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

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“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.