Читать книгу Never Cry Halibut. and Other Alaska Hunting and Fishing Tales онлайн

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SOOTY OBSESSION

I GREW UP IN JUNEAU, a city of thirty thousand surrounded by a wild expanse of temperate rainforest, mountains, and glaciers. Each summer, millions of salmon migrate up the rivers and streams of northern Southeast Alaska to spawn. Their flesh sustains some of the densest concentrations of bald eagles and brown bears in the world. Autumn brings more rain, blusters, and a loss of daylight that contribute to a widespread melancholy and even depression in locals. The darkness and storms of winter inspire many animals, people included, to migrate south or hibernate. Solace comes in the spring, when days grow longer and ridges and mountainsides come alive with the hooting of sooty grouse.

When I was a kid, I constantly dreamt of hooters. What did they look like? What did they taste like? Would I ever successfully hunt one? Each spring I listened to the sounds of their courtship booming off the steep, forested ridges and slopes and felt magnetically drawn. Hooters, the colloquial term for male sooty grouse, haunted much of my adolescence, so much so that I’d often wake at night in a cold sweat, my bedroom echoing with the sound of their mating calls.