Filling the Freezer

Someday, I will be a true Alaskan. Someday, I will kill something with hooves. In preparation for this day, I bought a bench freezer. It’s in my basement. It’s like something you’d find in a science lab. It opens from the top so the cold heavy air doesn’t escape. The Alaskan ideal is to fill the freezer with organic protein from the wilderness. I can’t let it sit cold and empty, like my eyes.

I’ve attempted to fill the frozen voids of my freezer and soul with many hunts over the last decade. Trips for caribou over the Arctic Circle, a trip for moose south of Fairbanks, another trip for caribou near Glennallen, and too many attempts at deer in Southeast to count. Nothing.

I was a better killer as a kid. I spent September and October weekends with my dad going after hare and grouse off the road system outside of Anchorage. We had a beagle, Sheila. Before Sheila was too fat to hunt (too fat, really, to move), she was quite a hare dog. Dad and I trained her in a large park in Anchorage that abutted Chugach State Park. We’d let her loose and she’d sniff out the hares. When she found one, she’d fill the forest with that beautiful beagle bray. A beagle bray is like the otherworldly sounds you, or your wife, yowled when pushing out a baby, but with more joy.

Grouse were a different story. Like a lot of lazy Alaskans, Dad and I would hunt grouse back in the 1980s by driving the dirt roads in the Mat- Su and the Peninsula. The grouse would peck at gravel on the edge of the road. Grouse are, and I don’t think I’m relaying new information here, dumb. Though their camouflage might work in the deep woods evading a red fox, it’s not so useful when you’re on the edge of a road hiding from a 12-year-old with a 0.410 over/under. Some say that is unsportsmanlike. I say grouse taste good.

I don’t hunt grouse anymore. I live in Southeast and grouse live way too high on the mountainsides. The ratio of exertion to reward is much different hoofing up a cliff versus driving slowly on a dirt road. I can’t reconcile the thought that I burn more calories stalking a grouse in Southeast Alaska than I get from eating one. Come to think of it, nothing is easy to hunt in Southeast, except maybe porcupines.

The Cooking Alaskan cookbook perhaps has the best assemblage of words ever set to print about hunting porcupines: “Porcupine is neither hunted nor trapped in Alaska… There’s no need! The animal is so slow moving it can easily be clubbed.” Well, you don’t say! If the underpinnings of our comfortable First World life crumble and satellites tumble out, I am heartened to know that if in need of some “Armageddon meat” I can go club a porcupine. There are a lot of porcupines in Juneau. I live in a great place if the world ends.

Now, there’s a time on a hunt, about day three, when you can almost imagine a world without satellites. It gets quiet. In our world of bings, pings, blasts, blares, and rings, the quiet deafens you like a shroud. Then your ears adjust.

The silence fades into the tap tap tap of a woodpecker, the rustle of a mouse, the whiff of a gray jay, the bluster of a grouse, a splatter from a duck, a wind whispering to the woods. A stick cracks suspiciously in the distance.

There’s so much we miss. So, can a hunting trip without a kill be a success? Isn’t it the experience that matters? Isn’t it all about the appreciation of some quiet time in wilderness?

No. I spent money on a flight plus gas plus food. My wife treads water as a mom and a professional while I play in the woods for a week. If I come back with a few hundred pounds of meat, then there’s no problem. But to come home empty-handed? Well, there’s a difference between tolerating your husband’s hobbies and encouraging them.

In hunting, the ends must justify the means. Love of the process and poetry of nature is great, but best reserved for single people with abs and a good vacation policy. At any rate, the trajectory of my hunting prowess suggests the only game my freezer will ever freeze is porcupine. Yet, my bench freezer is not empty. Bread freezes beautifully. Twice a year my local grocery store holds a “meat bonanza” sale. Friends have bought me two annual gift subscriptions to the excellent Storyville, a Seattle coffee brand. I can’t drink the coffee fast enough to keep up so I store the unused beans in my freezer. The freezer is full, and despite my failure to meet the Alaskan ideal, so is my soul.