animal writings | laura leif

The following writing comes from a desire to engage with hunted animals laterally, with death in a non-reductive way, and with non-linear storytelling. From a place that is like deep love, I was trying to tell the arrow story in a carrier-bag style: without progress, without anthropocentrism, sans a hero, a conflict, finality, or celebration. The following are excerpts from pieces on fishing and on hunting.

1) I see care as something which extends into discomfort even more powerfully and importantly than it does into warm feelings. Life has consequences: it also implicates a lot of death, and even killing. Mostly this is experienced indirectly, and is disregarded in the everyday. Some examples, in addition to those of the meat industry, are the clearing of land to build human infrastructure, mass extinctions caused by environmental degradation, and the human deaths implicated through economic disparity and inequality (including death through the complications of poverty, death through conditions that mimic slavery, and death through desperation).

2) I wanted to see what happens when I myself am directly implicated in killing something, and I wanted to see if I could do it in a way that was nowhere near the arrow tale.

I learned to hunt and butcher with the Kjulböle-Båsa Jaktlag hunting lodge in Båsa village, Finland, as invited by artist Pia Lindman. I was taught to fish by Pieter-Jan Van Damme in Hammastunturi region in Lapland, Finland; in a lake North of Kirkenes, Norway; and from the edge of the Barents Sea Northeast of Kirkenes. These locations are traditional and active herding territories of the Sami people.

Fishes

All Colour

It wasn’t a vision but it entered my dream.

We had walked for three days without seeing people. We had come slowly up through the dry swamps and then we had stood at the top of a hill. A dull mountain. We had walked through the round rocks, rounded from glaciers, since softened by time and weather and the small growing things. Placed there as if with intention. We had come down the steep side messily, a sort of falling. On the side of the wide red valley, crowberries. Over that lip we see four fox cubs. Their mother at a distance crying, crying, calling our attention away. She is a small outline at the lip of the rock, back-lit and skinny. Then, reindeer. Again a curious child, this time a father braying danger. And then the colours soften and the sea opens, huge and cold and strange. The grass short where we are standing, small tufts of seed like cotton waving. A flower that looks like a hand-drawn snowflake. unripe cloudberries, we eat them anyways. Although we are tired we walk to the furthest edge with our fishing things. I wash in the bitter waves with a stone the size of my palm, although I cannot get the smell away.

We cast from the edge of a flat rock, beyond we see nothing. I am a small animal. It is dark in that water. From that emptiness we conjure slick bodies, we dip our lines and when we pull up they are heavier, there is weight at the end of the string. We pull out 6 easily, their name is Pollock. I kill them by snapping their spines with my thumb in their mouths. We wet our hands before we take them from the water, so as not to burn them. We calm them before we kill them. Afterwards they are both more fully present and have swum away.

Later I sit on the grey deck of the cabin where we broke in. The light is orange and pink again, we’ve come to the other side of the day, where the light gets slightly lighter. I slice the fishes as I have been taught, very carefully. I open them. Inside, the smoothest skin. Clean clean container for the things the fishes bring. Air bladder, stomach, shit, intestines. And another, stranger thing. Reaching like a pom-pom or a ball of string. Alive. System of exchange. It is all of the colours of the sea, inside of these fish. In this scene, all of the colours in existence are present.

We are too tired, we cover them for the morning. But it is hot and the flies come, and by the morning everything has changed. I return the fish meat to where I returned the rest of their bodies. I do not know what happened after.

Hunting

The Edge of the Forest, the Edge of the Shed

I wanted to believe that something magical would happen, that I would find something that would tie everything together. The roots of the spruce, the micro-organism feeding. I was looking for it in books and I was looking in conversations. I was looking everywhere, obsessively. Going for long walks with my eyes open outwards or to the ground. But there is no such thing. Just long lines of story that get stronger the longer you sit with them. And at a certain moment it can all fall apart. At any moment there can come unravelling.

I wanted to believe that something magical would happen, that I would find something that would tie everything together.

I invited myself to go hunting. To go hunt a moose. Before we get started, I feel I should tell you that we didn’t catch anything. That is not where this story is going. This is a story to hold something.

Where to start with this? Somewhere there was a moose. There was a moose license that was attached to this moose, although we wouldn’t know which moose until we shot it, although we had clues: its age, its sex, the area where we would shoot it. In Finland to get a moose licence you need enough land. To get enough land you need to get enough land owners, to get enough land owners you form some kind of hunting board, a coalition. A collection, a cohesion. Then you get the license then you hunt on the land. And it’s agreed, the meat will be shared [ are these 1st 2 paragraphs too obnoxious? I think I can do better. ]with everyone who owns the land.[ it is also shared with those who help but do not own the land, at the landowners’ discresion. They help because they like the hunt. Historically this land was owned by the Swedish gentry. This lineage is still present in land ownership in Finland. ] But to hunt a moose you need to find the moose, and to find it they’ve figured out this way:

A bunch of people (including some land owners, but other people too) get together on a rainy Saturday in the fall, wearing their gumboots and all wearing the brightest orange. Some of them have guns. Everyone gathers in front of a shed; inside there are tractors and picnic tables and a grill. At 9am on the dot you stand in a circle and decide which routes you will take. The routes have names like “the lookout” and “the hill”, although all of the places might have lookouts and involve hills. Once you’ve laid it out you all squish into some cars, the runners separate from the hunters (they are treated better), and you drive off. Along the way the hunters are deposited, they walk into the wet woods and they climb into wooden structures where they hide, very still and quiet, with their guns out. One boy has a camera as well as a gun.

The runners all drive to the same place, a stretch of forest, and they leave their cars there. They get out and they walk along the edge of the woods until they form a long line, evenly spaced, along one edge of it. They wait. They listen on their walkie-talkies. Some of them might also have a dog with them. When someone in the line knows it is time (they hear about it on the walkie-talkie) they start to call, a call like “heeeey-o” or “yoo-ooo”. You all start to walk, and you also start to call. You find a way to call that feels right, that fits your voice. Maybe you hit some sticks together. You make a ruckus. You enter the woods from the edge, from the field. You go from walking on one kind of harvestable plant and seeing far, to walking on a very uneven and varied surface. It is so uneven it is not a surface; it is some kind of collection. Sometimes it is solid—packed dirt or a log or a big rock—and sometimes it is less solid, far from solid. Sometimes it is a puddle, or the air around and through the mosses that you step onto. Sometimes it is the spaces around sticks, they crunch as you press down on them, onto some other underlying unknown. Onto whatever underneath will hold you. The sticks are wet and you are worried that you might slip. You keep your balance. You run around a tall hill made of rock, or you clamber up and over it.

all this time you are calling, and all this time you are listening, too. You are listening for the calls that are on either side of you; you are trying to keep yourself in the middle, a balance of sound and of movement. You use this sound to determine your direction, if the place is new to you. You are not worried about being lost if you are keeping up.
Slowly the forest floor enters you. You feel the wet leaves and the mud. Maybe you see mushrooms along the way, lots of them, but for the sake of the chain you don’t stop to pick them, you continue to move. Maybe you pick one or two if they are special and put them in your breast pocket. the special mushrooms are orange and the vest that holds them is orange too. They shine with an orange glow. Their stems are wet and on them are small pieces of forest floor: a dead pine needle, one small arm of moss still reaching for something, what can only be described as dirt (although it is bigger and smells only of the forest floor—it is not a dirt smell, but a wet one. The mushroom, later, held to your nose, smells like the forest floor too, and also like your body wants it).
Now and then you can spot the ones on either side of you, small in their orange vests, slipping between trees with the human noises rising. They make the forest bigger by looking so small, the trees tall suddenly. The trees looked so small without the people there to make them huge. Sometimes you are very close together but then so are the trees, so it is the same, this feeling of glimpses that gives the forest some variety of bigness. Fullness. Fullness that feels like bigness, bigness that makes you full.

On the next-to-final run you spot the moose. Or someone in the chain does, and you can feel it. You can feel that you are in the woods together with the animal. There is some variety of excitement, a rooting in you for the moose, a rooting in you for the people. The moose slips the chain and so you make the same pass again, but backwards. This time you see moose tracks, fresh, and also moose poop. The tracks are also in the complicated forest floor, and the message that they communicate is weight and movement. They speak clearly in their own tongue. You make this sweep together and again you miss the moose, it is seen somewhere on the other side, moving away from you. You still feel the thrill, the excitement. You feel it for the moose. Escape! Both capture and escape are exciting, and even though you are hunting the moose with intent and desire you are also all rooting for the moose.

While you wait for the last car to pick you up, you are quiet and you look at the crows. The crows are hanging around in case of meat. Maybe they also let the moose know you are here, everybody’s cleverness competes. There are wet rocks on the side of the road. You feel the unseen animals around you. There is something about the cold wetness of the rocks, broken from bigger slabs of granite that are the ground/under, that holds you. Captures your attention. Here the view is a little more open, your eyes go further.

In the shed around those picnic tables, we siteatsandwichesgrillsausages. I am at the back, looking through the steam of thermoses, the many sturdy hands and the conversations, towards the open door. Where it is parked cars, then field, then wet and green and fog and beyond that, something wild and growing, calling in its own voice, through a kind of silence, a dark and heavy something, a lumbering between the darkness and the leaves.

Little Moose, Little Knife

On the second trip I am lost twice, and during those times we kill two. I am lost in the swamp on the edge of a field, I keep falling in the water when I step through the canals. I can’t see the person I have been following, a kind farmer named Eki. He gestured and I moved deeper into the woods, where I find many mushrooms and a wet lonliness that only the forest can offer. Green at the edges. I find my friend and she translates: Eki has been gesturing for me to join, but instead I just kept moving further.

The first is a calf. Lying on the hill, in the space left by the power lines. He lies on the rocks and the soft graygreen lichens. He is open when i reach him, the shooter elbows-deep and wearing long gloves, trying to cut through, to take what is inside, what is held by the cavity, and to put it out before the calf is moved. He has trouble, his heart is troubled, and the woman hunter takes over. Bare hands, she moves in with her jacket sleeves dangling, little knife. searching in the pooling blood at the back of the beast for the easiest path to its release.

While you are gutting the elk, it is very important not to puncture the stomach, or you risk spoiling all of the meat. You need to release the innards from the back of the spine. Most of them will be left, but some are taken and eaten. You must also sever the esophagus; it is another place that holds together the things that are inside. You stop the mechanism for singing, but the death song cuts steady, fills the air and all the light.

The moose is young. His antlers are just starting to show. His face is soft, softest expression. Says I hadn’t even figured this out yet, says I don’t understand, says sad. His soft ears, soft nose.

Emptied now, they pull.

I follow with his heart in a bag. Down the hill and singing for him in my headheart, singing with my truest voice and purest, trying to sing him thanks and home.

The Time Holds

There is a room in the middle full of blood, and bones, and knives being held and sharpened expertly. It is a tender place, and a vulnerable one, and one that rests very near to hurting, entwined with it, attached with many fibres to a solid core. It is a space of separation, and of sorting, what is worth the energy of making useful, and what is made too heavy by the time it holds. There are four buckets and the worth held by those buckets is determined by our wanting.

It is a container for generosity, also.

Of that space I can’t say more.

There is one more room before we go, and in that room is human language, and speaking, and a bit of warmth. There are chairs and coffee mugs and boots left at the door. The men to us are old. To them we are kids, although in other contexts fully grown. We put more wood in the oven before we leave them.

Of these spaces
I won’t
say more.

III

Your Own Shape

shape of fox

On the ice there is a fox. His shape waggles as a black shape, a man shape, a dog shape, a deer or cat shape, before becoming fox. He comes towards me and then he enters the rushes, where in their mass he disappears.