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

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Together the three skiffed toward Juneau, the jagged sentinel mountains guarding the icefield growing closer, the sharp wind on their faces.

Forty years later, my dad still brags about my mom’s tree-climbing abilities. She still claims that she wasn’t afraid of bears but was simply trying to get a better view.

Hunting stories are the oldest stories we have. My brothers and I listened to our dad’s as we grew. We poked and examined the game he brought home to feed us. When we became old enough, he’d take us along, decreasing his odds of harvesting a deer but showing us the woods and how to hunt. When we were teenagers, we began to bring deer and our own stories home from the rainforest.

The first buck my dad shot was one of the biggest deer anyone in our family has harvested, not that it matters. What does matter is that more than forty years ago, amidst a rainforest of brown bears, my dad encountered something timeless and difficult to articulate in the presence of an eagle, a raven, and a deer. It is a gift he received and passed on to his sons.