracks look even fresher.
Deeply dished indentations of its hind feet
12 inches from splayed heel to scimitar claws
obliterate several of the deer's imprints, proving the bear
came afterward.
Pushing her muzzle into each depression,
Keta savors a feral scent as dense and pungent
for her as burnt toast would be for me.
I unshoulder the rifle and kneel down to put my nose beside hers
but detect nothing except the salty tang of kelp and tide.
Then hunkered shoulder to shoulder with the dog,
I carefully scrutinize the way ahead,
a lazy curve of beach ending in a bedrock point
heaped at its edges with seaweed.
But I see no trace of shaggy flank,
no furred hillock of shoulder and back,
no glint or blink of eye, only a batch
of crows above the tide's reach, pecking
and flapping and gabbling.
The long window of seaweed 5 feet deep and 30 feet wide
washed ashore in massive swells kicked up by our latest North
Pacific storm.
Clambering onto it, I find a series of broad pits
dug into the snarl of composting eel grass and kelp with the post
hole depressions of bears' feet leading from one excavation
to the next.
Beside the last and biggest crater
is a pile of droppings the diameter of a medium pizza,
bright tan, moist and gleaming.
It looks something like dog scat but appropriately
scaled for a creature weighing 600 to 800 pounds.
I make no claim to fastidiousness or refinement,
having occasionally eaten things most people from my own culture
wouldn't touch with a long stick.
Yet when I lean close to inspect these droppings,
their feculent curdling aroma takes
the breath right out of me.
The odor, which outclasses anything
of this sort I've ever encountered,
does eloquent justice to an immense churning digestive
tract.
Its contents-- I don't know why I got so graphic about this.
Maybe I'll revise it.
Its contents include a goulash--
I'm going to go on about this a little more.
Its contents include a goulash of plant seeds, grass,
and mulch seaweed along with bits of gravel and shell,
evidence of the bear's shoreline foraging.
To find out if this scat is as fresh as it looks,
I poked two fingers far down into the glutinous melange.
And sure enough, from the surface to the very core,
there's not a hint of cooling.
In fact, a thermometer inserted where I've just stuck my fingers
would probably register close to a brown bear's normal body
temperature.
Information like this should never be taken lightly.
I fasten my eyes on the shoreside forest
just beyond a batch of driftwood logs about 40 feet away,
the direction in which Keta is presently sniffing and peering.
I suspect the animal saw us coming,
hesitated just long enough to deposit this organic calling
card and then took off at a dead run.
On the other hand, it's only prudent to assume
the bear is lurking back among those shadows
deciding what to do about us.
Perhaps we should get out of here,
but I choose, instead, to follow Keta up toward the trees,
pausing for long intervals to watch and listen,
trying to ignore the heartbeats thrumming in my ears.
This is not blind foolishness, however,
because I trust Keta's judgment.
If she sensed the bear nearby, she'd
fix a burning border collie's stare
on one spot in the underbrush and her whole body
would tremble excitedly.
But now, although on full alert, she
acts like the place has been abandoned.
As we ease into the forest, I can't
stop thinking of what we found in this same place
a few months back.
Beneath an enormous spruce in a game trail worn raw
by the previous winter's deer traffic
lay a bloodstained shoulder blade neatly punctured
with a single tooth hole.
Not far away, we found a patch of matted grass
and trampled earth 10 feet in diameter thickly
strewn with gray-brown hair plucked from a deer's hide.
Then we discovered the fore scattered legs,
their bones still articulated, hide and meat stripped away,
tendons shredded, hooves intact.
A wafting smell of decay indicated
several days had passed since the black tail,
a full grown adult, had been killed or scavenged
by a brown bear.
I imagined the bear feeding just outside--
I'm sorry.
I imagined the deer feeding just outside the woods and the bear
stalking meticulously into the wind,
hunching behind bedrock mounds much the same color as its fur,
lifting its head to watch when the deer leaned down
to nibble seaweed, then cringing back when
she snapped to alertness and the bear drawing shallow breaths,
neurons flaring in the maelstrom of its brain,
muscles coiling and hardening.
And the bear, unleashed like a boulder on a steep slope,
pitching against the deer's late flight, and the collision
of muscle and bone, the shearing of flesh, the two
animals twisting together and becoming still,
the unraveling violence lapsing to serene quiet broken
by the bear's heaving chest and fog bursting from the bear's
nostrils, warm blood rivering down its tongue,
and the deer's body yielding and relaxing,
its heartbeats subsiding, its eyes staring absently
into the sky as night came down and down.
I trust these imaginings because I've
stalked deer in this same place and watched them
with the same predatory intent, drawing from the part of my mind
that is purely and passionately a hunter.
In this sense, the bear and I differ little from each other
or from our fellow island predators, flicker and robin,
mink and shrew, marten and river otter, great blue heron
and bald eagle.
We all have the gifts of cunningness and guile.
We share a common hunger, and our bodies
are made from the flesh that feeds us.
And here on this wild island at the continent's
far western edge, a human hunter must accept the possibility
of also being hunted.
My experiences with hunting are kind of unusual,
I think, for an ordinary Norwegian type
of a guy who grew up in Wisconsin in that I never hunted
at all as I was growing up.
And I was adamantly opposed to hunting.
I thought it was one of the purest forms
of unconscionable behavior toward animals.
And had there been animal rights and anti-hunting protests
at that time, I certainly would have been right in the front.
However, then I went and lived with Inupiaq Eskimos
in northern Alaska and found myself
in a society that hunted for a living.
And my work as an anthropologist was
to learn the skills of subsistence and survival.
And so I had that unusual opportunity
to learn hunting from people whose traditions have
been embedded in it for thousands
and thousands of years.
This is a little bit later in the same day and just about
in the same place.
After setting up the tent, I skewer
chunks of last year's venison on an alder
stick to roast over the campfire.
The skiff rides at anchor, secure
on slick water inside our cove while lazy swells
roll against offshore rocks.
I've kept an eye out for seals or sea otters that often haunt
these waters, but the place seems
abandoned except for the occasional flight of cormorants
and circling gulls.
At last, I slice pieces of venison
from the stick, browned on the outside, scarlet inside,
sizzling, tender, and exquisitely tasty.
While relaxing against the driftwood log afterward,
I hear a faint rushing sound from high overhead.
And purely by luck, I pick out a dark projectile
hurtling under the torn remnants of cloud.
It must be a peregrine falcon diving
after some hapless seabird, I think, grabbing the binoculars.
But within seconds, I realize it's
a bald eagle, much higher than I thought, descending
at a sheer angle, wings half folded,
feathers shuddering in the gale of its own descent.
The bird dilates like the pupil of a cat's eye
and in the final moments unfurls its wings to break the fall,
dangles its legs, flexes its golden feet,
turns its gaze and beak downward and shapes
an inverted arc that intersects the water 100 yards offshore.
At the precise moment of impact, it reaches out and down
and jerks through the shattered surface of fish
the length of my forearm then labors upward,
water trailing from its pinions while the gasping fish strokes
its tail against the air.
The eagle finally regains altitude
and flies back toward the forest where
it lands atop a huge spruce.
Swaying from side to side, still folding its wings,
the bird bends down to fill its beak with living flesh.
How many meetings between predator and prey
take place along this shore during the passage
of a single day?
How many along the 1,000 mile reach of the North Pacific
coast?
How many over the entire North American
continent with its sprawls of forest and desert, farm field
and marsh, sea coast and river valley,
scrubland and prairie all aswarm with hunters and prey?
Owl snatching mouse, snake seizing frog,
spider snaring fly, fox grabbing chipmunk, trout striking minnow,
shrew nipping beetle, toad snagging cricket,
raccoon digging clam, dragonfly capturing moth,
bear biting marmot, swallow taking mosquito, weasel touching
vole, mountain lion ambushing deer.
During every moment of every day on earth,
there are billions of predatory encounters, life changing hands,
creatures of every description devouring and digesting
shaping themselves through the deaths that
sustain their existence.
Here on this island where I hunt and fish and gather,
I can best comprehend my own place in this living family.
Like the eagle, my blood is made from fish.
Like the bear, my flesh is made from deer.
I guess carrying on along these lines
and perhaps getting a tiny bit grittier,
this is a short little thing from The Island Within.
And it has to do with a day when I had taken a deer.
And this was a number of years ago,
and I don't know if anything needs explanation.
It's probably fairly evident what I'm talking about.
I carry the deer inside the cabin
and hang it from a low beam.
The animal is dimly lit by a kerosene lantern
and a blush of daylight through the windows.
I feel strange in its presence as if it still watches,
still glows with something of its life,
still demands that nothing be done carelessly
and no offensive words be spoken in its presence.
Grandpa William, my Koyukon teacher,
told me that a hunter should never
let himself be diluted by pride or a false sense of dominance.
It's not through his own power that a person takes life
in nature but through the power of nature
that life is given to him.
After sharpening the knife, I slit the deer's skin
along the whole length of its underside
and down each leg to the hoof.
Then I peel the soft hide away, using the blade
to separate it from the muscles underneath,
gradually revealing the inner perfection of the deer's body.
When the skinning is finished, I follow an orderly sequence,
cutting through crisp cartilage, severing the leg joints,
brisket, ribs, vertebrae and pelvis,
following the body's own design to disarticulate bone from bone.
Everything comes apart smoothly and easily as deer becomes meat,
animal becomes food, the most vital and fundamental
transformation in all of living existence.
There is no ugliness in it, only hands
moving in concert with the beauty of an animal's shape.
While I work with the deer, it's as if something has already
begun to flow into me.
I couldn't have understood this when I was younger
and had yet to experience the process of one life being
passed on to another.
Before I lived with the Eskimo people, I had never hunted
and had never seen how game is prepared.
But I was immediately fascinated by their skill
at taking an animal into its component parts.
The Eskimos always watched me closely
and found my mistakes entertaining.
If I did something uncharacteristically well,
someone was likely to look bemused and declare, accident.
They were passionate hunters and incredibly hard workers.
When they hunted walrus, it took only a short while
to stalk the animals but many hours to butcher them.
As we pulled the skin covered boat onto the ice,
someone was sure to say, well, the excitement is over.
Now it's time for the real work.
But somehow, it never seemed like work to me,
this deeply engaged process of learning
about animals from the inside and out,
of binding my own existence more closely
to the lives that sustained me.
By the time I went to live with Koyukon people,
I could skin and butcher animals,
but I knew little about the delicate matter
of keeping a right mind while working with them.
Sarah and Joe Stevens were especially
scrupulous about treating each animal as a sentient being
and butchering it according to the traditional pattern, which
was not only a technique but also a ritual of respect.
They made certain that no unusable part was wasted
or tossed carelessly aside, that the meat was covered
to keep dogs and scavengers away,
and that it was well cast so nothing would spoil.
Once, I met Sarah carrying a platter of meat
to her neighbor's house with a piece of cloth over it.
She explained, it wouldn't be right to leave
this open to the air like it doesn't mean anything.
In this and other ways, she treated meat
as a sacred substance, a medium of interchange between herself
and the empowered world in which she lived.
It seemed to me that everything she
did in relationship to nature was
both an activity and a prayer.
Well, during the altogether about two years that I lived
with Koyukon people, I tried to learn
about the spiritual and ethical and moral aspect of people's
relationship to the world.
And, excuse me, it was a tremendous life-changing
experience for me, not in the sense that I have ever
entertained anything--
an idea of being anything except exactly what I am or have ever
aspired to take on a culture other
than the one that is mined by my own inheritance,
but I think the principles that Koyukon people teach
are of universal significance to all of humankind
as are the similar principles that have guided
Native American people and traditional people
all over the world for so many thousands of years
in their relationship to the earth
and that guided humankind on earth for so long.
And perhaps the dwindling or change
or disappearance of those principles account,
as Alison was suggesting, for the deep shit
we're in these days.
Anyway, from Koyukon people, I became
very interested in animal rights and the ethics
of our relationship to the world because here
were people whose philosophy of animal rights
was so extraordinarily complex and sophisticated that I don't
think in Western culture we have yet come anywhere close to it.
In any case, in my work with deer,
I was very interested in hunting.
And I went back to Wisconsin where I grew up
and for the first time in my life
went out with hunters there and went to Texas
and went out with hunters there and not hunting myself
but my own hunting I prefer to only do at home,
but just to learn from them what they do.
And after one fall going out with a group of hunters
on opening day of the deer season in Wisconsin
in the company of 600,000 other hunters that
were out in the woods on opening day,
it's one of those days when you really are sort
of looking over your shoulder.
The next winter or the next fall,
I went back to Wisconsin and went out with a group
of anti-hunting protesters to experience more of--
to learn more of their philosophy
and to get to know them as people
and to see what it was like to participate in one of those
protests where people meet hunters and try
to suggest to them that it might be nicer
to do something else that day.
And so it was a really interesting--
I mean, that is sort of funny, but in truth,
that is exactly what the folks I was with were doing.
And it was a really fascinating experience for me.
Of course, they knew that I myself am a hunter,
but I think they also knew that we
shared many views in common about the way we
should treat animals.
But I made strange company for them, and I made--
it was a very odd experience for all concerned but also for me
kind of wonderful.
And this little bit that I'm going to read to you
is out of a chapter called "In Search of Eden"
from Heart and Blood.
I was with three women and a television-- a news television
crew.
And the leader of the group was named Darcy.
We had already met one group of hunters
and done our thing with them.
And there are some funny parts in this,
but please don't misunderstand.
I am not making fun of these people.
I am not at all because I really like them and I respect them
enormously, but it was kind of a funny experience.
I can't help that.
Once we got back out on the road-- we were in our car.
Once we got back on the road, it didn't take long
to find more hunters.
A weary looking sedan, faded brown,
crammed with people pulled on to the shoulder
as we approached from behind.
The occupants sat inside for what
seemed like forever perhaps looking out the rearview
mirror to see what our group would do.
Finally, the entire crowd, three men
and two women all dressed in brilliant orange
piled out and opened the trunk.
Showing no particular haste, they
sorted through rifles packs and other gear then surveyed
the terrain as if they weren't sure where to go.
We watched the proceedings intently, silently, almost
hypnotically.
Once again, I'm muddled about my divided loyalties.
I felt an odd allegiance to my activist companions
but knew my deeper sympathies, in this context at least,
rested with the hunters.
To my amazement, I felt electrified with the chase,
having lost my earlier anxiety.
Did my companions recognize, I wondered,
the similarity between their pursuit and the hunter
stalking prey?
Meanwhile, the target group didn't look terribly serious
about hunting given that they'd come so late
and acted as if they were preparing
for a stroll or a picnic.
At last, they strung out along a footpath
that climbed a grassy hillside toward promising woods
a few hundred yards from the road.
Without a word from Darcy, everyone
launched out after the hunters.
Their leader was a slightly built man
probably in his mid 50s accompanied
by his two daughters and their respective boyfriends
all in their 20s.
Only the three men carried weapons.
Taken completely by surprise, they
accepted the intrusion with remarkable calm
as if it wasn't altogether welcome
but might prove interesting, like an encounter
with door to door salespeople or survey takers.
As soon as the television camera started rolling,
our three women repeated their suggestion
that it might be a nice day for some other outdoors activity.
This led to a short now familiar and not terribly informative
debate with the older man concerning the evils or virtues
of what he had come to do.
Wouldn't you rather be out with a camera?
Well, it's kind of hard to eat a picture.
Yeah, yeah, but between the three of you guys,
you could each legally get five deer.
That's 15 deer altogether.
Doesn't that bother you?
We'd be lucky if we get one, really, the man responded.
He didn't mention that hunters cannot legally take five deer
in Wisconsin.
A person who worked all the angles
hunting both the firearms and both seasons
and also holding a special bonus permit
could take as many as four and in certain management units.
Officials say this rarely happens
and that most successful hunters take a single deer.
Don't you worry about the message
it gives to younger kids telling that hunting is an OK thing
to do?
What's wrong with that message?
Hunting has been going on since the beginning of time.
Yeah, but I mean, slavery went on for a long time too.
The hunter had a question of his own,
how are you going to deal with the car
collisions, the agricultural damage, the urban deer wrecking
people's gardens and all the other problems from high deer
populations?
Well, that's very simple, Darcy replied,
collisions won't happen if people
put deer whistles on their cars and if you've
got special reflectors along the highways
and if you mow a certain way along the roadsides.
Also with firearms, you just plant
a couple of extra rows of corn around the field which
the deer eat and then they leave the rest of the corn alone.
If deer come in your backyard and eat your red tulips,
well, you might find out they don't like yellow tulips.
I'm sorry, this is a tape recorded conversation.
I didn't make this up.
These are cost-effective measures,
Darcy added-- and this is a very good critique, I think.
Darcy added, then you've got the Department of Natural Resources
over the last decade managing deer populations for more
and more and more trying to get the maximum deer yield per acre.
They kill off the bucks every fall
and then you get does having two or three fawns.
When you follow a hands-off approach allowing nature
to take her course, the deer population averages out.
We just want the deer left alone instead of having atrocities
committed against them.
The elder hunter countered each point with a firmness that
equaled Darcy's.
He was calm, steadfast, and unfazed, if a bit impatient.
For their part, the protesters tempered
their strident assertiveness with flawless courtesy,
and so it went.
One of the couples kept to the background during all this
but the other stayed close, listening intently
while casting an occasional glance toward the television
camera.
At one point, the young man sidled over
to ask the reporter which station he came from
and if we'd all be on the evening news
and if we'd get paid something for doing this.
At last, the father announced, I respect your right
to say your piece, and it's been nice talking to you,
but we're going hunting.
Not without our company, Darcy let him know.
Well, I guess that's fine, he responded.
And all three men unloaded their rifles slipping the ammunition
into their pockets.
Judging by the heavy blaze coveralls each of them wore,
I figured they wouldn't hike far.
The television guys said they'd have
to stay behind keeping their equipment dry inside the car
until the protesters returned.
Everyone else trekked up the narrow soggy trail,
a single file procession of flaming orange outfits that
looked like a Halloween parade.
When we topped the ridge a quarter mile from the road,
the older man called a halt. From here,
we looked into an exquisite little valley, broad swathes
of Auburn meadow, sumac thickets with clinging scarlet leaves
and a surrounding forest dominated by ivory trumped birch
and aspen.
The place had an ethereal quality
wreathed as it was in mist and drifting rain
like a romantic painter's version of paradise.
I could hardly imagine a less appropriate venue
for political wrangling, yet here we
were ready for a standoff amid the wilds.
I hadn't heard a shot that morning,
perhaps because of the noisy gale.
But now somewhere in the distance,
a blue jay's call surged and faded on the wind.
I longed to see that bird flinging over
the treetops like blue satin torn from the sky's edge.
But the bird, having its own desires and the freedom
to pursue them, never came within our sight.
I guess we'll sit right here on this hill,
said the elder man, looks like a pretty good place to hunt.
The shy couple talked softly for a few minutes
then hiked off to hunt or wait elsewhere.
But the other two sat on the grass beside our circle.
They seemed more interested in the debate or perhaps the event
than in hunting.
While continuing his discourse with Bart, Darcy, Penny,
and Mary, the man took a small bottle from his pocket
and dabbed a stick into it.
Instantly, the whole area was saturated with dense lurid skunk
scent.
We use this to mask human odor, he explained, you know,
so the deer won't smell us.
Despite his placid businesslike demeanor,
I sensed a little gesture of retaliation here
and caught an impish glint in his eyes.
But the saboteurs seemed unperturbed;
perhaps they appreciated this forthright
and uncomplicated fellow as much as I did,
an ordinary man altogether equal to this extraordinary situation.
In fact, I was impressed with every performer
in this little melodrama.
Unfortunately, given the clatter of voices,
one player certain not to make an appearance
was the white-tailed deer.
Much of the dialogue had become familiar,
so I chatted with the daughter and her mate.
Both said they'd hunted before but neither had yet
taken a deer.
To assuage my guilt, I mentioned that I'd
come not to protest but to watch and report.
At this, the young man beamed like a lottery winner.
Oh, you're a writer.
Do you think we'll make it into a book?
Does it make you angry having these folks interrupt your hunt,
I asked.
Heck no, he said, eyes widening, I want to get on TV.
About this time, Darcy played another card,
warning the father that we'd stay around until they all
abandon the woods.
That's fine, he parried.
We'd like to get a deer, but we'll
have a nice day outdoors no matter what happens.
The young guy leaned toward me and whispered,
I figure you're going to have to leave pretty soon.
But I'd rather you didn't, at least
not if the TV guys come out here and take some pictures.
Back in the main arena, Darcy probed for a different nerve.
I wish I could tap into your brain
to understand how hunting can be fun, seeing the life go out
of a deer's eyes.
Well, I can't say I don't enjoy hunting, the elder responded,
and also, I love venison.
Of course, we're not starving, but we still
like to get our deer for the meat.
I'm not after a trophy buck, even though, unfortunately,
all we have this year are buck tags.
We sent in for doe permits but we didn't get any.
You might decide later in life to just look at deer
or take up the camera instead, Penny suggested.
I probably will when I can't manage to walk up the hills
or get to the places where I hunt.
You know, I love being out here in the woods.
I could sit here for a week and just watch and I'd be happy,
said Darcy.
We'd probably agree with you on 90% of this,
but it's just the killing.
After about half an hour, Darcy checked her watch,
sighed, and threw in the towel.
Time for us to get along, she announced.
And I guess we'll get on with our hunting,
the older man replied.
Everybody swapped amicable goodbyes,
and then Darcy's crew marched back down the trail,
ponchos flailing in the wind.
All three women seemed delighted with the way things had gone.
So was I. It was a really great experience.
In the beginning of it, I was absolutely catatonic.
I was so nervous about it, and I was really scared.
All of the protesters were scared, I mean,
confronting armed people and on the most sacred day of the year
for those folks.
But it amazed me that every hunter we met and talked
with, if their rifle was loaded, they immediately unloaded.
And they were either polite or they pretty much
ignored the protesters.
It was a really interesting experience.
And as I said, I ended up having a lot of admiration
for everyone, including, certainly,
the folks who had invited me along on the protest.
Something related to that same day,
after I left the group of protesters, everybody went home.
We'd gotten up at 2:30 in the morning
to drive out and be there when the first light came.
And after the protest ended, which was around midday,
it was like it was in a typhoon.
It was blowing and raining so hard,
and it wasn't a great day for a protest.
It wasn't a great day for hunting either.
I was driving back to Madison, Wisconsin.
I saw a group of hunters out in a field,
and they were obviously working on a deer.
So I stopped and walked out to them.
And it was really funny.
The first thing they said is, geez,
you made us nervous walking out here.
We thought you might have been one of those hunting
protesters or something.
I said, are you kidding?
I can hardly wait to eat fresh venison, said one of the hunters
I met on the opening day protest.
His partners nodded their agreement
and so did I. This brought to mind the countless times I'd
worked on deer as he was doing and the satisfaction it
gave me preparing food that I would enjoy over
the following year.
Regardless of my Euro-American roots,
I felt sure this satisfaction reflected, more than anything
else, the fact that I'm an animal
and that I am driven by the same hungers that
motivate any other creature, the squirrel in the forest,
the vole in the meadow, the bear on the mountainside,
the deer in the valley.
What could I learn by keeping constantly
in mind the fundamental encompassing fact
that I am an animal and by remembering
that I share with every other creature on earth
the need to sustain my life by eating other organisms?
This biological need reveals that I am not just one
of the earth's living creatures but also one with them.
At the deepest level, all forms of life are interchangeable.
Animals eat plants, and plants are nourished in turn
by animals.
There is only one kind of life, shared equally, identically,
and universally among every organism on earth.
We pass life back and forth, the fire that burns inside us
all, creating a spectacular network of interdependence.
Nowhere is our membership in the earth's living community
more evident than at meal time when our table
is arrayed with organisms.
Listen to their names, corn, wheat, rice, potato, carrot,
radish, celery, broccoli, tomato, lettuce, rhubarb,
blueberry, banana, pear, strawberry, orange, cherry,
apple, salmon, halibut, red snapper, perch, chicken, turkey,
duck, cow, pig, sheep, elk, deer.
We veil these organisms with euphemisms, green, fruit,
vegetable, cereal, herb, condiment, relish, source,
beverage, poultry, meat, fillet.
We further conceal them by mixing, dicing, whipping,
coloring, leavening, mashing, dressing, dehydrating, stewing,
boiling, smoking, roasting, frying, boxing, and wrapping.
Yet at every breakfast, lunch, dinner, banquet, picnic,
and snack, each of us is fed by other lives passed along
to us as our daily bread.
The supermarket is an agent of our forgetfulness.
Organisms we buy in stores and array on the table
are our makers, the creators and nurturers of our bodies
until eventually we die and nourish other organisms in turn.
As a society, we could benefit enormously
by finding ways to remember, acknowledge, and celebrate
this process, to accept with gratitude
and respect the plants and animals who keep us alive,
who weave us into the living tapestry of earth.
The thing that I think is taught so importantly
in Native American traditions as at least I
have tried to understand them is that all kinds of life
are gifted with spirit and power and awareness.
And the simple and perhaps simplistic
division between plants and animals
or between animals with consciousness and animals
without consciousness, I don't think you
would find a lot of support for that idea, at least
in the Native American communities
where I have been a student.
And so that kind of a division, that sort
of an escape from the great psychological and moral
and ethical responsibilities involved
with taking life that is kind of on an equal plane with your own,
you can't escape from that, whether you're
eating my buddy Nabhan's hot chilies
or whether you're eating venison or whatever it is.
It's all living, empowered, conscious, aware life.
And that's one of the reasons why that philosophy seems
to me more sophisticated than the one
that I inherited in the culture of my birth.
Well, OK, so now we've come this far.
We might as well just go all the way with the gritty stuff.
This is the day after the day that I
came across the bear sign.
And actually earlier in this day,
I had also come across the maker of that sign in one of the most
terrifying experiences of my entire life
in which along about dusk walking out of the muskeg--
the day before walking out of the muskeg,
this great huge animal stood up right in front of the dog and I
and really renovated my whole way of thinking in a hurry.
In any case, as you can see, we all got out of it
alive without any major damage there.
Still a torrent of whitecaps, the offshore islands
half lost in rain squalls, thick strata surging overhead,
I turn my face toward the sky, let the raindrops
prickle my skin and feel grateful to be
alive in this saturated kingdom of clouds.
After months of tranquil weather,
the whole world seems caught up in a boisterous celebration
as if the season isn't just turning, it's doing handsprings.
I'm exalted by the wildness of it all,
ready for the cold and fire and passion of winter.
At times, the gale blows so hard that the rhythm
of my tired footsteps seems almost inconsequential,
but I still try to keep quiet staying
on the highest least spongy ground
as we trek along the muskeg's edge.
Little time remains before nightfall,
so there's not much chance we'll come across any more deer.
And yet, judging by the abundance of tracks,
droppings, and clipped vegetation,
more than one black tail would hear the sound
if I clapped my hands.
All around us is lovely park-like heath
scattered with bonsai pines veiled in mist and rain.
It's as if everything had been set perfectly
in place according to some meticulous yet whimsical design.
And even I, a man freshly rooted here,
feel myself a part of it, a single voice in a deafeningly
beautiful chorus.
I am an animal moving among other animals surrounded
by plants, wrapped in a cloak of rain, breathing wind,
feet sunken into the moss, the great earth plunging away below.
With the approach of dusk, I have no choice but to head back
toward the cove.
We haven't come across fresh bear sign today,
but I don't care to grope through the woods in darkness.
Retracing our earlier route, Keta and I
approach the spot where we saw the first doe this morning.
It's fairly calm and quiet under the leaning brow of trees,
so I move along slowly and pause every few steps to look around.
But just ahead is a broad, open meadow, not
the sort of place where I'd expect to see deer, especially
during a storm.
Keta grabs a stick and begs me to play,
but I motion her to settle down.
If nothing else, stepping along quietly and silently
will keep my senses alert, heightening
my awareness of the wind, the rain,
and the softly dwindling light.
I pick my way through a patch of deer
cabbage then look up to scan the area ahead.
In that fraction of a second, everything is changed.
And I catch myself in mid step as the truth of it bolts
through me.
At the same instant, Keta sags into a half crouch,
her neck leaning forward, her ears honed, her eyes riveted,
her legs quivering, one fore paw lifted off the ground.
They're standing atop a low rise about 20 yards ahead silhouetted
above the crowns of two stunted pines.
Hard edged against a faded hoary overcast
is the chest and neck and head of a deer faced directly
toward us, eyes shining, ears in a wide V
and a beaming crescent of antlers bending above.
Without hesitating and without conscious thought,
I sink onto my knees, raise the rifle to my shoulder
and brace it against the slender tree.
During these seconds, I'm taken by a powerful sense of deja vu.
At this same season a few years ago,
a buck stood against the evening sky
less than 100 yards from this spot,
and I did exactly what I'm doing now.
Perhaps this is why the outcome seems just as certain.
There is no tingling apprehension, no pounding heart,
no shaking hand.
The rifle sights come to rest, unwavering.
I breathe deeply and deeply again, eyes opened wide.
It's as if everything were preordained
and the animal had come, as Koyukon elders teach,
to give itself.
I feel absolutely jarringly predatory,
like a cat splayed against the grass simmering in ambush,
and utterly alive in a way that defies
language, that scarcely renders itself in conscious thought.
I am a living creature questing for its food.
Whatever ambiguity I feel about the hunt,
it now lies far beyond reach.
And I say this, no tiller of soil, no herder of flocks,
no gatherer of plants, no browser of grocery shelves
will ever cross this same emotional terrain.
As for me, I would rather be a rock on a hillside
than exist without knowing in this way
the animal who lives inside me and gives me life.
The buck pumps his head up and down,
telegraphing his uncertainty.
Then he stands absolutely still, his shape
incised above the curving cloud of branches
as if the full truth of him had leapt into the fluid of my eye.
Lightning flashes brightly in the blackness,
and thunder pours away over the land's edge,
tumbling and tumbling beneath the storm.
There is a burst and a shock and a jarred half vision
of the deer's fall as if he were completely
released like a puppet whose strings have all
been snipped at once.
I stand, breathing heavily, and rush
toward the empty space between the pines with Keta
bounding alongside.
She reaches the spot before me, circles and snuffles
the soft edges of the buck.
He lays on a mat of crowberry and bog
laurel, soft and quiet and midnight still,
as if the gale had instantly grown calm.
At first, I hear only silence, then I
hear my heart pounding and the ringing in my ears
and finally Keta panting at my side, the swishing of wind
and high boughs, the distant drum of surf.
I kneel beside the deer and touch his warm silky eye
to affirm the certainty of death,
then I run my hand along his flank whispering
words of thanks which seem inadequate and frail against
what I've been given here, a life that will enter and sustain
my own.
Beaded raindrops roll down over the dry brittle fur.
I am not a guiltless hunter, but neither do I hunt without joy.
What fills me now is an incongruous mix of grief
and satisfaction, excitement and calm, humility and pride
and the recognition that death is
the rain that fills the river of life inside us all.
Keta prances back and forth excitedly
looking in all directions for another deer
as if animals only fascinate her when they're running,
or might do so.
I hold her by my side, rub her fur and nuzzle her wet face.
The deer is a prime heavy thick-coated buck bearing
modest but lovely antlers, their slender
beams stained dark maroon at the base fading
to polished gray on each of the six elegantly tapered points.
I will leave them here.
Keta nudges close, trying to lick the blood that drips down,
but I shoo her away out of respect for the animal.
Later on when we butcher the deer,
Keta will have her share of scraps.
I take some fat from inside the body plus a few slivers of meat
and leave them with the viscera for the other animals.
It's important, Koyukon people say,
that wild creatures feed on remnants left in the woods
by hunters.
But other than small tidbits, nothing
should be abandoned except parts we can't use ourselves.
The eagles and ravens will come at first light tomorrow,
and within an hour, they'll clean up
everything but the skull bones and stomach contents.
To make sure no dirt gets inside the carcass,
I cut small holes through the skin around the belly
and neck openings then lace them shut with cord.
Next, I have to sever the four legs at their knee joints
and toggle each front leg through a sliced opening
in the hock of the corresponding rear leg.
This makes it possible to carry a modest sized
deer as if it were a pack, putting
your arms through the fastened legs
and hoisting it up so the animal's belly lays
against your back.
With darkness looming above mountains to the east,
I start the final trudge.
Keta dances alongside perhaps anticipating tonight's dinner.
I'll cut a few pieces of fresh venison
to fry in a skillet atop the wood burning stove,
the most delicious and elemental feast I can imagine,
making the deer a part of me.
In the last stretch of muskeg, just before we'll
enter the woods behind bear cove,
I angle over to a small rain dappled lake,
put my load on the ground and rest beside the water.
Keta slumps against me, finally getting tired.
But she perks up a few minutes later
when a large doe ghosts out from the trees
directly across the lake from us and steps to the water's edge,
nervously switching her tail.
She reaches down and touches her nose to the water,
and it's as if I've drifted into a deer's dream.
I slowly bend over, dip my hand beneath the ripples
and fill it with the same chilled water.
And there, embraced by the island and the sky,
we drink each other down.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]