Never Cry Halibut

Bjorn Dihle

Description

From the sharp, comic voice of Haunted Inside Passage,Never Cry Halibut is a collection of humorous and thoughtful short essays about hunting and fishing in Alaska.

Accompanied by photographs, each story reflects the author's three-decade relationship with the wildest places left in North America as he interacts with brown bears, wolves, wilderness, commercial fishing, and the nearly forgotten act of harvesting food from the wild. From hilarious tales of his nieces outfishing him to reflective ruminations on the human connection to nature, Bjorn captures the liveliness that comes from living so close to the Southeast Alaska wilds.

Chapter 1: Blacktails and Brown Bears

Chapter 2: Sooty Obsession

Chapter 3: The First Deer

Chapter 4: My Best Trophy

Chapter 5: Fish Terrors

Chapter 6: Mountain of Memories

Chapter 7: Return of the Prodigal Fisherman

Chapter 8: Meat Hunter’s Creed

Chapter 9: Never Cry Halibut

Chapter 10: Fishematics

Chapter 11: High Country Blacktails of Admiralty

Chapter 12: Dear Nutrition.gov, Please Sponsor My Alaskan Diet Plan

Chapter 13: Goat Obsession

Chapter 14: Forty Mile Caribou

Chapter 15: A Bloody Business but a Good Life

Chapter 16: A Good Weight to Carry

Chapter 17: Fishiction

Chapter 18: Monarch

Chapter 19: Dear Patagonia: Please Hire Me as a Fashion Designer

Chapter 20: The Return of the Prodigal Fisherman

Chapter 21: Adak

Chapter 22: The Constant Fishing Syndrome

Chapter 23: Deerslayer

Chapter 24: A Few Hours of Pain for a Winter of Good Eats

Chapter 25: Bird Dog

Chapter 26: The Fish That Refused to Get Away

Chapter 27: From Forest to Freezer

Chapter 28: The Wolf and the Fawn

Chapter 29: The Trails We Follow

Chapter 30: In the Time of Ptarmigan

Chapter 31: Of Relationships and Freezers

Chapter 32: Caribou Spoons

Chapter 33: The Caribou of the Brooks Range

Chapter 34: Dear National Geographic, Please Produce My Reality Show Idea

Chapter 35: Yakobi Island and Cross Sound

Chapter 36: Sheep Country

Chapter 37: Grizzly Country

Chapter 38: Fishlove

Chapter 39: Sisu

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Fly fishing
• Bill Bryson
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513260945
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NEVER CRY
HALIBUT
AND OTHER
ALASKA HUNTING FISHING TALES

BJORN DIHLE
Text 2018 by Bjorn Dihle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dihle, Bjorn, author.
Title: Never cry halibut : and other Alaska hunting and fishing tales / Bjorn Dihle.
Description: Berkeley : Alaska Northwest Books, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043435 (print) | LCCN 2018001441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781513260945 (ebook) | ISBN 9781513260921 (paperback) | ISBN 9781513260938 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Dihle, Bjorn. | Fishers--Alaska--Biography. | Hunters--Alaska--Biography.
Classification: LCC SH415.D54 (ebook) | LCC SH415.D54 A3 2018 (print) | DDC 639.2092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043435
Edited by Kristen Hall-Geisler and Olivia Ngai
Cover art: Red monkey/ Shutterstock.com ; Meilun/ Shutterstock.com ; Tribalium/ Shutterstock.com ; K N/ Shutterstock.com
Interior graphics: ducu59us/ Shutterstock.com ; Red monkey/ Shutterstock.com
Published by Alaska Northwest Books
An imprint of

GraphicArtsBooks.com
Graphic Arts Books
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Marketing Manager: Angela Zbornik
Editor: Olivia Ngai
Design Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
CONTENTS
Blacktails and Brown Bears
Sooty Obsession
The First Deer
My Best Trophy
Fish Terrors
Mountain of Memories
Return of the Prodigal Fisherman
Meat Hunter s Creed
Never Cry Halibut
Fishematics
High Country Blacktails of Admiralty
Dear Nutrition.gov, Please Sponsor My Alaskan Diet Plan
Goat Obsession
Fortymile Caribou
A Bloody Business but a Good Life
A Good Weight to Carry
Fishiction
Monarch
Dear Patagonia, Please Hire Me as a Fashion Designer
Adak Caribou
The Constant Fisherman Syndrome
Deerslayer
A Few Hours of Pain for a Winter of Good Eating
Bird Dog
The Fish That Refused to Get Away
From Forest to Freezer
The Wolf and the Fawn
The Trails We Follow
In the Time of Ptarmigan
Of Relationships and Freezers
Caribou Spoons
The Caribou of the Brooks Range
Dear National Geographic, Please Produce My Reality Show Idea
Yakobi Island and Cross Sound
Sheep Country
Grizzly Country
Fishlove
Sisu
For my folks, Nils and Lynnette Dihle.
BLACKTAILS AND BROWN BEARS

MY DAD GREW UP in Sacramento reading stories about hunting and fishing in Alaska. In the early seventies, as strip malls and suburbia ate up the fields and woods surrounding his home, he persuaded my mom to move north. They were both kids, newly married and ripe for adventure. Alaska had untrammeled landscapes where people could wander, hunt, and fish where they pleased and not see another person for weeks. There were massive herds of caribou, and plenty of wolves hunting them. There were Dall sheep and thousands of miles of mountains. There were brown bears and blacktail deer, and to my dad it sounded like paradise.
Alaska didn t quite have the same ring for my mom.
We ll try it for a year, my dad promised. If we don t like it, we can always move back.
Reluctantly, and much to the disapproval of her family and friends, she agreed. Southeast Alaska seemed as far away as Russia, and between the bears, bugs, weather, and the price of a plane ticket, a trip north wasn t high on their circle s list of vacation destinations.
They loaded their tiny AMC Gremlin with a giant malamute and a high-strung Norwegian elkhound and drove out of the suburbs. Following the Alaska Highway, they slowly motored through forests and mountains that seemed to stretch forever. In Fort John, British Columbia, the dogs rolled in something dead, making the final push to the Alaskan port of Haines a bit fragrant. Aboard the state ferry, they motored south down Lynn Canal, an expansive, storm-ridden fjord, with mountains towering up to seven thousand feet on both sides. Clouds clung to Admiralty Island s rainforest mountains as the ferry made a hard turn toward the small city of Juneau.
They settled there, cut off from the rest of the civilized world by a 1,500-square-mile icefield and a wilderness archipelago. It was late fall, the nastiest time of the year in Southeast. Having nowhere to live, they pitched a tent at a campground and slept with their dogs for nearly a month before they found a small rundown trailer. Their slate-gray rainy world was a hard adjustment for my mom, and a lifelong love-hate relationship with Southeast Alaska began as she watched snow creep down mountains and stared at a glacier in her backyard.
It was one thing to read about Alaskan hunting adventures and another thing to make your own. The forest and mountains, tangled and shrouded in constant storms, were nothing like the Sierras. My dad was armed with an ancient rifle with a bolt that was clunky and problematic. On one of his first ventures, he wandered through walls of alders, clawing brush, and gloomy old-growth forest to the top of a mountain to look for mountain goats. His excitement of finally going hunting in Alaska was not dampened by his inability to see more than a hundred feet in the foggy alpine. After spending the day sitting in the rain and snow, hoping a goat would appear out of the gray, and watching ravens glide in and out of view, he hurried down with an empty pack. After his being chilled and lightheaded from low blood sugar and wandering through a dark, dripping forest, a respect for how quickly even a day hunt could go awry was born.
A year later, having yet to harvest any Alaskan big game, my dad and his friend Joe skiffed across Stephens Passage to Admiralty Island for a fall deer hunt. Having heard stories of brown bears and frustrated with a gun that barely worked, he d upgraded to a .338 Magnum. They anchored the boat offshore and carried a raft over popping seaweed and slick rocks. Ravens spoke their ancient language from spruce boughs, and eagles stared mutely out to sea. Higher on the beach in a sandy section, my dad knelt and studied large tracks unlike anything he d seen. Brown bears. He knew this island, at a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, was said to have the densest concentration of coastal grizzly bears in the world. Fresh deer tracks, tiny in comparison, wended along the high tide line. After agreeing on a return time, Dad pushed through the guard timber and stood on a well-worn bear trail paralleling the beach. Squinting into the sodden forest, he checked his rifle, took a breath, and walked into the dark maze.

A brown bear superimposed against the mountains of Admiralty Island.
He traveled slowly over windfallen trees and through blueberry brush, alert and focused for any movement or sound. After hours of sneaking along without seeing a deer or meeting a bear, he came to the edge of a meadow and stopped to look and listen. The wind was still. A raven croaked, and an eagle cried its strange, haunted cry. Nothing unusual. He eased through shore pines and deciduous brush, and his rubber boot sunk into the muskeg. Slowly, he pulled his boot out, making a soft sucking sound. A flash of brown streaked across the meadow. Seeing it was a buck, he instinctively raised his rifle, and when the crosshairs rested on the blur of its vitals, he pulled the trigger. A moment later, the deer disappeared.
He hurried across the meadow, skirting sinkholes and small ponds, to where he d last seen the deer. There was no snow for tracking, and after a long fruitless search for blood, he began to walk in circles, regretting taking such a rushed shot. More than an hour later, the light had faded, and the meeting time the friends had agreed on passed. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a raven and an eagle standing next to each other on a hummock. Investigating closer, he found a big buck, its antlers reddened from rubbing against alders, lying still atop wet moss and Labrador tea.

Dad looking for deer in the mountains of northern Southeast Alaska. (Photo courtesy of Nils Dihle)
It was weird, he told me years later, seeing the eagle and the raven next to each other and that buck. The Tlingit have the two moieties, the eagle and the raven. Here I was a kid, green to their country, standing above the first deer I shot, in the company of an eagle and raven. I m not sure what to make of it.
Not having time to haul the deer out, he gutted it and hung it from a tree, and raced back to Joe and the boat. They barely beat the darkness back to Juneau. Somehow Dad convinced my mom to accompany him to retrieve the deer the following morning.
Freedom is the word my mom still uses to describe the boat ride across Stephens Passage, but once on the shore of Admiralty Island, she realized the rules of civilization no longer meant anything. She peered at large bear tracks and piles of scat, and an unpleasant feeling came over her. Following Joe and my dad through the wet, claustrophobic woods, she stared up at the trees, wondering at the power of the rainforest and praying a bear didn t jump out of the brush.
Relieved to find the buck still hanging from a tree, the two friends packed the deer back to the beach. While paddling the raft out to the boat, they left my mom alone for a few minutes, and in those brief moments she vanished.
It s not rare for people to disappear in Southeast Alaska, so naturally, my dad s b