Content Warning: This article is deeply personal and contains discussions of sensitive content such as animal death, which some readers may find distressing. Please proceed with caution.
There is an Inuit saying “eating involves the exchanging of souls.” But what if we kill and don’t eat? What happens to the killed and what happens to the killer?
When I was five years old I crushed a turtle with a rock. I looked down with horror at what I had done. It haunted my sleep for years to come.
As a pre-teenager my friends and I would gather up pitchforks in the spring and spear suckers as they entered the creeks to spawn. The carnage was awful. The creeks ran red and the fish were left to rot. There was no turning them into the soil, or digging them into the rows of newly planted corn. There were no cultural instructions for us to respond to.
I used to set off the traps of a poor muskrat hunter. He was scratching a survival living off the marshes. I was being a self-righteous little bastard. Golf course development drove him off the land. When he was gone I was sad.
As a teenager I became a hunter, although not an avid one. I dressed the fallen game and acknowledged the lives I killed. I was moving into the wild and the wild was moving into me.
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