Predator or Prey

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Diana Saverin | Longreads | July 25, 2024 | (4,088 words)

1.

An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins. 

There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand. 

I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen. 

2.

I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou. 

I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere. 

Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting. 

I was becoming a hunter.

I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful? 

At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild. 

Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.

3. 

The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting. 

4.

K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again. 

Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter. 

When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood. 

5.

A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s. 

I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control. 

I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice. 

About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there. 

6. 

I eventually told my parents I was dating a man twice my age who was teaching me how to skin river otters and fry caribou liver. My dad said, “You’re a grown woman, so you can do what you want, but I want you to ask yourself, ‘Am I being used?’” 

Later, when I told K about this conversation, he replied, “Aren’t we using each other? I mean, we’re both having sex.” 

Where is the line between being exploited and fulfilling your own desires?

What I remember less often now, because of the way things ended with me and K, is how much I wanted to be with him—how much I loved being with him. Picnics in the boat, sharing pilot bread, cheddar cheese, dried caribou, smoked salmon, blueberry cake. Evenings listening to Martha Scanlan’s “Seeds of the Pine” on the muskox-skin couch. Mornings watching him build a fire in the barrel stove. We used to eat half of a lingonberry pie after each meal. 

For years, I’ve read about Indigenous traditions around hunting. I have found it comforting to learn of practices that turn predation into partnership, consumption into communion. In Southeast Alaska, the Tlingit people throw salmon bones back to their home river as a gesture of reciprocity, in the hopes that the salmon will come back. In Yupik communities, hunters give the seals they’ve killed a drink of fresh water to quench their thirst. In a Koyukon community, anthropologist Richard Nelson described an elder carrying a plate of meat to her neighbor’s house with a cloth over it. She explained, “It wouldn’t be right to leave this open in the air, like it doesn’t mean anything.” 

I’ve tried to find my own practices to treat meat like it means something. Some days, before eating, I recite the Five Contemplations, Thich Nhat Hanh’s script for mindful eating (“This food is the gift of the whole universe…”). I try to use food that’s available close by, growing a big garden in the summer, picking wild berries and greens from the tundra, putting away gallons of fermented root veggies for winter. I try to celebrate food with careful cooking and vibrant ingredients, smoking salmon bellies and collars with brown sugar and salt, collecting seaweed to sprinkle in miso soups and big pots of rice, tending moose meat as it slow-cooks with apple cider vinegar and star anise. I try to share good food with friends, sitting around a table with salmon filets broiled with sesame seeds, farro with roasted carrots and whipped ricotta, salads with quartered beets and goat cheese, black lentil stews with wilted kale and cubed sweet potatoes. But there is still the question of whether it’s all enough; each summer, I find my fingers wedged in the prickly gills of a salmon, trying to hold the fish still so I can bang a club against the animal’s head—and smiling as I do so. 

It’s not always clear, the difference between a relationship defined by love or predation—or some mix of the two. When I was inside the story with K, I didn’t see it the way my dad did. I saw myself as a hunter, too. 

7. 

K taught me how to set steel traps. We ran a small trapline, killing martens and beavers and foxes. We tried eating fox meat once when we feigned being hungry enough for it. It tasted terrible—predators don’t make very good meals. Usually, we left the carcasses outside the door for ermines to chew on.

One night, after skinning beavers by the woodstove, we heard the cry of a fox caught in a trap on the river. It was midnight and 30 below. We donned headlamps and snow pants and walked the trail down to the shore. K let me kill the animal; I steadied my .22 as he held a spotlight on the thrashing body. I squinted into the scope, inhaled, then exhaled to pull the trigger. The jerking legs released their fight. 

I carried the fox away from the trap site, then skinned him. My hands got stiff with cold as I worked, so I warmed my bare fingers against the fox’s flesh, which was still hot. I later sewed his fur into a pair of mittens, pulling fake sinew tight after each stitch. I jabbed myself repeatedly with the sharp needle, trying not to stain the orange hairs with blood. Those mittens eventually kept me warm on other 30-below nights, when I camped alone on a frozen river, my body prone under the winter sky. A couple of those nights, I had a stomach virus. Puking over the side of my sleeping bag, I feared I might freeze: the thrashing of my desire—to keep living, wanting, killing, eating—stilling into a limp pose of surrender. I knew, then, as I wiped vomit from my lips and shimmied back into my sleeping bag, how quickly my flesh would become meat. The ravens would circle, the wolverine would lumber through the spruce, the foxes and wolves would trot down the river, frosted snouts high in the air. 

8.

Soon after I first started trapping, I wrote my friend Sophie a letter and shared my qualms about killing animals. She replied with a letter about her own experience fishing in Southeast Alaska. Once, when gutting salmon on the boat, she’d decided to keep their hearts separate from the guts she threw into the sea. When she looked up from the filets, she saw a pile of salmon hearts thumping on the counter. Out in the open air, pulled from the cavernous bellies of fish, those hearts continued beating—a heap of pulsation, life holding onto life.

Remembering that letter now, I wonder: what did she eventually do with all those hearts? How do we ever properly honor what we take from other bodies? And how might we make sense of the mix of violence and tenderness, desire and cruelty that sustains us?

9.

In my first year of marriage, I cooked voraciously: red lentil stews, toasted chickpeas with paprika, elaborate lasagnas with butternut squash. I tried to make a pie a week and a friend teased that I should start a blog entitled “Fifty-Two Pies.” David and I planted seeds in a neighbor’s abandoned beds, where our green beans dangled from the vine, the arugula grew leafy and bitter, the kale proliferated so much we had to freeze numerous Ziplocs because we couldn’t keep up. 

We joked, at the time, that we’d been domesticated: we bought sheets and towels, discussed the merits of the Instant Pot, took dozens of pictures of our two sled dogs. We were housesitting that first winter together, and the cabin had a double office in the loft that looked out over a hay field. It was the coldest winter on record in Fairbanks since the 1970s, and ice stitched onto the window, obscuring our view of the snow with frozen crystals in the shapes of stars and ferns. 

I trust David more than anyone I know. He is a very good person, a very good man, so trained in not objectifying me that for years, he rarely commented on my looks. Our engagement came soon after I finally put an end to the off-on period with K. I wanted to anchor in a safe harbor. I wanted to domesticate myself. But domestication hasn’t always come easy: our first summer of marriage, also the first summer of the pandemic, my seasonal work leading backpacking trips was canceled, so I stayed home. I picked 30 gallons of wild berries—18 blueberry, 12 cranberry. Come fall, I spent hours in the kitchen pickling our carrots and beets, making veggie soups to can and freeze. I got scared, as David worked on his laptop downstairs, that my world had become too small, that it wasn’t the pandemic but the word wife that was containing me. 

This is what I’d wanted: to feel safe. To erect sturdier walls between me and animals that might kill me. To have a partner I could trust. I no longer wanted to find myself looking over my shoulder as I skied across the tundra or walked down the street, wondering who might be following me. And I no longer wanted to carry a gun when I ventured out, always ready to turn beings I met into meat. When I walk through the woods now, I no longer stalk or worry about being stalked—instead, I often clog my ears with headphones, pausing every once in a while to refresh email. The other day, when talking to a friend on the phone while wandering nearby trails, I almost stumbled on a cow moose munching on willows. The sight of her blond fur literally brought me back to my senses. Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone? 

10. 

When I was newly enamored of K, I focused on his eyes: green and, if you looked close enough, a splash of yellow around the pupil. 

There were his arms, too, which he knew were a surprise for his age. When we lived together, he spent a lot of time shirtless—puttering around the house half-naked in the middle of an Arctic winter. Maybe he also wanted to be looked at and objectified every now and then, to pretend that he, too, might be considered prey. 

We were living in his home at the time, which was nestled on a hill and surrounded by hundreds of miles of boreal forest and tundra. At the time, it was freeze-up, which meant the river was half-frozen, which also meant there was no way for me to leave if I wanted to. The nearest human, besides us, was 30 miles away. When I remember these details, I sometimes wonder why I considered myself “a hunter” in those years—why I said things like, “I was the one in control.” 

11.

I recently read an article that described the microwave as the most eco-friendly way to cook. When I turned 30, I rediscovered the device after David and I moved into an apartment with one. I hadn’t lived around a microwave since I was a kid. I became obsessed; you can steam a sweet potato in five minutes! You can poach an egg in 55 seconds! You can pop bulk popcorn in six minutes! 

When I was with K, I was in a phase of my life when I was trying to live as far from the nearest highway—and microwave—as possible. It wasn’t unusual for me, during that time, to haul 15 to 30 gallons of water per day. I liked to wait until the temperature dropped below zero to split wood—logs shattered at the slightest tap like candle ice. One spring, when I was alone in a remote cabin, I cried over a salad. As I stared at my plate with the first wild greens of the season, fireweed shoots and willow leaves, I improvised new prayers: Thank you for the bounty and the beauty of the land, the people I love who are both near and far, and the many joys of being alive. By the time I chewed and swallowed, my eyes were wet with tears. 

Despite my current efforts to practice mindful eating, careful cooking, and local harvesting, I still sometimes find myself pushing food into my mouth while standing up or looking at my phone or talking in such animated conversation that I forget to taste the miso-butter brine on the turnips, or the crispy skin of pan-fried salmon, or the sharp bite of ginger in a wakame salad. There are days when I am so caught up in my mind I don’t realize my body is absorbing another body. 

Often, I miss the way hunting demanded my attention, turned my gaze toward the cost of my still-beating heart. I wish I could remember that without having to kill, though. When K and I were in our prolonged off-and-on period, I was also more awake than usual, even if that meant I was more distraught than usual, too. I memorized Rilke poems, journaled furiously, went for multi-hour runs. K’s accusations at the time—mostly that I was sleeping with various other people—were maddening; I thought I was losing my mind. And yet, our reunions were ravenous. I was high and low and rarely anything in between. I felt unmistakably alive.

I don’t have nostalgia for that relationship in the way I do for hunting, even though the process of falling in love and having my heart broken woke me up to the world, too. At this point, I want to feel awake to my surroundings, alive in my relationships, a part of my environment—and also to feel safe. But I don’t want comfort to mean complacency. I still want to feel each meal, each touch, each body I absorb into mine. 

12.  

A few years before I met K, I went diving with a friend in Southeast Alaska. We drove his boat into a small cove and put on wetsuits, and my friend strapped weights to his chest to help him drop down and plumb the ocean floor for sea cucumbers. I stayed near the surface, spectating—neither hunting nor being hunted. I peered through my mask at kelp undulating in the waves. Water gurgled and the whole world seemed somehow far away and too close at once. 

Meanwhile, my friend dove down, his flippers swishing as his fingers sorted through sea stars and sand dollars, looking for the slippery oval beings we hoped to later unravel, cutting thin strips from their bodies, nestling flesh against sushi rice, cucumber, and nori. When you grabbed their bodies, he later told me, they tensed up in your grip. 

The memory returns to me now as I look for an option between predator and prey—some new way to be in contact with the world, with other bodies, with my own body, with wildness and domesticity both. There was still exploitation: the sea cucumbers died; we ate them for dinner. But in the moments in between, there was something else, too: the moon’s pull on the kelp, the invertebrates, my limbs. There was my need to hold my breath and plunge into a beautiful and terrifying place. There was that zip of attention, another being in my palms, the undeniable pulse of something (briefly) alive.

Diana Saverin is a writer and outdoor educator who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Guardian, and others. 

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin