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84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
80/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Seth Kantner
Publisher:
Mountaineers Books
Date:
October 15, 2021
A firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying and living alongside caribou in the Alaskan Arctic. Kantner leads readers through the historical past and present day, revealing the fragile intertwined lives of animals and peopleâincluding the Indigenous Iñupiatâsurviving on an uncertain landscape of cultural and climatic change sweeping the region.
What The Reviewers Say
Structured according to the seasons, these essays range though memoir, natural history, ecology, politics and Alaska history. But they never stray far from the free-range ungulate—the North American subspecies of the animals called reindeer in Europe and Asia—that was the foundation of the Kantner family economy, and whose biology and behaviors are marvels of adaptation to the rigors of this environment.
Sharp, fond essays and landscape photographs move from his childhood in a sod igloo into present-day battles over wildlife management, Indigenous rights, and resource extraction. Cozy reminiscences contrast with descriptions of 'Rambo hunting,' as snowmobiles and semi-automatic weapons replace dog sleds and .22 rifles.
Along with telling his own personal story, which reads as the adventure Jack London and Jon Krakauer wished they had lived, Kantner considers how rural Alaskans rely on, revere, and, occasionally, take for granted the caribou. His sharply worded dismissals of bureaucratic ideas about life in the bush have an urgent relevancy, while his gorgeous prose, along with his stunning color photographs, bring the beauty of the state to every page.
There is almost nothing related to caribou that the author does not cover in this wide-ranging book, which is especially good, like Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, in welcoming the knowledge and stories of Indigenous people.
