Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska

While I was reading Ordinary Wolves, I wondered how much of Cutuk's unusual life was based own Kantner's own experiences so when I saw this book I snapped it up. Turns out he did grow up in an isolated sod house with the same family structure.
This book is more a collection of stories of his memories of family, friends, and community in the Alaskan outback, and a few ruminescing on the changing lifestyle as big oil and technology takes over. Many double-spread photos taken by Kantner, who is a photographer in addition to writer. I suppose I should be impressed by the tundra, caribou herds, Jade Mountains but find I couldn't find a focal point in them and was more caught up examining the photos with people.
Kantner writes well, and show more thoughtfully, and his heart is connected with his subject. As an environmentalist, I know many people who feel uncomfortable with hunting in any form. As a practicer of self-sufficiency, I recognize that we are tied in to the food web and believe it is better to accept the responsibility for taking an animal's life rather than letting some distant feedlot and slaughterhouse protect my sensibilities. Yes, he talks about hunting, but he also is looking for how he fits into the world.

There was no quote I needed to mark for a personal guidepost, but include a selection here which typifies his style: "I hear a whimpering in the trees. My hand twitches for a rifle, but I go on, leaning and peeriing forward. Silence lives here in these trees. But what else?...Tucked up in the branches, a porcupine clings...We peer at each other, both with frost around our eyes and puffs of breath dissipating. I consider shaking him down for dinner but decline. Winter porcupine tastes like a spruce slab, and besides, it is nice to have him here....Hunting is installed in my heart, as sacred as eating and breathing. It is a very separate thing from some Outsider's paper regulations...Here on the old froontier the eapproaching modern mesh of law feels like a gill net set too drown our souls. But the truth? We're already hooked. We have swallowed technology and are wriggling to avoid the shackles that make it work: rules and laws...Unfortunately, hunting itself has altered...'He always catch'--half a century ago the difference between life and starvation--is still our region's highest coompliment. But lost along the trail to today are the bulk of the ancestral requisites of hunger-driven hunting, often including tracking the wounded, tanning their hides, reverence for the dead...We are living through big change, hard times in a new way...The dying of subsistence as a lifestyle doesn't negate the importance of food from the land... (p 162-3)"
Includes glossary of Inupiaq words used show less

I rather enjoyed this essay format memoir about Northeast Alaska. I learned a lot about the subtleties of "subsistence" lifestyles. Topics touched on include: trophy hunting, subsistence hunting, sno-gos, technology's effects on hunting and gathering, race, cultural evolution, trapping, photography, Alaska Native issues. There are a lot of very fine photographs in this book, most of which are taken by the author. This book could easily serve as a nice introduction to growing up in and living in bush Alaska.

Arctic Essays