I lived along the Kuskokwim. I won’t say where, and you’ll know why I won’t once I retell these charming observations of living among Alaska’s First People.
Once I came upon a group of men on snowmachines in February. They told me they were headed upriver to get moose. I asked them what they would use to hunt them, expecting to get a caliber for a rifle. One of them smiled and said, “A shovel.” Thay dry Yup’ik humor. He meant that once the animal was poached out of season, they had to cover the bloody snow so it wouldn’t be seen from the air.
I watch a group of Yup’ik hunters on snowmachines corral caribou into a circle and fire wildly into the middle until a few of the animals fell.
I came across a caribou once walking on three legs; one leg had been shot, but the animal was left wounded.
In the village where I lived, literally every mammal larger than 10 pounds was killed and eaten - with the exception of beaver, which has a funky, sometimes foul, smell.
Once the elders came into my classroom to warn kids that a wolf had been spotted five miles away. They told the kids to run home and lock the doors. They then went out to kill it.
Once I was hunting with an elder and I asked him about the “rules for hunting out here.” He told me, “There are no rules.”
Conservation and the longterm care of the environment is a distinctly Western notion arising out of our understanding of the world with rational thought, our Christian ethic, and our respect for rule of law. I like Native people, but their culture isn’t mine. For a lot of Natives I know personally, hunting and fishing is seen as something that you can do anytime, with little longterm consequence. It doesn’t surprise me that they want to kill the wolf and bear pups down there along the Kuskokwim, since those predators are the competition.
It’s a different world, for sure.
Nothing you relate would surprise me. It’s a whole other thing when you get the kill or don’t eat.