Travelers' Tales Alaska (19 page)

A hunting guide stalks memory and ambivalence in the Alaska Range.

W
HEN
I
WAS TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD
, I
FELL IN LOVE
with a man who was a hunting guide. We didn't have what you would call the healthiest of relationships. He was selfish, evasive, and unfaithful. I was demanding, manipulative, and self-pitying. He was a Republican and I was a Democrat. He was a Texan and I was not. I belonged to the Sierra Club and he belonged to the NRA. Yet somehow we managed to stay together for three years of our lives, and to spend two solid months of each of those three years hunting for Dall sheep in Alaska.

I was always quick, in those days, to make the distinction between a hunter and a hunting guide, for though I was indirectly responsible for the deaths of a total of five animals, I have never killed an animal myself, and never intend to. I had the opportunity once to shoot a Dall ram whose horns were so big it would have likely gotten my name into the record books. I had three decent men applying every kind of peer pressure they could come up with, and I even went so far as
to raise the rifle to my eye, unsure in the moment what I would do next. But once I got it up there I couldn't think of one good reason to pull the trigger.

I learned about bullets and guns and caliber and spotting scopes, and I was a good hunting guide simply because I'm good at the outdoors. I can carry a heavy pack long distances. I can cook great meals on a backpacking stove. I keep my humor pretty well for weeks without a toilet or a shower. I can sleep, if I have to, on a forty-five-degree ledge of ice. I know how to move in the wilderness, and because of this I understand how the sheep move. I'm a decent tracker. I've got what they call
animal sense.

When I was hunting Dall sheep in Alaska it was one on one on one. One hunter, one guide, one ram that we tracked, normally for ten days, before we got close enough to shoot it. My obvious responsibility was to the hunter. It was my job to keep him from falling into a crevasse or getting eaten by a grizzly bear, to carry his gun when he got too tired, to keep him fed and watered, to listen to his stories, to get him up at three in the morning and keep him on his feet till midnight, to drag him fifteen miles and sometimes as much as four thousand vertical feet a day, and if everything went well, to get him in position to shoot a sheep to take home and put on his wall. My other job, though understated, was to protect the sheep from the hunters, to guarantee that the hunter shot only the oldest ram in the herd, that he only shot at one animal, and that he only fired when he was close enough to make a killing shot. A hunter can't walk a wounded animal down across the glaciers in Alaska the way he can through the trees in the Pennsylvania woods. A bad shot in Alaska almost always means a lost ram.

I describe those months in the Alaska Range now as the most conflicted time of my life. I would spend seventy days
testing myself in all the ways I love, moving through the Alaskan wilderness, a place of such power and vastness it is incomprehensible even to my memory I watched a mama grizzly bear feed wild blueberries to her cubs, I woke to the footfall of a hungry-eyed silver wolf whispering through our campsite, I watched a bull moose rub the velvet off his bloody antlers, and a bald eagle dive for a parka squirrel. I watched the happy chaos that is a herd of caribou for hours, and the contrastingly calculated movements of the sheep for days.

I learned from the animals their wilderness survival skills, learned, of course, a few of my own. I learned, in those days, my place in the universe, learned why I need the wilderness, not why
we
need it, but why
I
do. That I need the opportunity to give in to something bigger than myself, like falling into love, something bigger, even, than I can define. This did not have to do with shooting an animal (though it would have, of course, in its purest form, had we not packages and packages of freeze-dried chicken stew) but with simpler skills: keeping warm in subzero temperatures, avoiding the grizzly bears that were everywhere and unpredictable, not panicking when the shale started shifting underneath my boot soles in a slide longer and steeper than anything I'd ever seen in the Lower 48, finally riding that shale slide out like a surfer on a giant gray wave.

I listened to the stories of the hunters, the precision and passion with which the best among them could bring the memories of past hunting camps to life. I understood that part of what we were about in hunting camp was making new stories, stories that were the closest these men ever got to something sacred, stories that would grace years, maybe even generations, of orange campfire light.

But underneath all that wonder and wildness and the telling of tales, the fact remains that in payment for my Alaskan
experience I watched five of the most beautiful, smartest, and the wildest animals I'd ever seen die, most of them slowly and in unspeakable pain. And regardless of the fact that it was the hunter who pulled the trigger, I was the party responsible for their deaths. And though I eat meat and wear leather, though I understand every ethical argument there is about hunting including the one that says it is hunters who will ultimately save the animals because it is the NRA who has the money and the power to protect what is left of America's wilderness, it will never be O.K. with me that I led my hunters to those animals. There is no amount of learning that can, in my heart, justify their deaths.

So when I remember that time in my life, I try to think not only of the killing but also of the hunting, which is a work of art, a feat of imagination, a flight of spirit, and a test of endless patience and skill. To hunt an animal successfully you must think like an animal,
move like an animal, climb to the top of the mountain just to go down the other side, and always be watching, and waiting, and watching. To hunt well is to be at once the hunter and the hunted, at once the pursuer and the object of pursuit. The process is circular, and female somehow, like giving birth, or dancing. A hunt at its best ought to look, from the air, like a carefully choreographed ballet.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed that men desire the object of their desire, while women desire the condition of desiring, and this gives women a greater capacity for relishing the hunt. I believe that is why, in so many ancient and contemporary societies, women have been the superior hunters. Good hunting is no more about killing an animal than good sex is about making babies or good writing is about publication. The excitement, even the fulfillment, is in the beauty of the search. While a man tends to be linear about achieving a goal, a woman can be circular and spatial. She can move in many directions at once, she can be many things at once, she can see an object from all sides, and, when it is required, she is able to wait.

Occasionally there is a man who can do these things (most of the guides I knew were far better at them than I), and he is a pleasure to guide and to learn from. But the majority of my clients started out thinking that hunting is like war. They were impatient like a general, impatient like a sergeant who thinks he should be the general, impatient for the sound of his own gun and impatient for the opposition to make a mistake.

But the sheep didn't often make mistakes, and they were as patient as stone. So it was my job to show the hunter that he could choose a different metaphor. If hunting can be like war it can also be like opera, or fine wine. It can be like out-of-body travel, it can be like the suspension of disbelief. Hunting can be all of these things and more; like a woman, it won't sit
down and be just one thing.

I wore a necklace in my hunting days, a bear claw of Navajo silver. The man I was in love with, the hunting guide, had given it to me to make amends for one of our breakups, one of his affairs. He gave it to me in a tiny box, wrapped elaborately, like a ring, and I shook it, heard it clunk, thought,
Oh my God, Oh my God, he's really doing it.
When I opened it, saw that it was not a ring but a pendant, I was not disappointed. I simply wore the pendant like a ring, confusing the symbolism of that pendant just enough to carry me back into the relationship, and back into hunting camp one last time.

It was late August, and much too warm in the high mountains. I'd been dropped, by airplane, 100 air miles from Tok with two bow hunters from Mississippi. We'd made a base camp and climbed from it, up the valley of the Tok River to the glacial headlands. The sheep would stay high in the warm weather, higher, probably, than we could climb. But we tried anyway, crossing glacial rivers normally small but now raging in the heat wave, knowing after each crossing that we wouldn't make it back across until the weather turned again and the water
began to subside. We had our packs, of course, a tent, sleeping bags, a change of clothes and enough food, if we didn't shoot anything, for a little better than three days.

When we got to the glacier at the head of the valley we hadn't seen any recent sheep sign, and this told us that the sheep would be higher still, lying with their bellies in a snowfield, not even needing to eat until the weather cooled down. We were wet and tired, hot and hungry, but we dropped half our gear, the tents and bedding, and climbed higher up the rocky moraine that flanked the glacier. We climbed through tangled forests of alder that grew, it seemed, horizontally out of the rocks, climbed over the soggy mounds of tundra, squeezing into it with our boot tips and fingernails when it got too steep. Our socks got wetter, our breathing more labored; for hours we climbed and still no sign of the sheep.

The hunters—I forget their names now, but let's just call them Larry and Moe—were nervous. We were all nervous. The packs were too heavy, the air was too thick, the sun was too hot, and we'd come too long and too far not to have seen any sign of the sheep. We collapsed on the top of a rocky outcropping surrounded by tundra. Larry amused himself by shooting arrow after arrow at a ptarmigan (a fat bird with fuzzy white après-ski boots on) who, as slow and stupid as that particular bird can be, let the arrows whiz by his head. Larry couldn't hit him, and the bird refused to fly away. Moe poked at a hole in the ground with a long stick, worrying whatever was inside. I went into my pack, looking for food, and found, buried between the cans of tuna and dried apricots, a rock—quartz, I believe—weighing six or seven pounds.

“You sons of bitches,” I said to Larry and Moe, who had been watching me, smirking.

That's when the ground hornets finally got angry enough
to come out of the hole in front of Moe. Maybe wasps know who in the crowd is allergic to them; these wasps seemed to. Four of them, anyway, came straight for me, and stung me on the hand. The first-aid kit, the shots of epinephrine, had made it as far as the mouth of the glacier and no farther, and that was at least four hours away.