It’s raining here this afternoon. It can’t seemed to make up it’s mind if it wants to snow, rain, or most likely something in-between. If you look across the way the rain has reduced the hills to a blur. I enjoy it. It’s not boring weather and around here it has a mind of it’s own. The poor weather people in the media in this neck of the woods must need counseling.
The mama deer and her teenager stopped by in the rain to ask if I might have an apple. I allowed that I had asked the lovely Rebecca to purchase a bag of apples at the store. I told them further that she had indeed purchased the apples and they were close at hand. To this they replied with a look that said “and step lively if you don’t mind.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the critters the past few years. And in doing so, I’ve arrived at a different understanding about my relationship with the critters.
There was a time that I was not as friendly with the critters of the world as today. When Becky and I were living in Alaska, the practice was to hunt or fish for the family meat. I understood that a man needs to go kill things so that his family can have the protein to grow healthy.
We were living in Kiana which is a very beautiful village at the confluence of the Squirrel and Kobuk rivers. The Kobuk was two hundred and eighty miles long and the largest clear water river in northern Alaska. It teemed with salmon and shee fish. The shee fish is about the size of a salmon and is called the tarpon of the north. It has amazing white meat that is delicious.
A trip to the village post office and I was fitted out with a hunting and fishing license. The fishing license allowed us to have a 30’ subsistence gillnet I understood nets, I’d been a commercial fisherman.
Lee Staheli was our bush pilot. He’d been a sergeant-pilot during WW2 in the Aleutians. He flew a PBY Catalina hauling freight and dignitaries up and down the chain. In the summer he wore a shinny red jacket, brown pants, a crew cut and three days growth of beard. A couple of years ago he was inducted into the Bush Pilot Hall of Fame.
Now Lee and his kid Lee-Lee lived down on the bank of the Kobuk in a cabin that looked like it was a painting in Alaska magazine. Inside it had a spool and some stumps for furniture. It was kind of rough living but Lee was trying to get an air taxi service off the ground so to speak.
I’d had a Thompson’s 18 footer shipped up by barge. It had a 70 hp Johnson that I’d bought brand new for around a thousand bucks. I look at the boats out here on the lake today and they’d laugh at me with that motor. But, it performed it’s job well.
So, my care package from home arrived in the form of a 30’ gillnet which I loaded into the Thompsons and headed down to Staheli’s place on the river bank, about a quarter mile down river from town. We figured out an anchor and buoy system for one end of the net and a shore anchor for the other end.
We used the Thompson’s to set the net and then pick it. The net almost always caught 30 fish. It didn’t matter if we set it for a couple of hours, or overnight, 30 fish. Some combination of salmon and shee fish. We’d toss ‘em in laundry tubs
Staheli looked at our wash tub of fish, shook his head and put a plank across the top of two 55 gallon empty drums. He went in the house, got some knives then brought out a propane burner and a pressure cooker. Staheli was like that, had what you needed when you needed it.
We were in the canning business. Becky and I would gut the fish, guts and head into the river to be recycled, meat cut to size and stuffed in the cans. We canned salmon for days. We had so much salmon the Famous Snoopy, the five thousand dollar circus dog that you’ve heard so much about, started complaining and wanting dog food again. Let them eat salmon….or cake…or in Snoopy’s case both.
And of course I hunted caribou and moose, with some success. I won’t go into detail, but in the end I didn’t find much enjoyment in the process. I mean, I did it because it’s what we could afford, but frankly hunting is just a lot of hard work so you can eat. And in my case the hunting often took place at -30 degrees. It’s so cold you need to wear a down filled face mask and wear goggles. When you breath in the hair in your nose freezes like tiny daggers.
When we came back to America from Alaska I was happier going to the supermarket and buying what we needed. It was less bother.
So, Elsie the deer brought her teenager by and I leaned against the house cutting slices of apple for them. Every minute or so, they would both lift their heads and their ears would rotate scanning their environment for danger. The rain kind of muted the sound so they were a bit skittish. They needed to be doing deer business, and being constantly alert for danger was their deer business. She’s had two fawns in the spring, and now only one. Cougars need to kill a deer every seven to ten days.
Deer have deer business, bears have bear business, otters have otter business. I’ve tried to become respectful of this and intrude into their business as little as possible. When my dock became unsafe and I had to remove it, I worried about the otters that live in the space between the float and the deck above. Instead of destroying it, I pulled it against the shore. Problem solved. I’m sure eventually I’ll get a letter from the county telling me I’m being environmentally unsound.
I like the idea that critters have their own agenda. I enjoy watching them going about it. We live near a vast forest land and every once in awhile one of the forest critters will wander past to say howdy. Three cougars up at the store end of the lake walked across the lawn going down to have a drink from the lake, a mamma and her two adolescents. The property owners took pictures and put them on the Big Lake group. Folks said “You ought to shoot ‘em.” I wrote back, “No need to shoot ‘em, they just doing cougar business.”