Christine Cunningham explained to me the choice she made between being a vegetarian and a hunter. For her, the two choices were not far apart: they were both about integrity.
The integrity of Christine’s writing, and that of her partner Steve Meyer, lights the pages of their book, The Land We Share: A love affair told in hunting stories. The honest pairing of love and death in these essays makes the Alaska wilderness as real as I’ve ever found it in outdoor writing.
I’m reading the book as slowly as I can. One essay a night. Because it takes me into mountains and wetlands I love and makes me feel briefly like I’m there, and I don’t want that to end.
Writing about fulfilling outdoor moments is extremely difficult. There are many pitfalls.
Some writers use the setting as a stage to puff themselves up. Others express so much spiritual ecstasy over their duck hunting or fly fishing that you wonder if they ever caught a trout without having an orgasm.
Christine and Steve simply tell good stories, understated, with beautifully observed details. Their stories are about relationships, with hunting dogs, each other, the weather and the terrain, and the animals they are pursuing. Everything is rendered actual size, including the precious truths.
I interviewed the couple in 2017. Christine said that before Steve introduced her to hunting, she enjoyed seeing nature from a kayak or hiking trail, but felt like a spectator, not a part of the ecosystem.
When he led her crawling through the mud in pursuit of the hunt—smelling rot, feeling fear—she became a character in the story of life rather than an observer or a free-rider.
She gave up on vegetarianism.
“I want to live as honestly as possible,” she said. “If my actions on planet Earth are blindly causing harm to animals, eating what comes out of a long production line, or leaving a big footprint, in terms of my use of a car and plastic bottles and so forth, I wanted to take the blinders off and really look at it. If I eat meat, what does it mean to eat meat? What does it mean to go out there and be responsible for that? How can I do that with as much integrity as possible?”
The intimate moment of death connected her to the real world.
“It is hard for me to come up on a game animal that I’ve killed,” she said. “I’ll hold a bird and it’s this very beautiful thing. I love birds.”
Everyone who eats poultry or other meat subsists on the death of animals, but most of us avoid thinking about that. Christine and Steve have built their lives around it.
The metaphor to writing is deep. To do it well, you have to go to uncomfortable places, have the courage to see clearly, and tell the truth. Writing well is a way to live more fully.
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