Reading Nature
The Heart of a Hunter
By TOM MURPHY

Review of The Island Within, by Richard Nelson. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989.)

When we moved to Tioga County almost twenty years ago, the roof of our old house was in bad shape and, based on the number of hardened tar buckets with brooms stuck in them in the barn basement, it had been that way for a while. So first thing, we found someone to redo the roof, and to cut costs, I helped as unskilled labor. It was fall and the hillside across the valley from our house was gray trunks and scattered leaves, brown with some faded fall glory mixed in. We were about to take a break, and as one of my coworker’s feet touched ground from the ladder, he noted, “There’s a doe over there.”

The other three looked and apparently saw her right away. Another said, “I wonder if she had a fawn this year,” as a third returned from the truck with a pair of binoculars. Almost in chorus, the one with the binoculars and another one said, “There it is,” as they saw the fawn.

Meanwhile, I saw nothing. My father did not teach me to hunt; he taught me to bowl, which meant I could join the office bowling league when I worked in Philadelphia, but that meant little here. These experienced hunters were speculating whether the doe would cut across the field or go up into the woods, and I kept scanning the hillside looking for what might as well have been a ghost. Finally I asked, and after much pointing and referencing, (“See those three birches there . . .”) I finally saw her. That was my first experience with how sharp-eyed and knowledgeable about wildlife hunters can be.

Each year, as deer hunting season approaches, I remember that experience and remember a book I read some years after it. Richard Nelson’s The Island Within contains powerful writing about hunting. The book is an interlocked series of essays primarily about the time he spends camping, exploring, and hunting on an isolated Alaskan island. Nelson did not learn to hunt growing up in Wisconsin; he learned from the Koyukon people of western Alaska while studying them as an anthropologist.

One particularly powerful essay describes a time on the island toward the end of hunting season when he takes a large buck. He explains how important respect for the animal is because, as Koyukon elder Grandpa William told him, “It’s not through his own power that a person takes life in nature, but through the power of nature that life is given to him.” After he finishes butchering the buck in the small hunting cabin, Nelson cooks some venison and then sits and eats it right out of the pan and notes:

“No meal could be simpler, more satisfying, or more directly part of the living process. I also savor a deep feeling of security in having this meat, bringing it home to freeze or can for the year ahead—pure food, taken from a clean, wild place, and prepared by our own efforts. There is a special intimacy in living directly from nature, nourishing my body from the same wildness that so elevates my spirit.”

When students read this essay, those who are concerned about hunting are often reassured by Nelson’s approach and by how, much to their surprise, many of their fellow students who hunt attest to that same feeling of awe when they hunt.

This is a beautiful book, full of clear and evocative stories and experiences, and throughhis experience, Nelson makes clear that how we live on the land, what we make of our responsibilities as part of the natural world, says much about who we are.

Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com.