Two Hunters

On wolves, wolverines & caribou

Two short profiles to go with Saturday coffee. A heads up—this letter contains images of animals killed during hunts. They’re not particularly graphic, though for some viewers they might be surprising. I shared them with my 4-year-old this morning and spent some time explaining what they showed, what they meant. At the beginning of our talk he decided to become a vegetarian, by the end of it he’d come back to being a carnivore. I told him the choice was his; I’ll let you know how it goes.

PS: watch out for that second dose. It laid me out on Thursday.

——

We went out first with Clyde. He hunted close to town because the caribou were close to town. Passed nearly through it, in fact, and had done so since the itchak imma, the time of myth. Clyde carried that with him—much of the knowledge and the expectation that had passed to his family since those days, along with a thin sense of unease about the future, which was, I learned, taught by the landscape itself.

Clyde Morry, Sr.

Each of Clyde’s parents and all of his grandparents had known starvation, and they had shared with Clyde what they knew about escaping it. There was much about food—meaning, animals—that was not up to him, personally. Animals kept watch over humans and made their own decisions, sometimes choosing a different path for the migration or a different country upon which to bestow the blessing of their bodies. But there were things, small things, that Clyde could do to steady himself and to honor successful traditions. One of these involved the caribou’s innua, a word I have seen translated as soul, or spirit.

In the first moments after the kill, after he’d given thanks and promised not to waste any meat, Clyde always cut off the caribou’s head and turned it upside down. This released the innua and allowed its return to the realm of animals where it would, one hoped, report favorably. Clyde also skinned quickly, never let the meat get dirty. Before their arguments became too much to bear he also brought most meat home to his father, Mark, the aging patriarch, the Vietnam vet, father to 7 children, grandfather to 27, great-grand to 16 more.

Honor thy father and thy mother: before it was written in any book it was tradition in this valley, and Clyde knew this better than almost anyone because he knew the depth of his people’s presence. In many years of wandering the land Clyde had learned where the dirt pooled deep on the tundra, and he knew what he would find beneath it if he were to dig: obsidian blades, arrowheads, flecks of bone and worked stone thousands of years old. That his how he came to understand, he said, that his ancestors had been giants—not literal ones, but heroes, hunters who had survived the itchak imma, and hid proof in the earth.

While Clyde had absorbed a lot of his elders’ advice he had his own way of doing things, too, and that way was fast. He’d come by our house on the hill in Carhartts—cotton work jacket, cotton overalls—on days when the wind shot through everything at 35 below zero. I’d ask if he wanted to eat before we went out and he’d say, No, I just had coffee. I like to be hungry when I hunt.

Then we’d leave, me wearing a pack filled with a GPS and a headlamp, a thermos full of tea, snacks, batteries, extra hats—the full load of a southern education. Clyde would maybe wear gloves. He carried a borrowed rifle, rode a borrowed snow machine. When he shot a caribou, he’d skin it in less than 10 minutes, pausing now and then to flail his freezing fingers in the air and howl at the wind.

When it was all over, Clyde never lingered over the carcass or in the glow of the chase. Only once, after a hunt, did he allow himself to sit for tea in our house. It had been very cold that day, our faces were red and raw with it. I pulled off my boots, put on the water. Tossed Clyde the only snack we had: a package of salted nuts. Frozen caribou blood was melting out of his pants and dripping to the floor. Before the water boiled he shot up, almost slipping on the blood, and said, I’m too hot. I’ll see you guys later.

I laughed and watched him go and reached for the mop.

——

Ben Hopson, III

Ben, with his .223 and his wolf-skin gloves and the parka his wife made, finer than anything stocked in a store. I still think of the parka and even more of the gloves which, in this photo, look like the paws of a yeti. Ben would hunt yeti, if they were found here, for every creature has its season and Ben looks forward to each. Caribou to geese, moose to sheep, the year’s wheel bringing each creature into focus as its best, most bountiful self.

Some of Ben’s family had been whaling people from the coast and he’d done time there, in the boats. But it was wolverines and wolves, and maybe mountains, that held his attention. He’d once spent 6 hours digging a single wolverine out of snow burrow, both of them growling and cursing at one another. When it was over Ben left behind quite a scene: gaping hole, mountain of snow, trail of blood. It mystified other travelers. Later they came into town and told Ben about what they’d seen on the trail. You’ll never believe it! they said. Some kind of monster bear out there digging up the tundra! Ben just laughed and looked down at his hands.

Once I saw Ben catch a wolf. Or, I should say, I caught the end of the story. That afternoon Katie and I were following him on our snow machine when he throttled up and dropped us like flotsam in his wake. I flipped our machine trying to follow him through willow thickets, and by the time we righted the thing Ben was on his way back. There in his lap was the wolf, a male, big and beautiful. He’d chased it down, shot it twice. While Ben smoked a cigarette I knelt and put my face to the wolf’s neck, found a fading warmth, a faint clean musk. Gray hair ran to black at his spine. White teeth told us he was young.

From a thermos Ben took a few sips of steaming coffee, then snapped on purple surgical gloves. He blew his nose with a wad of cotton gauze, the kind doctors pack into wounds, and then he began cutting with a knife he’d made himself of steel, baleen, and the horn of a Dall sheep. Ben moved methodically, deliberately. At first I thought him slow—at least compared to Clyde—but then I recognized his pace. Ben worked days as a search-and-rescue coordinator for the local government; he was a professional, probably trained under the same EMT maxim as battlefield medics I have known: “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

There was no reason to hurry, and hurry might damage the hide, which was the object for which the animal had died. In other words, sloppy work would dishonor the wolf. Eventually I came to see that Ben was cutting to plan—he was processing the wolf with a seamstress in mind, the woman who would transform the prize into a pair of gloves, the ruff of a parka, or some other useful thing.

As Ben worked a powerful scent filled the air around us, sharp and almost rank, released from the wolf’s glands. Soon it seemed to lay thick over every surface, despite the cold. When he finished skinning I asked Ben if anyone ever ate wolf. He shook his head, reached into his jacket for another cigarette.

Back in the day some of the elders did, he said. But only because they were starving. 

To be Iñupiat in this place is to have an interesting relationship with wolves. You understand that you share much in common, especially when it comes to caribou. But for them you are also competitors, and your hunger for their bodies becomes like jealousy—whatever one takes the other covets. So you are not friends. You do not hang. Unless you are like Ben, who will watch a wolf for a while, rifle safely slung, just to see what it’s up to.

Ben loves to hunt wolves, and he is tireless in pursuing them. There comes a point in the season, though, where he stops.

Just something happens, he told me, and I know enough is enough. I think it’s about maintaining balance. They’re a part of this place, and we need them for the land and the herds to stay healthy. So if I catch a few in one area, I will stop hunting there for a while, sometimes a long while.

Then Ben told me about the time several years ago when a woman called him and began lecturing about how the wolves needed protection. She was white, from somewhere down south. Worked for a non-profit that was trying to stop wolf hunting, and one of their tactics was to call Native people and argue the point. Ben didn’t know how she’d gotten his number, and she didn’t know who she was talking to. The killing must stop! she said. Ben listened for a while and then quietly explained that he’d killed 80 or so wolves over the last few seasons. He gave her to know that he did not plan to stop.

The woman stumbled. There followed a silence, then a few more words, but the lecture had collapsed. She had never been to the Arctic, and had not yet learned how very different love, up here, might look.