We are going hunting today. It is early, just light, the fog still threads the air, lisping over the calm waters. It is hard to get up, and the two of us, my husband, Duncan, and I  briefly reconsider, knowing we could go tomorrow or the next day or the next, but this morning is calm, and we will need meat soon. There’s not much preparation, just dress warmly, pull on hip boots and life jackets over our coats, check the gas tank, get the rifle, pull the skiff in,  start the engine, and we will be hunting. It is hunting mostly in the sense of looking very carefully as we parallel the shoreline, eyes skinning the beach for the stray deer or two who have wandered down to munch on kelp and sea-greens. Or sometimes we will see whole herds, huge bachelor packs of thirty to seventy that rove the long beaches, ganglike, moving from island to lagoon to the mainland over to the other side of the bay. 

     They are Sitka black-tailed deer, not native to Kodiak Island,  but brought  here in 1924 from southeast Alaska. They are plentiful, having  no natural predators other than man,  so much so that some years the hunting limit in the bush is seven per person. They are more beautiful than their cousins, the mule deer I knew back East,  delicate beyond just deer-ness, because of their size. They are  often no bigger than a goat. The hoof of a big buck would easily fit in my hand. 

       When we are settled in our  skiff,  we decide to go down to a long several-mile stretch of beach not too far from our island.  The ocean is a pool this morning, and as we zip through it, I can see myself leaping in like a silver fish,  all point and no splash. But when we arrive, there is a swell, as usual.    It can be  tin-pan flat everywhere else,  but action is always guaranteed on this  beach.  We skim the shoreline  and see a fox slinking around a rocky stretch  we know is good for clams, and farther down, we see otter lounging among the kelp beds, but no deer.  We decide to go farther, down around Rocky Point, where we seldom go because our sixteen foot skiff feels so small and the waters so big below the two thousand foot cliffs.  It’s a dry run there too, and we start back,  scanning the long beachline one last time as we head home  when we see them. About eight deer, all bucks, headed down the beach as if on some kind of schedule.  They hear us and watch as we slow to change positions in the skiff, with me now at the forty-horse outboard, Duncan poised in the bow with his gun, ready to jump out onto the sand.  The surf is not too heavy, but I am anxious at the sequence I know must follow:  getting in just right, just close enough for him to leap, then reversing full throttle stern-first through the breakers without taking on too much water.   

   Duncan is ashore  and I am back out in stiller water, watching, catching up on breath.  He stands on the beach, quiet, rifle in hand,  while  the deer,  too, watch.  The ones we want are out in the open. He drops  to his knee , aims, fires. The herd runs, wildly, and Duncan has just moments to squeeze off a few more shots as they scatter, leaping up the cliffbank to the dense brush above.  Seven have run, one is down.     

     My turn.  Nervously, I throttle low and ease the bow back into the surge and break, while Duncan stands there with the deer heavily draped over his shoulders. He catches the sink of a wave and rolls the body off  into the skiff as it dips before him.  We do it again,  and then we are on the way  home, the two deer in the bottom of the skiff, still dainty, graceful even in death, while blood pools at our feet.

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       Hunting season in New Hampshire  was for us a time of war and near mourning.   A week before the opening, my mother would tramp the boundaries of her land, the several hundred acres of woods and fields in  central New Hampshire, posting the largest neon-orange “NO HUNTING!” signs she could find.  We lived surrounded by woods and forests, grew huge gardens, had chickens and goats, but we never ate our animals, except once---Harry and Larry, two pigs we guiltily fattened through one winter. At the last, my mother  balked at the slaughter and released us all from the deed, hiring it out instead, the whole thing, from live pigs to packages in the freezer. She hated the hunting and killing of any animal, but saved her greatest scorn for deer hunters. 

     They would come, park their trucks along the dirt road, and for several weeks we would walk about in fear, fear of being shot, fear of letting the dog out, whose fawn- colors would surely lure a bullet.  If we dared a walk at all, per mother’s instructions, we kept to the road, wore loud red, and sang and talked as if with megaphones to advertise our presence.   Hunters were our enemies. Every newspaper story of a hunting accident was read aloud and we all would shake our heads at the tragedy, murmuring, “What else could you expect?  They were hunting.”   Occasionally we would hear a distant gunshot,  and then we knew all our cautions and fears were justified.   Even more occasionally, we would see a truck emerge from the woods with a deer in the back--- crumpled, neck broken, legs splayed. Even so, I could see its magnificence, and I was angry.

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     Part of the reason I came to Alaska in 1978 and to this island was to become a commercial fisherman, as my new husband had been all the summers of his life.  Blood was there from the start of my trying-on of this new country.  Kodiak was then and still is the second most productive fishing port in the nation.  There are so many salmon here that last season, 1998,  the canneries shut down in the middle of the run because they had run out of materials.   So many salmon another year, the price went down to a penny a pound.

     The first year in the skiff, I was startled to see how disconnected I felt from these creatures.      I pulled them from the nets, often already dead, sometimes still alive.   I studied them incessantly, how their mouths gaped, their gills straining in the strangulation of air. They made gurgling sounds, and often flayed about in a final thrash toward the life of water. All of this I recognized as desperate efforts to live, and yet I was not moved to pity. It only stuck me how entirely dissimilar we were: they so cold, cauled in gurry, limbless, eyes unblinking, mute. Beyond all of this, I knew they were on their way to die, nearly all of them, the millions that swarm Alaska’s waters, headed kamikaze for the streambed and spawn-out and a horrible, leprous,  rotting kind of death. Yet now, still, so beautiful,  so obviously and purposefully created, so deliberately fashioned with skin  like a suit of mail, the fit on fit of scale to scale.   I stood in them knee-, sometimes thigh-deep, these dead and dying and bloodied creatures,  all the while  loving the artistry of their bodies, and feeling happy to have caught them, that their lives ended here in my boat.  There it was, beauty and death and food and grace clotted together.

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     We make sure that the bucks are dead.  A beach-hunting trip two years before had taught us this caution.  We were returning home with a good-sized buck when the animal began to stir.

Just a leg at first. Muscle spasms, I remember thinking.  Then it began shaking its head;  then it lifted its head, kicking as it tried to stand. Duncan and I looked at each other, horrified.  "Sit on him!" he yelled.  Without hesitating, I jumped down hard on his neck and straddled his chest. Still unbelieving, I looked his body over carefully from my prime seat and  realized there was no blood to be seen anywhere, just a knick in his antlers.  As he struggled beneath me to rise, we ran through our options in short, breathy phrases.  We were still ten minutes from home. If I let him up, he could do serious damage with his adrenaline-powered hooves. Someone could easily be knocked overboard.  It was too risky to try and shoot him in the skiff.  There was only one choice, it seemed.   I would hold him down until we got to the island, and we would let him out there. At that point, I longed for Duncan to offer to trade places, but a switch, however equitable or chivalrous, was not possible. I rode the bucking deer all the way back to the island.  As the beach came to view, Duncan aimed  for the softest sand, and  gassed the engine. We braced for the hit, jerked to a stop further up the beach than I'd ever been in a skiff. I rolled off the deer and with one leap he was out, up the beach and gone.

     These two deer do not surprise, though I watch them warily, expectantly.  When we return to the island, we slice open their throats and angle their heads downhill, to bleed him as best we can. Duncan removes the scent glands on the backs of the legs.  Now the gutting; for me, the worst part.  Though there is something very primitive about it, still, it is done with delicacy. It is  a form of reverse surgery, our care with the knives and incisions not for the sake of the animal but for us and the good of the meat.  The intestines, bladder, scent glands, and stomach must not be punctured or the foul gas and bacteria will contaminate the meat.  Deftly yet cautiously Duncan severs the membranes holding the organs to the cavity, then at the last, I squat down and pull out the bulging stomach and ropes of intestines, still warm. The hearts and livers we save.   The rest of the entrails must be  remove  from the scene as quickly as possible so as not to attract bears.  .  Duncan has brought the ATV over, and, lacking a trailer of any kind, has tied a piece of plywood tied on behind for a makeshift trailer. With both hands, I grasp the slippery, gelatinous organs and slide them over onto the plywood.  They ooze to the edges of the plywood and we realize there’s no way they’ll stay on for the five hundred  foot downhill run out to the spit, where the tide will carry them away. I say I will do it.  Using my body as a shield, I kneel on the plywood, spread my arms to engulf the steaming viscera, my face just inches from its mass. And we are off roaring down the hill, going too fast, the plywood, the guts, my own splayed arms and legs rattling over rocks, logs, wanting only to get there, and to keep my face out of it.    It is nasty. As we land on the beach,  I am shaken and my hands are bleeding from gripping the splintered edge of the plywood. I  need a minute to catch my breath before pulling these parts of the deer I now know so well into the water. The saltwater stings my raw hands with a purifying bite, and I hope I will not have to ride the entrails of any other animal again. It is far too personal.                                           

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       I see deer often during the summer.  The swim to our island and leave again at will, perhaps searching for more grazing or more plentiful water.    Last night I went for a walk with my two-year old son, Elisha. He rode on my hip as we wound toward  Lupine Meadow and points beyond.  Around the first corner we saw a deer on the hillside above us.  She was intent on grazing, and though there was no path and the slope was steep, I was drawn to her. Elisha clung to me as I scrambled up the scree.  We did not whisper or try to sneak.  She saw us.     “Elisha, what is the deer eating?”  “Gas!” he proclaimed.  “Yes, grass and look, what else?” I asked to keep his eyes ahead instead of below as I continued to climb.    “Gowers. Deer eating gowers,” he said with the same delight I felt as I watched her snap the tops of the yellow coastal paintbrushes.  Finally we were within ten feet of her.  She stopped for a moment, lifted her head,  regarded us with some interest, still chewing vigorously, and finding no cause for alarm, went back to her berry bushes and paintbrushes.  We could have touched her with just a lunge.   I have nearly touched many deer over the years.  They do not act like any wild animal I have ever known.   Their unconcern for our presence does not serve them well.

    One fall morning, just a few days after the deer season opened, we were finishing breakfast and saw what looked like a covey of ducks, very large ducks, all swimming in an orderly row, but with strange heads.  They came closer, about thirty of them, and then I could see they were not ducks, but deer.  It was my first sighting of a water-borne herd.  They were swimming across from another island about a mile away. They were remarkably buoyant and obviously very experienced in such crossings.  And though the island was obviously inhabited, our red cabins could  be seen for half a mile, still, they were steering directly for our beach. As their hooves touched ground, they gingerly stepped ashore, still together, and began all of them, walking quite calmly toward the house and us as we stood on the porch, watching.   Just outside our door, as they walked past,  Duncan just as calmly got his gun, lay in position, we chose the two bucks we wanted,  and like that,  it was done: our hunt for the year, our supply of deer meat was provided. There was no sport in it, and that was good.  The pursuit of an animal  held no thrill or fun for either of us.  I was pleased that it was done, but I hated it, too, and wished they had come ashore somewhere else, or had at least fled from us in the two-legged bound of fear. Let them at least know who we are.

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      My first season in Alaska brought not only fish and deer, but cattle.  My father-in-law was a rancher on Kodiak Island for thirty years. Every year of it was a skirmish.  DeWitt’s federal grazing lease of thirty-two thousand acres bordered what he came to call the “bear hatchery,” a federal refuge protecting  the Kodiak bear, a huge subspecies of the grizzly. The cattle, open-grazing in steep valleys and hillsides, had no defense against the predator save a panicked gallop that didn’t even wind the bear.  Two years before I joined the family, he loaded a herd of twenty  onto a barge and out to the island I live on every summer—Harvester Island.  Though the island is named for a sailing ship “The Harvester” that ran aground near the turn-of-the century, the name fits our fishing and hunting lives  here well.  On Harvester,  he reckoned,  they would be safe from bears, and so they have been. The herd has flourished, nearly doubling in size, fed only by the grasses and greens of this place. These cattle  feed twelve of us in the extended family all through the year, and feed twenty-eight  through four months of the fishing season.  Every fall, we choose two or three animals to be culled.  Every fall, I stand for three days  with the others parsing flesh into portions and packages.  This is part of the business of living out, the business of ranching, and of commercial fishing.  This is what it costs to live here, and this is how we feed so many.  That is how I think of it when the gun comes out.  The beef is good---lean, sometimes tough, but grass-fed natural.  The deer, though,  are better.  And so, the truth is told: we  eat beef out of need; we eat deer out of desire.

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     Now that the deer are gutted, they are lighter, and we carry them easily into the warehouse that stores our skiffs in the winter.  One buck is good-sized, about one hundred-thirty pounds, the other smaller, about one  hundred.  We hang them from the rafters to finish the bleeding and to ready for skinning. Knives come out now, knives that were sharpened the day before or that morning,  and we begin skinning the hide from the still warm bodies that seem smaller now than on the beach, even smaller than when they lay in the skiff.

      We slide the knife under the fat of the skin as the other hand pulls the hide taut.  Out of habit, we try to keep the hides intact, though we have no plans to tan them.   We work fast, speaking  softly to each other, in low tones, or not at all; though we are happy  for the meat, and satisfied that the hunt went well, we do not laugh. There is work to do, and these bodies, less than two hours ago, were walking the beach.  

   When the hide is finally off, through a combination of cutting and then pulling it over the head, the deer  becomes meat.  I am glad to feel this sudden distance.  But it is not the same as when  cattle become meat.  The old bulls are so massive, that once inert, quartered and hung, it is impossible to imagine them again as living beings.  The deer, even as they hang,  are still lithe, fragile, the muscle between the bones is spare, efficient.  We will let the meat hang for four days to season.  I consider for the first time how good it will taste.