I can’t help feeling a little anxious, because the season is drawing short and our year’s supply of meat is not yet in. During the past few weeks, deer have been unusually wary, haunting the underbrush and slipping away at the least disturbance. I’ve come near a few, but these were young ones I stalked only for the luxury of seeing them from close range. Now that the rutting season has begun, there’s a good chance of finding larger deer, and they’ll be distracted by the search for mates.
A bald eagle watches from a tall hemlock as we bob ashore in the punt. Finally the bird lurches out, scoops its wings full of dense, cold air, and soars away beyond the line of trees. While I trudge up with the punt, Shungnak prances back and forth, hunting for smells. The upper reaches are layered and slabbed with ice; slick cobbles shine like steel; frozen grass crackles underfoot. I lean the punt on a snow-covered log, pick up my rifle and small pack, and slip through the leafless alders into the forest.
My eyes adjust to the darkness, the deep green of boughs, and the somber, shadowy trunks. I feel safe and hidden here. The forest floor is covered with deep moss that should sponge gently underfoot. But today the softness is gone: frozen moss crunches with each step and brittle twigs snap, ringing out in the crisp air like strangers’ voices. It takes a while to get used to this harshness in a forest that’s usually wet and velvety and silent. I listen to the clicking of gusts in the high branches and think that winter has come upon us like a fist.
At the base of a spruce tree is a familiar white patch — a scatter of deer bones: ribs, legs, vertebrae, two pelvis bones, and two skulls with half-bleached antlers. I put them here last winter, saying they were for the other animals, to make clear they were not being thoughtlessly wasted. The scavengers soon picked them clean, the deer mice have gnawed them, and eventually they’ll be absorbed into the forest again. Koyukon elders say it shows respect, returning animal bones to a clean, wild place instead of throwing them away with trash or discarding them in a garbage dump.
The long, quiet, methodical process of the hunt begins. I move deeper into the forest, ever mindful of treading the edge between protracted, eventless watching and the startling intensity of coming upon an animal, the always unexpected meeting of eyes. A deer could show itself at this moment, in an hour, in several hours, or not at all. Most of hunting is like this — an exercise in patient, isometric endurance and keen, hypnotic concentration. I lift my foot, step ahead, ease it down, wait, step again. Shungnak follows closely, as we work our way through a maze of windfallen trees, across the clear disks of frozen ponds, and around patches of snow beneath openings in the forest canopy. I remind myself there is probably a doe or a buck somewhere in this stretch of woods, perhaps close enough to hear a branch snap or a bough scratch against my clothes. Deep snow has forced the deer off Kluksa Mountain and Crescent Peak, so they’re sure to be haunting these lowlands.
We climb a high, steep scarp that levels to a wooded terrace. After pausing to catch my breath, I stand atop a log and peer into the semiopen understory of twiggy bushes, probing each space with my eyes. A downy woodpecker’s call sparks from a nearby tree. Several minutes pass. Then a huckleberry branch moves, barely shivers, without the slightest noise, not far ahead.
I turn to look at Shungnak, taking advantage of her sharper hearing and magical sense of smell. She lifts her nose to the fresh but nebulous scent of deer that must have come through here this morning. I watch her little radar ears, waiting for her to focus in one direction and hold it, hoping to see her body tense as it does when something moves nearby. But she hears only the twitching of red squirrels on dry bark. Shungnak and I have a very different opinion of the squirrels. They excite her more than any other animal because she believes she’ll catch one someday. But for a hunter, they make distracting spurts of movement and sound, and their sputtering calls of alarm alert the deer.
We approach a low, abrupt rise, covered with obscuring brush and curtained with snow. A lift of wind hisses in the high trees, then drops away and leaves us in near-complete silence. I pause to choose a path through a scramble of blueberry bushes and little windfalls ahead, then glance back at Shungnak. She has her eyes and ears fixed toward our left, directly across the current of breeze. She stands very stiff, quivering slightly, leaning forward as if she has already started to run but cannot release her muscles. I shake my finger and look sternly into her eyes as a warning to stay.
I listen as closely as possible, but hear nothing. I work my eyes into every dark crevice and slot among the snowy branches, but see nothing. I stand perfectly still and wait, then look again at Shungnak. Her head turns so slowly I can barely detect the movement, until finally she’s looking straight ahead. Perhaps it’s just another squirrel. I consider taking a few steps for a better view.
Then I see it.
A long, dark body appears among the bushes, moving up into the wind, so close I can scarcely believe I didn’t see it earlier. Without looking away, I gently slide the breech closed and raise the rifle to my shoulder, almost certain that a deer this size will be a buck. Shungnak, now forgotten behind me, must be contorted with the suppressed urge to give chase.
The deer walks silently, determinedly along the little rise, never looking our way. Then he turns straight toward us. Thick tines of his antlers curve over the place where I have the rifle aimed. I remember the Koyukon elders saying that animals come to those who have shown them respect, allowing themselves to be taken, in what is both a physical and spiritual passage. At a moment like this, it’s easy to sense that despite my abiding doubt there is an invisible world beyond this one, a world filled with power and awareness, a world that demands recognition and exacts a price from those who ignore it.
It is a very large buck. He comes so quickly that I have no chance to shoot, and then he is so close I haven’t the heart to do it. Fifty feet away, the deer lowers his head almost to the ground and lifts a slender branch that blocks his path. Snow shakes onto his neck and clings to the fur of his shoulders as he slips underneath. Then he half lifts his head and keeps coming. I ease the rifle down to watch, wondering how much closer he’ll get. Just now he makes a long, soft, rutting call, like the bleating of a sheep, except lower pitched and more hollow. His hoofs tick against dry twigs hidden by the snow. I can almost feel the breeze blowing against his fur, the chill winnowing down through close-set hairs and touching his skin.
In the middle of a step he raises his head all the way up, and he sees me standing there — a stain against the pure white of the forest, a deadly interloper, the one utterly incongruous thing he has met here in all his life. He reaches his muzzle forward and draws in the affliction of our smell. A sudden spasm stuns him, so sharp and intense it’s as if his fright spills out into the forest and tingles inside me like electricity. His front legs jerk apart and he freezes all askew, head high, nostrils flared, coiled and hard. I stare at him and wait, my mind snarled with irreconcilable emotions. Here is a perfect buck deer. In the Koyukon way, he has come to me; but in my own he has come too close. I am as congealed and transfixed as he is, as devoid of conscious thought. It’s as if my mind has ceased to function and only my senses remain.
But the buck has no choice. He instantly unwinds in a burst of ignited energy, springs straight up from the snow, turns in midflight, stabs the frozen earth again, and makes four great bounds off to the left. His thick body seems to float, relieved of its own weight, as if a deer has the power to unbind itself from gravity.
The same deeper impulse that governs the flight of a deer governs the predator’s impulse to pursue it. I watch the first leaps without moving a muscle. Then, not pausing for an instant of deliberation, I raise the rifle back to my shoulder, follow the movement of the deer’s fleeing form, and wait until he stops to stare back. Almost at that moment, still moving without conscious thought, freed of the ambiguities that held me before, now no less animal than the animal I watch, my hands warm and steady and certain, acting from a more elemental sense than the ones that brought me to this meeting, I carefully align the sights and let go the sudden power.
The gift of the deer falls like a feather in the snow. And the rifle’s sound has rolled off through the timber before I hear it.
Shaking now as accumulated emotions pour through me, I walk to the deer. Shungnak is already next to it, whining and smelling, racing from one side to the other, stuffing her nose down in snow full of scent. She looks off into the brush, searching back and forth, as if the deer that ran is somewhere else, still running. She tries to lick at the blood that trickles down, but I stop her out of respect for the animal. Then, I suppose to consummate her own frustrated predatory energy, she takes a hard nip at its shoulder, shuns quickly away, and looks back as if she expects it to leap to its feet again.
Almost at that moment, still moving without conscious thought, freed of the ambiguities that held me before, now no less animal than the animal I watch, my hands warm and steady and certain, acting from a more elemental sense than the ones that brought me to this meeting, I carefully align the sights and let go the sudden power.
I whisper thanks to the animal, hoping I might be worthy of it, worthy of carrying on the life it has given, worthy of sharing in the larger life of which the deer and I are a part. Incompatible emotions clash inside me — elation and remorse, excitement and sorrow, gratitude and shame. It’s always this way: the sudden encounter with death, the shock that overrides the cushioning of the intellect. I force away the sadness and remember that death is the spark that keeps life itself aflame: these deer we eat from, and the fish, and the plants that die to feed us.
It takes a few minutes before I settle down enough to begin the other work. Then, I tie a length of rope onto the forelegs, run it over a low branch, back down through a loop in the rope, and up over the branch again like a double pulley, so I can raise the animal above the ground. This done, I cut the dark, pungent scent glands from its hind legs, to prevent their secretions from tainting the meat. Next, I make a small incision through the belly skin, insert my hand to shield the knife blade from the distended stomach, and slice upward to make an opening about a foot long. Reaching inside, I loosen the stomach and intestines, then work them out through the incision, pulling carefully to avoid tearing the thin membranes and spilling stomach contents into the body cavity. The deer’s inward parts feel very hot, slippery, and wet, as I suppose my own would if I could ever touch them. Finally the viscera slide out onto the ground: soft, bladderlike stomach and flaccid ribbons of intestine; a gray, shining mound, webbed with networks of veins and lacy fat, steaming into the cold, saturating the air with a rich odor of plant mulch and body fluids.
Next, I roll up my jacket sleeve and thrust my arm deep inside the deer, until I feel the diaphragm, a sheet of muscle that separates the abdomen from the chest. When I slice through it, a thick, hot rush of blood flows down my arm and sloshes into the vacant belly. There is a hollow, tearing sound as I pull the lungs free; and reaching up inside the chest, I can feel the firm, softball-sized muscle of the heart. The lungs are marbled creamy pink and feel like soft, airy sponge. As I lay them beside the other organs, I whisper that these parts are left here as food for the animals. Shungnak wants to take some for herself but I make her stay away. Koyukon elders say the sensitivity and awareness leave an animal’s remains slowly, and there are rules about what should be eaten by a dog. Shungnak will have her share of the scraps later on, when more of the life is gone.
Before I lived with the Eskimos, 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 walruses, 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’s 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.
When I’ve finished with the deer, I put two slices from the hindquarter in a pan atop the stove. Scraps of meat and fat boil in a separate pot for Shungnak. She whines impatiently, perhaps remembering her sled-dog days, when she lived mostly on meat and fish and bones. As soon as she’s been fed, I sit on a sawed log and eat venison straight from the pan. No meal could be simpler, more satisfying, or more directly a part of the living process. I also savor a deep feeling of security in having this meat, bringing it home to freeze or can for the year ahead — pure food, taken from a clean, wild place, and prepared by our own efforts. There is a special intimacy in living directly from nature, nourishing my body from the same wilderness that so elevates my spirit.
Later, perched atop rocks near the mouth of Bear Creek, Shungnak and I look out over Haida Strait to the sea beyond. A distant winter sun sprawls against the horizon, thins to a mound of shivering flame, and drowns itself in the cold Pacific. The sky fades to violet, darkens, and relaxes, like a face losing expression at the edge of sleep. Silence hovers in the brittle woods.
A great blue heron glides down into the anchorage cove and stands motionless in the shallows, like the shadow of a pterodactyl against the Mesozoic sky. Every few minutes I notice the bird’s stance and position have changed, but invisibly, like a clock’s hands, so that I never actually see its legs move. Then I notice its head slowly lowering, its body tilting, its neck stretching forward. Suddenly it flashes out and draws back, and a fish wriggles on the dripping spear of its beak. The recoiling heron stands erect, flips the fish lengthwise, gulps it, and resumes hunting. Over the next few minutes, the bulge of the fish gradually moves down its serpentine neck.
I’ve watched herons many times before, admiring them as elegantly plumed, primeval works of art. But I never thought about their impeccable skill and patience as hunters. This event gives me a better sense of the way they live — the measured and timeless stalks, the penetrating eyes fixed at the water’s edge, the shadows of prey moving below, the saber beak striking down, the sudden consummation of the predatory impulse. Given a choice of birds, I would be a heron, or an owl, a falcon, an eagle. I love these quick, canny animals, perhaps because they seem closest to my own kind. To feel otherwise about predators would be like shrinking from the face in the mirror.
Shortly after noon we come into a narrow muskeg with scattered shore pines and a ragged edge of brushy, low-growing cedar. I squint against the sharp glare of snow. It has that peculiar look of old powder, a bit settled and touched by wind, very lovely but without the airy magic of a fresh fall. I gaze up the muskeg’s easy slope. Above the encroaching wall of timber, seamed against the deep blue sky, is the peak of Kluksa Mountain, with a great plume of snow streaming off in what must be a shuddering gale. It has a contradictory look of absoluteness and unreality about it, like a Himalayan summit suspended in midair over the saddle of a low ridge.
I move slowly up the muskeg’s east side, away from the breeze and in the sun’s full warmth. Deer tracks crisscross the opening, but none of the animals stopped here to feed. Next to the bordering trees, the tracks join as a single, hardpacked trail, showing the deer’s preference for cover. Shungnak keeps her nose to the thickly scented snow. We come across a pine sapling that a buck has assaulted with his antlers, scattering twigs and flakes of bark all around. But his tracks are hardened, frosted, and lack sharpness, indicating they’re at least a day old.
We slip through a point of trees, then follow the edge again, pausing long moments between footsteps. A mixed tinkle of crossbills and siskins moves through the high timber, and a squirrel rattles from deep in the woods, too far off to be scolding us. Shungnak picks up a strong ribbon of scent, but she hears nothing. I stop for a few minutes to study the muskeg’s raveled fringe, the tangle of shade and thicket, the glaze of mantled boughs.
Then my eye barely catches a fleck of movement up ahead, near the ground and almost hidden behind the trunk of a leaning pine — perhaps a squirrel’s tail or a bird. I slowly lift my hand to shade the sun, stand dead still, and wait to see if something is there. Finally it moves again.
At the very edge of the trees, almost out of sight in a little swale, small and furry and bright-tinged, turning one direction and then another, is the funnel of a single ear. Having seen this, I soon make out the other ear and the slope of a doe’s forehead. Her neck is behind the leaning pine, but on the other side I can barely see the soft, dark curve of her back above the snow. She is comfortably bedded, gazing placidly into the distance, chewing her cud.
Shungnak has stopped twenty yards behind me in the point of trees and has no idea about the deer. I shake my finger at her until she lays her ears back and sits. Then I watch the doe again. She is fifty yards ahead, ten yards beyond the leaning tree, and still looking off at an angle. Her left eye is visible and she refuses to turn her head away, so it might be impossible to get closer. Perhaps I should just wait here, in case a buck is attending her nearby. But however improbable it might be under these circumstances, a thought is lodged in my mind: I can get near her.
My first step sinks down softly, but the second makes a loud budging sound, like stepping on a piece of toast. She snaps my way, stops chewing, and stares for several minutes. It seems hopeless, especially out here in an open field of crispy snow with only the narrow tree trunk for a screen. But she turns away and starts to chew again. I move just enough so the tree blocks her eye and the rest of her head, but I can still see her ears. Every time she chews they shake just a bit, so I watch them and step when her hearing is obscured by the sound of her own jaws.
Either this works or the deer has decided to ignore me, because after a while I’ve come close enough so the noise of my feet has to reach her easily. She should have jumped up and run long ago, but instead she lies there in serene repose. I deliberate on every step, try for the softest snow, wait long minutes before the next move, stalking like a cat toward ambush. I watch beyond her, into the surrounding shadows and across to the muskeg’s farther edge, for the shape of a buck deer; but there is nothing. I feel ponderous, clumsy-footed, out of place, inimical. I should turn and run away, take fear on the deer’s behalf, flee the mirrored image in my mind. But I clutch the cold rifle at my side and creep closer.
The wind refuses to blow and my footsteps seem like thunder in the still sunshine. But the doe only turns once to look my way, without even pointing her ears toward me, then stares off and begins to chew again.
I am ten feet from the leaning tree. My heart pounds so hard I think those enchanted ears should hear the blood rushing in my temples. Yet a strange assurance has come into me, a quite unmystical confidence. Perhaps she has decided I am another deer, a buck attracted by her musk or a doe feeding gradually toward her. My slow pace and lapses of stillness would not seem human. For myself, I have lost awareness of time; I have no feeling of patience or impatience. It’s as if the deer has moved slowly toward me on a cloud of snow, and I am adrift in the pure motion of experience.
I take the last step to the trunk of the leaning pine. It’s bare of branches, scarcely wider than my outstretched hand, but perfectly placed to break my odd profile. There is no hope of getting any closer, so I slowly poke my head out to watch. She has an ideal spot: screened from the wind, warmed by the sun, and with a clear view of the muskeg. I can see muscles working beneath the close fur of her jaw, the rise and fall of her side each time she breathes, the shining edge of her ebony eye.
Drawn by the honey of the doe’s scent, the buck steps quickly toward her. And now the most extraordinary thing happens. The doe turns away from him and walks straight for me.
I hold absolutely still, but her body begins to stiffen, she lifts her head higher, and her ears twitch anxiously. Then instead of looking at me she turns her face to the woods, shifting her ears toward a sound I cannot hear. A few seconds later, the unmistakable voice of a buck drifts up, strangely disembodied, as if it comes from somewhere underneath the snow. I huddle as close to the tree as I can, press against the hard dry bark, and peek around its edge.
There is a gentle rise behind the doe, scattered with sapling pines and bushy juniper. A rhythmic crunching of snow comes invisibly from the slope, then a bough shakes . . . and a buck walks easily into the open sunshine.
Focusing completely on the doe, he comes straight to her and never sees my intrusive shape just beyond. He slips through a patch of small trees, stops a few feet from where she lies, lowers his head and stretches it toward her, then holds this odd pose for a long moment. She reaches her muzzle to one side, trying to find his scent. When he moves up behind her she stands quickly, bends her body into a strange sideways arc, and stares back at him. A moment later she walks off a bit, lifts her tail, and puts droppings in her tracks. The buck moves to the warm ground of her bed and lowers his nose to the place where her female scent is strongest.
Inching like a reptile on a cold rock, I have stepped out from the tree and let my whole menacing profile become visible. The deer are thirty feet away and stand well apart, so they can both see me easily. I am a hunter hovering near his prey and a watcher craving inhuman love, torn between the deepest impulses, hot and shallow-breathed and seething with unreconciled intent, hidden from opened eyes that look into the nimbus of sun and see nothing but the shadow they have chosen for themselves. In this shadow now, the hunter has vanished and only the watcher remains.
Drawn by the honey of the doe’s scent, the buck steps quickly toward her. And now the most extraordinary thing happens. The doe turns away from him and walks straight for me. There is no hesitation, only a wild deer coming along the trail of hardened snow where the other deer have passed, the trail in which I stand at this moment. She raises her head, looks at me, and steps without pausing.
My existence is reduced to a pair of eyes; a rush of unbearable heat flushes through my cheeks; and a sense of absolute certainty fuses in my mind.
The snow blazes so brightly that my head aches. The deer is a dark form growing larger. I look up at the buck, half embarrassed, as if to apologize that she’s chosen me over him. He stares at her for a moment, turns to follow, then stops and watches anxiously. I am struck by how gently her hoofs touch the trail, how little sound they make as she steps, how thick the fur is on her flank and shoulder, how unfathomable her eyes look. I am consumed with a sense of her perfect elegance in the brilliant light. And then I am lost again in the whirling intensity of experience.
The doe is now ten feet from me. She never pauses or looks away. Her feet punch down mechanically into the snow, coming closer and closer, until they are less than a yard from my own. Then she stops, stretches her neck calmly toward me, and lifts her nose.
There is not the slightest question in my mind, as if this was sure to happen and I have known all along exactly what to do. I slowly raise my hand and reach out.
And my fingers touch the soft, dry, gently needling fur on top of the deer’s head, and press down to the living warmth of flesh underneath.
She makes no move and shows no fear, but I can feel the flaming strength and tension that flow in her wild body as in no other animal I have touched. Time expands and I am suspended in the clear reality of the moment.
Then, by the flawed conditioning of a lifetime among fearless domesticated things, I instinctively drop my hand and let the deer smell it. Her black nose, wet and shining, touches gently against my skin at the exact instant I realize the absoluteness of my error. And a tremor runs through her entire body as she realizes hers. Her muscles seize and harden; she seems to wrench her eyes away from me but her body remains, rigid and paralyzed. Having been deceived by her other senses, she keeps her nose tight against my hand for one more moment.
Then all the energy inside her triggers in a series of exquisite bounds. She flings out over the hummocks of snow-covered moss, suspended in effortless flight like fog blown over the muskeg in a gale. Her body leaps with such power that the muscles should twang aloud like a bowstring; the earth should shudder and drum; but I hear no sound. In the center of the muskeg she stops to look back, as if to confirm what must seem impossible. The buck follows in more earthbound undulations; they dance away together; and I am left in the meeting place alone.
There is a blur of rushing feet behind me. No longer able to restrain herself, Shungnak dashes past, buries her nose in the soft tracks, and then looks back to ask if we can run after them. I had completely forgotten her, sitting near enough to watch the whole encounter, somehow resisting what must have been a prodigious urge to explode in chase. When I reach out to hug her, she smells the hand that touched the deer. And it seems as if it happened long ago.
I walk slowly from the spot, letting the whole event roll through my mind again and again, remembering the dream that began many months ago, that I might someday touch a deer. After trying and failing with the naive little fawn earlier this fall, I’d begun to think the idea was far-fetched, perhaps even foolish. But now, totally unexpected and in a strange way, it has happened. Was the deer caught by some reckless twinge of curiosity? Had she never encountered a human on this wild island? Did she yield to some odd amorous confusion? Then I realize I truly do not care. I would rather accept this as pure experience and not give in to a notion that everything should be explained.
I stop in the shadows along the muskeg’s upper edge, and think back over the years with the Koyukon. What stands out for me at this moment is a special wisdom of their tradition — to expect nothing of nature, but to humbly receive its mystery, beauty, food, and life. In return, the Koyukon show the same respect toward nature that is shown toward humans, acknowledging that spirit and sacredness pervade all things. If I understand correctly, their behavior toward nature is ordered around a few simple principles: move slowly, stay quiet, watch carefully, be ever humble, show no hint of arrogance or disrespect. And if they follow one overarching commandment, it is to approach all life, of which humans are a part, with humility and restraint. All things are among the chosen.
As I reflect on the experiences of yesterday and today, I find an important lesson in them, viewed in the light of wisdom taken from the earth and shaped by generations of elders. Two deer came and gave the choices to me. One deer I took and we will now share a single body. The other deer I touched and we will now share that moment. These events could be seen as opposites, but perhaps they are identical. Both are founded on the same principles, the same relationship, the same reciprocity. Both are the same kind of gift.
Koyukon elders would explain, in words quite different from my own, that I moved into two moments of grace, or what they would call luck. This is the source of success for a hunter or a watcher; not skill, not cleverness, not guile. Something is only given in nature, never taken.
Excerpted from The Island Within. Copyright © 1989 by Richard Nelson. Published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by North Point Press in 1989. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York.
