I live and write on Lingít Aaní, and gratefully acknowledge the past, present and future caretakers of this beautiful place, the Jilkaat Kwaan and Jilkoot Kwaan.

“Meanwhile the world goes on. / Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain/ are moving across the landscapes,/ over the prairies and the deep trees,/ the mountains and the rivers./ Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,/are heading home again.”– Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese

The skiff with the camp, before…and after.

Chip calls in the slough.

The sound of moose camp is that “harsh and exciting” cry of the geese, the trumpet of the swans, water running, mud sucking, wind or is it rain in the leaves? Mosquitoes buzzing right next to my ear, between my glasses and my eye. Crack of branches, a moose? A nasal kind of moan. A moose cow? Or another hunter? The low “whup, whup, whup” grunt of a bull. Boats. Jet motors, air boats, fast boats, slow boats, stuck on sandbars boats. Rarely a moose dropping rifle shot, we heard one, mostly any loud bangs come two or three in a row. Those are from duck hunters’  shot guns on Bear Flats or over by Stump Canyon Lake. There is no ping or ring, no cell service or internet. No radio. Sometimes, rocks crash (they don’t slide)  down Four Winds Mountain. Once, right in front of us, a small tree fell. Another evening in the tent we heard a generator humming way down on the Kelsall Road, across the river. At night the stove ticks, the gas lantern hisses, and I think: We should have a fire extinguisher in this tent. Next time.

I have been in camp for a week with Chip.  Mostly sitting in a tree stand. We boat and walk in each morning as soon as we can see. We are up at 4:30. (Well, he is. I wait  in my sleeping bag until the coffee is perked.) We return at lunch, checking a few meadows or creek beds on the way back, eat, nap and head out again until almost dark.  We cow call – a nasal whine or kind of moan, to attract a randy bull.  We scrape and grunt to sound like a bull that may make another bull fighting mad, and draw him in, or may attract a cow that will attract her own bull. Mostly though, we are very, very quiet. We alternate between being on high alert  —“I hear something.” “Over there.” “A bull.” “A cow.” “Do you hear that?” ” It’s behind us.”  “Is it legal? Can you see?” ” Don’t move.” “Nope. It’s a One by Two” —  and reading a lot.

We nod a bit but are careful not to fall asleep, as we don’t want to slip out of the tree. There are folks who have broken backs, hips, a collar bone ( he was lucky.)

It has been windy, rainy, calm, sunny, cool, warm, even hot a few parts of a few days. It’s a muddy, soggy, rotting leaf kind of river valley, full of swamps that look like meadows, with grasses and wet brown ferns as high as my head. The  muck can be knee deep, or deeper. There are gravel bars and silty gray sloughs that sometimes we can wade across in hip boots and sometimes can’t. The Chilkat River rises and falls so often I shove a stick to mark where it meets the shore each time I climb in or out of the skiff.  It can drop or rise a foot between breakfast and lunch. Places that we zipped over one morning grind on the bottom of the boat the next and the engine spits out gravel. I am not a boat person, and neither is Chip. We do our best to always be where we can walk to safety if we need to.

We were extra safe this week. Since the day before opening day, Ron Martin, one of the legends of the local hunt died following a skiff mishap far upriver from where we camp. The boat stalled and was pushed by the current  into the brush on the bank. His friend got out, but couldn’t talk Ron into leaving the wedged skiff. (The story travelled down the river with other hunters.) I don’t know why he didn’t leave the boat. I’m sure we will learn more, but maybe not. We never will know what Ron was thinking. I do know that he had survived much more dangerous situations in his 80-something years. Maybe he wasn’t concerned. He did seem indestructible. He was the definition of tough and confident. I can’t imagine anything scared him. Ever.  Friends ( and fellow hunters) found his body the next morning. Of course everyone agreed he would not have wanted a pause in the action, although there was a kind of wake at the landing when we arrived to launch our boat. A quiet group of his friends and family stood around a skiff on a trailer, leaning on trucks drinking beer. Nobody said much as we nodded condolences and motored, cautiously, off.

Maybe it is just me, but knowing how quickly a day, an adventure, a hunt– can go from exciting and fun to terrifying and tragic heightened my senses. Everything seemed crisper, clearer, closer. It was a sort of new world– Later, I was especially happy to see the boats of other hunters pass our camp at lunchtime or in the evening.  Over seven days we saw plenty of moose, several bulls and cows, but the bulls weren’t legal in this hunt. One big bull posed for us– giving us a full view of his rack, tipping it first one way and then the other, then holding still just to be sure we could see it.  He had  two brow tines on either side, perfectly balanced. But there needs to be three in order to shoot it. He even stood broad side and then turned and waited, like a model. He would have been as easy to hit as the side of a barn, or at least a wood shed.

We practically walked into another bull who was resting in the grass.  He was a perfect forked horn –little Y antlers like sling shots are also legal, and  they are on smaller moose, making them easier to pack out. I was hoping for a fork– Chip tiptoed over and I hid behind the brush, glassing him. A closer look revealed small dips in the back of each fork, tiny palms really, so not legal–  I almost shouted “Don’t shoot!” but then Chip was back, smiling, “Well, he was almost legal”  he said. “That would have been perfect.” We got a good story, but no stew meat.

Yes, I know. Hunting is hard. It is killing, after all. (That is why I don’t use the word harvest  to refer to subsistance hunting. It’s not like picking berries at all.) I am aware, probably too much, of what to hunt means. I have been doing it a while now. There is a relief when we don’t get a moose.  Still, I really wish that we had. I hope we still do. (The hunt continues through the first week in October.)

Forgive me, Mary Oliver.

I love the way you speak to me daily although you have been gone for a few years, about loving trees and animals, rivers and rocks, even.  I am guessing you were a vegetarian. But I know that you were right when you wrote that the world offers itself to our imagination, like wild geese, trying to get our attention, over and over and over again. Well, at least I’m listening, and I’m watching, and I’m grateful. Thank you.