later, he could hardly walk at all. Reid would sometimes carry him to a duck blind. While he and Buff waited for a flock to fly overhead, he massaged Buff’s atrophied, shivering hips. After a shot, when a duck plummeted from the slate-gray sky, for a moment Buff forgot how crippled he was, plunged into the water, and proudly retrieved the bird. That winter, while I was halfway around the world, I called my family from a dilapidated payphone. My dad told me he’d had to put Buff down.
Nearly a decade later, on the night before my thirtieth birthday, my older brother, Luke, called me on the phone.
“Come on, let’s go hooter hunting tomorrow,” he said. My .22 had disappeared, and it had been years since I thrashed through the woods after sooty grouse. There were errands and other things I needed to do, but I agreed to meet Luke at a trailhead at six in the morning. The hooting of the first grouse of the day brought back a flood of memories of Buff, Thad, and Tim, and sitting in class daydreaming about hooter hunting while popping out hundreds of devil’s club thorns from my hands and forearms. Luke and I hiked through wet brush as the dark forest dripped and softly swooshed and creaked in the breeze.
“Got him,” I said when I spotted a grouse high up, perched on a branch of a spruce tree. Luke, acting as a retriever, got under the tree the bird was in. I used his .22 and the grouse fell, its wings beating wildly, to the earth. We took turns shooting and retrieving until the early afternoon. Even though there were other grouse hooting nearby, we had four in the bag, more than enough for a birthday feast.
“Thank you, grouse; thank you, God,” Luke said as he gutted the last bird of the day. Silently, I thanked Tim and Buff too.
THE FIRST DEER
WHEN WE WERE SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, my good pals Jesse Walker and Ed Shanley and I skipped school to hunt Sitka blacktail deer. We stumbled through drenched blueberry bushes, thorny mazes of devil’s club, and tangles of alders until we got to a mountainside covered in old-growth spruce and hemlock. Grabbing tree roots, we clawed up a steep slope of moss, rocks, and loose soil. On mountain benches, we crossed rain-swollen creeks running brown and sank into skunk cabbage-covered muskegs.
“How am I supposed to keep up with an English mountaineer and a savage?” Jesse muttered from the back as we emerged from dark forest into a subalpine meadow. We rested atop a fallen tree to feast on marble-sized blueberries. The rippling dark-blue swath of Lynn Canal stretched to the north. The first of autumn’s snow dusted the Chilkat Range on the western horizon, and the gigantic white summits of the Fairweather Range loomed beyond. To the east, 1,500 square miles of glaciers and mountains separated our community from the expansive taiga of the Yukon. Admiralty Island, a wilderness of brown bears and rainforest, stretched a hundred miles to the south. With purple-stained mouths, we spoke softly about the little we knew of hunting, mostly stories our dads had told us. I pointed Jesse in the direction of where we planned to camp.
A big Sitka blacktail watches the author from high on a mountain on Admiralty Island.
“This is the last time I’m climbing a mountain with you guys,” he growled as Ed and I hurried ahead to get in an evening hunt. Ed and I crested the top of the mountain and glassed a valley. To our surprise, a deer placidly grazed on deer lettuce and blueberry leaves below. With pounding hearts, we stalked as close as cover allowed.
“Too far!” I whispered as Ed and I looked at an unsuspecting buck less than a hundred yards away. “Do you think you could hit it?”
“No, too far!” Ed agreed. The buck’s antlers splayed out beyond his ears. We cursed under our breath and tried to figure out how to sneak closer. We belly crawled a few yards more before the deer snorted and disappeared into the brush.
The sun was sinking toward the summit of Nun Mountain when we stumbled upon a large, blond, hairy beast snoring beneath a jack pine. The creature groaned, roared, and shook itself. For a second, I nearly readied my rifle before Jesse rose to his full height, eyeing us malevolently. After a brief conference, Ed grabbed the other rifle and strolled off toward where we had last seen the buck. Jesse and I snuck over to the edge of a bowl and glassed the grassy stretches.
The Chilkat Range glistened red above the murky-blue Pacific. In the last moments of shooting light, I noticed Jesse flapping his arms like he was trying to fly. Upon closer examination, I understood him to be gesturing at the valley below. Two hundred yards away, a deer cautiously emerged from the dark forest. There was something phantasmal in its form as it tentatively moved through the failing light. I had my grandfather’s ancient .308. Its bolt didn’t work well, and in all its years of existence, it had only killed one or two animals. I belly crawled a few yards closer and awkwardly clanked a round into the chamber. Through the old four-power scope, I rested the crosshairs on the tiny image of the deer’s chest. It seemed impossibly far away. I hardly noticed the report of the shot.
“I missed!” I told my wild-eyed friend after he charged over. Staring down into the gloom, we saw no evidence of a deer or movement. The last of the alpenglow faded from the glacier-covered mountains. “I wish I hadn’t shot. I missed, but we should go take a look to make sure.”
We felt our way down a steep, slippery slope of deer lettuce, occasionally sliding. Jesse stopped and squinted into the darkness.
“I think the deer’s lying there,” he said.
The deer, a fork-horn buck, lay staring at the forest twenty yards away. I sat, clunked a bullet into the chamber, put the crosshairs on the base of his skull, and pulled the trigger.
Overwhelmed, Jesse ran to the deer, dodging kicking hooves and shaking antlers, and lay atop the animal as its life left it. Ed, hearing the shots, made his way down to us. Together, the three of us gutted and hung the deer in a small spruce. Covered in deer blood, we slept on heather and deer lettuce next to a fire that night.
The smell of sweat, deer, blueberry leaves, decay, spruce, and hemlock accompanied us down the mountain the following day. Our packs sagged with the weight of the meat. The wind rustled trees, and condensation dripped from branches. That night we fried heart and barbecued ribs. None of us had ever eaten a meal so fine.
MY BEST TROPHY
I CAN IMAGINE FEW THINGS more terrible or wonderful than being a parent, particularly a mom. My own mother was abducted from California to Alaska and then forced to live with a wild husband and three savage sons. Imagine coming home from work to see a bloody pelt on the kitchen counter and your six-year-old son gnawing a boiled squirrel. Maybe it’s not that weird for Alaskan mothers, but for a young woman who grew up in Sacramento, it must have been disorienting at best. Ermine, marten, and a variety of rodent soups—my mom was always in for a surprise when we cooked dinner. The house, with piles of bones and antlers strewn about, seemed like a Neanderthal clan’s cave crossed with a hunting lodge. For the most part, she bore the horror quietly and late at night, as she stared up at the aurora dancing or through sheets of rain in the inky blackness, dreamed of ridding her house of dead animals. This seemingly simple task—a basic human right in other parts of the country—became as epic a quest as Frodo’s journey to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
Growing up, I didn’t sympathize much with her. I couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want their house to smell like a rutting buck or a salmon spawning ground. Why change your clothes or take a bath when you’d be dirty again a few hours later? Up until the point Nintendo was created, there was nothing cooler than pelts, bones, and stuffed game animals. Forget Disneyland. A trip to visit a taxidermist—even an amateur whose road-killed critter mounts looked like they’d suffered horribly botched plastic surgery from the shaky hands of an Amazonian witch doctor—was once my happiest place on earth. Each antler, hide, and bone was fought over. My mother’s greatest victory was excommunicating our dad’s sheep and