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lazily circling in the blue sky. I crept up to the edge of a draw, lay on my belly, and waited for dusk to come. Like magic, two does appeared on the opposite side.
I remembered when I was fifteen, my older brother, Luke, and I saw a nice fork-horn in this same draw. We were green—Luke missed twice, and I proceeded to shoot the ground in front of me. On Luke’s third shot, the fleeing deer stumbled then disappeared. With ringing ears, we looked at each other in shock. In our rush to find the deer, I fell down a steep slope toward a cliff but miraculously slammed into the one stunted tree growing from the edge. Luke chose a better route down, and together we stood in awe over his first deer.
Dusk was nearing as I crawled away from the two does and crept back to camp. A small deer flickered inside a maze of jack pines. A moment later, it was gone. I passed the rock where, when I was seventeen, my friend Orion had lined up on his first buck at just twenty yards. After panting for five minutes—the deer oddly unaware—he whispered, “Should I?” There was the bowl where I’ve spent hours with my dad and brothers glassing. There was the spot where I accidentally shot two bucks one foggy, rainy morning. There was the ridge where that spike had been bedded down two Septembers ago. There was the ravine where that little fork-horn had been at the edge of in late September. There was the bowl where, with my friends Jesse and Ed, I took my first buck when we were sixteen. Reid and I had taken many more out of the same spot since.
It was near dark by the time I made it to camp. I was considering crawling into my sleeping bag when a deer emerged from the forest four hundred yards away. In the low light, I couldn’t tell whether it was a buck or doe. I grabbed my pack and crept along the forest’s edge, careful to make sure I didn’t silhouette myself. Through a break in the trees, thirty yards away, two deer stood. One had antlers. I quietly worked my bolt, brought the rifle to my shoulder, and fired. In the darkness, I found the buck lying nearby in deer lettuce, heather, and false hellebore. I lay my gun down and rested a hand on his warm body as the last of the crimson sunset disappeared behind the Chilkat Mountains. After gutting and splitting his brisket, I partly skinned his hindquarters and broke his pelvis so the meat would better cool. By Southeast standards, it was a hot night. I wedged a few sticks in his rib cage to air him out and then hoisted him the best I could in a stunted tree. I tied my sweat-drenched shirt on a foreleg in the hopes of scaring off bears.
The black merlin was hunting the meadow as I packed the buck out the following morning. Nearby, a fawn leapt out of the brush then looked me over for a minute before disappearing into the old-growth forest. A goshawk hurled itself between trunks and branches of giant hemlock and spruce trees. It paused midflight and gripped the vertical trunk of a large hemlock with its talons when it saw me. It spread its wings apart and stared, its red eyes burning, then leapt back into flight. The pack, filled with fifty pounds of premium venison, bit into my shoulders, but it was a weight I was happy to carry.
At home, MC had filled the bathtub with warm bleach water and left out a wire brush, paint thinner, and waterproof sandpaper. On the sink was a bottle of the latest and greatest hair removal product she’d bought for me. It wouldn’t work anyway—the hair on my back only comes out thicker and coarser. You can take the jungle out of the tiger, but you can’t take the tiger out of the jungle.
RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FISHERMAN
MY DAD DID EVERYTHING RIGHT to raise his three sons to be fishermen. He taught us to spin cast, troll, fly-fish, and halibut fish during outings that generally involved hours of untangling lines and existential crises. Quite frequently on these fishing expeditions, I was convinced I was tottering on the edge of hypothermia and perhaps even death. When I whimpered, my dad would try to set me straight.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” he’d say over the pouring rain and howling wind, a string of cohos over his shoulder, me sniveling and shivering in tow. “When I was your age, I walked miles to the dam on the Sacramento River to catch twelve-inch hatchery trout.”
Dad’s diligent, often frustrating labor paid off for the most part. His love for fishing passed on to my two brothers, who put in their hours each year. My older brother, Luke, enjoys fishing so much, he’ll even cast for humpies and chums—he eats them too. My little brother, Reid, told me the other day he might enjoy fishing more than hunting, which is the most controversial statement I’ve ever heard him make. Every family has its black sheep, and in regards to fishing, I guess it was me.
My career as a fisherman began as bright and hopeful as my brothers’. I tangled just as many lines—and perhaps even more. I got pretty good at being hypothermic, something to this day I’m proud of. I got in the way when my dad was trying to net, contributing to the loss of several king and coho salmon. I massacred fillet jobs, cut myself, and broke knives. I dropped valuables over the edge of the skiff and lost hundreds of dollars’ worth of lures and gear. I’m not sure if my dad was relieved or disappointed when I declined his offers to go fishing during my teenage years. Soon my mom put my poles in the mysterious, carnivorous underbelly of the house. They vanished, along with all other outdoor gear that had ever been stored there.
Somehow, perhaps out of pity or desperation on the part of the captains who hired me, I started crewing on a number of commercial fishing boats. Now I was getting paid to be soaking wet and hypothermic, plus tangle lines, lose gear, and get in the way. Some of my favorite times were based out of Elfin Cove, longlining on the Njord for halibut in Cross Sound with Joe and Sandy Craig. The first May I worked for them was rife with gale warnings and stormy seas.
“I hired a Jonah!” I heard Joe muttering as we tossed about, trying to snag the buoys attached to one side of our set. The fishing was slow, so the three of us got to spend a lot of time yelling, swearing, and bonding. One of my duties was to relay directions and curses between Joe, who was situated in the stern, and Sandy, who was driving in the wheelhouse. It was like the commercial fishing version of the game Telephone.
“Look,” Sandy had warned me on the first day we met, “when we’re out fishing, you’re going to hear Joe and me yell a lot of horrible things at each other. We still love each other; it just gets a little stressful at times. I’m sorry that you’ll often be the go-between for the two of us.”
I didn’t mind though. Whenever we snagged a set on the rocky sea floor, I got a chance to blow off some steam and work on my improv, adding a little extra drama and profanity to their warnings at each other.
One afternoon, after we’d finished up with their halibut quota, we decided to take the skiff out to Port Althorp and troll for a king. The sudden transition from working with hundreds of hooks to just one left me with that same drowsiness I got toward the end of my days of going fishing with my dad. I was half-asleep when Joe and Sandy started yelling, the line on the reel began zinging, and the spasmodic pole was shoved into my hands. They’d trolled these waters for nearly forty years and caught thousands of kings, but for the next five minutes, with all their whooping and hollering, I could have believed this was their first.
“There’s nothing better in life than catching king salmon,” Joe said as we admired the rainbow-scaled salmon. We barbecued a chunk on a cedar plank, and I embarked on a path of seafood snobbery.
Besides getting wet and hypothermic, tangling lines, and getting in the way of angry captains, there were other benefits to commercial fishing. A lot of folks who normally wouldn’t have thought much of me but suffered some romantic notions about commercial fishermen gave me much more respect than I deserved. I used my “Don’t worry, I’m a commercial fisherman” trick to fool MC, who’d recently moved to Alaska, into hanging out with me. She denies it, but I think dating a commercial fisherman was on her bucket list. I got her hooked on seafood, and she hasn’t been able to shake me since. Things got a bit rough when she discovered the true extent of my fishing skills.
“I can’t wait to catch my first salmon!” she exclaimed when she visited in Elfin Cove. On a day off, I borrowed Joe and Sandy’s skiff and took her to the head end of Port Althorp. Thousands of humpies were milling and splashing in the shallows, waiting for the tide to rise so they could swim upriver