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Messages from the Bombing Range

by Jim Hunter

59 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0035; ISBN 1-55369-222-5; US$12.00, C$14.95, EUR9.80, £6.80

"Charming, educated and natural. Promises nothing...and delivers everything." Ann Chandonet, in the Anchorage Times, Anchorage, Alaska

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book     It's a pleasure to be invited to enter deeply into worlds you've never known. From the opening poem, "The Wild Child," in which we trek along side the poet, proceeding south southeast, moving "slowly/on water," over the frozen surface of a creek in interior Alaska, deep inside the bombing range of this collection's title, to the vigorous next-to-last poem, "Cancer," Jim Hunter invites us along. He travels far. He opens his heart.     Jim's journey covers not just the "excellent thrilling path" of "The Wild Child"-rich with footprints of wild creatures, shifting weather, a "fingernail moon," and sibilant sounds of the poet's skiis on dry snow-but quickly plunges down "the luge run of philosophy." We see close up the frozen bombing range where helicopters hover, piloted by young men "bug-eyed with night-vision goggles" in the cold Alaska sky. Meanwhile, moose, lynx, and bear run for cover, even the "fox tip-toe." A local trapper waves his patent to his life style" bearing gold seals and notary stamps," as the poet muses on the odd truce between "Generals and Trappers and Others."     We meet up with lynx, coyote, and the cold country of an old trapper, who seems to speak for one aspect of the poet and who "wants no more/than more of it." Like the trapper of "Trapper's Lament," Jim too seems to believe that: "The Weather is my brother." And not a gentle sibling!     We venture to San Francisco, urban Fairbanks, and Big Sur, too, but Jim's real subject is the deeper and darker terrain of a human heart seeking peace, meaning, happiness, and glimpses of truth. The poems hang together on the music of Jim's warm and witty voice. Come along. Let's ponder Jim's messages with him. Jean Anderson Fairbanks, Alaska Also by Jim Hunter Messages from the Mountains Reader Comments     "I like Jim Hunter's poetry...it imparts the tranquility and solitude of far away, remote places along with the sacrifices and dangers which come with being there...the poems bring forth passion and peace...he speaks from the heart about being in the wilderness...puts the burden on each and everyone of us to make our own decisions on where we fit in the environment." Marcy H. Moab, Utah 07-09-02     "Even though we approach poetry from opposite directions: I favor the particular and Jim appears to favor the general, I enjoyed all the poems in Messages From The Bombing Range .... my favorite is "if Not For The Owl At Night"...which strikes me as a perfect poem, one which captures the northern experience: the life within the stillness." Tom Sexton Alaska Poet Laureate 07-06-00     "Mr. Hunter reminds us that we can feel most alive and human in the surroundings where few humans exist. He took me to the wilderness, and I couldn't help but feel both the healing effects and vast aloneness of lengthy journies into the wilds. I completely enjoyed Mr. Hunter's work...the experience ended too soon. I will highly recommend this book to other poetry readers." Westerville, OH October 5, 2002     "It had honest prose and excellent style. I felt it brought out the best in living with nature in Alaska. I feel this poetry book is the Alaskan equal to John Denver's folk music about Colorado." Rock Point, AZ October 8, 2002 "I felt as if I were actually in Alaska with the writer, experiencing the same things he was experiencing. I especially liked the Magic Tree and No Aztec I." Dickson, TN October 1, 2002

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About the Author     Born in Stockton, California in 1937 Jim Hunter arrived in Alaska in 1955 at eighteen years of age. He served four years as an Air Force radar operator, graduated from San Francisco State College in 1963 with a degree in Creative Writing. He worked as a pizza cook, prison guard, newspaper reporter, psychiatric technician, substitute teacher, and radio announcer before returning to Fairbanks in 1966. Hunter has published over 100 articles on Alaska, Mexico, and the western U. S. In 1976 Chronicle Books of San Francisco published his widely acclaimed guide to Mexico's Baja Peninsula, OFFBEAT BAJA. His other book of poetry, Messages From Raven placed among a select group of finalists in the 1987 NEW LETTERS LITERARY AWARDS sponsored by the University of Missouri. Hunter has worked in Alaska for many years as an insurance adjuster. In 1985 he and Marilyn J. Mount, a counselor in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, were married. Alternating between a remote cabin in the Alaska Range Mountains south of Fairbanks and their home in town, Jim and Marilyn Hunter continue to live and to work in Alaska's still wild Interior.

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Excerpts

If Not For The Owl At Night

If not for the owl at night
the raven's call at day
the strange curling upward motion of smoke's shadow
sunlit on tree trunks
I would in twenty-four hours
have neither sound nor movement to report.
This alive stillness is more than silence.
It has weight.
It presses me down.
And as I listen and stare
hypnotized by it
I'm released by the owl
the raven
the smoke.
As we all hoot, croak and curl
small against the sky
as this day's sun
again
life giving
golden and slow
sinks.

Trapper's Lament

Aye! And wild I was before time began
for it's here I belong, and here I am!

    I

I came across the steppes before Atilla
alone west
wary of wolves and lions at night.
And before that I slept in trees
avoiding sabre tooths and quick-sand
for I've been here forever
and it's here I am.
I arrived at the Rhine wearing the fur
and the horns of those I'd killed.

Aye!
I walked the black forest a victor,
and took no pride in the killing.
Pride in the finding, the knowing,
in the doing, the surviving.

I was here with the miller
the tanner the logger
the smithy.
They in the town and the city
and I in the lonely wood.

Aye!
I have been here
unseen unsung
and wanting it that way
forever.

    II

Take the fur, I said.
You take it.
You wear it.
Leave me be, I said.
Out here
alone,
where I am
with them.

    III

I came across the sea
west
and slipped so fast into North America's
vastness
you never saw my track.
You barely knew me.
I am so private.
I am no Carson nor Boone,
no scout from here to there.
That's for them
what wants intercourse,
company.
Not me.
I've been here forever.
and I want no more
than more of it.

I am the ones I trail:
moving
learning,
but unlike them alert
to the beauty
and to the harshness,
to the sadness I didn't make,
to the chain of power what's
left me here on this end.

Alert too
to the bloody cruel middle.
The bloody cruel middle
that's not my makin'
though these gnarly red traps be.
Talk to God on that.

    IV

Not an animal killed I didn't feel bad about
that did not hurt
that like me was out here
bare toothed
and fierce.

Well, God bless'em
God bless me.
Save'em.
Save me.

God I ask you
is it no more for me
the snowy path?
I ask You!
No more cunning?
No more the dead black test
of who lives
and who dies?

    V

Aye!
Sometimes boss
sometimes dead
born so long ago
forever
to these vast wilds
these different ways
and ever ever to be.

Born so long ago
to gather to wonder
to go to
to crawl to
any mountain's magic gate.

Aye!
Nature's own child I be.
And not her hunter, no.

Her son and her daughter both
I farm the forest, I do.
Weather is my brother
nothing my mother
for I go in wind and storm
daylight and snow and darkness.
In faith in hope and in strength
no way scientific.

Better!
I was here before science
a trapper
the pure freedom and drug of it.
I understand the discipline of it
its limits
of what I can touch and what I can not.
I know what the forest will give me
and how the forest may kill me.

No second chances
the bargain I made.
Sunlight and breath.
One moment warm and well
the next one death
spirit fled.

It was so long ago I came
I can't remember my first home,
the first wilds I ever set eye on,
those first lakes, ponds, forests,
those absolute places
I flew to.
Aye! Was pulled to,
for the forest for me is the lethal magnet
for it's there
no better than some dumb moth
I go to live
and I go to die.

So long ago it was
when my blood itself
seemed to race ahead of me to see
to see over the next range and ridge,
so I was left with a body blood free
at sunset and at dawn and at mid-day
staring white and blank
my soul already out ahead
searching and pulsing
answering that awful desire
to be there fresh on some sunlit morning
to be there first
to see the snow covered huts
caught in the morning's sun!

First and alone,
first and the price paid.
Being paid now
to see the sun climb the trees
to see mine be
across the lake
the first track ever
and forever it's been
for I'm a trapper,
and that's how it is.
I'm alone with the beaver the mink;
and the soft, little shrew
the lynx the wolves;
their prey
the wolverine the marten
the touch of the country.
Aye! The Lust of it!

    VI

Today if it could
the forest would kill me,
for that's what forests do:
Live die kill.
And I too.

My own blood
has been red in the green moss
red in the white snow
with crushed chests
sawed legs
bones all askew and white
stuck outside the pink of muscle and skin,
thumbs and fingers in pickle jars,
all winter in alcohol.
Will the doctor sew them on?

Aye and forever the forest has
bit by bit fed on me
killed me slowly
with the lead weight of its loneliness
and the frost bit tips of my toes
and the frozen fingers of my hands
the frozen nose of my face
my dehydrated belly and wrinkled skin
my whole body every day out on the line
hundreds of miles beneath beauty and terror
beneath black sky and storm
over thin ice and deep water
treading the trapper's life
on the thin wire 'tween survival
and not.
Wink
your life's gone
spirit lifted
mine or some mink
a link here a wolf there
and Mike grizzly clawed
dead and shredded by a winter bear.

Herb and Bill starved that one winter
not even rabbits after leather belts
and Swede fell through the Tanana
and never even bobbed up
and the jumper down a beaver hole
never seen again
just the tracks in.

Aye, the forest wants me
to drown me
starve me swallow me
freeze me break me,
and I waver.
I do.

I feel pain
I wake I dream.
I know fear.

I'm happy
I'm sad.
Generous fitful
Glad to see you.
I sing I cry
I feel hurt.
I can tell a joke
I know rebuke.

Like a steelworker
run from his plant
am I no longer useful?

I've searched for and caught
fur and fabled creatures
for mankind and kings alike.
And was never looked on
just quite right.
Oh, I knew it,
so I'm not really surprised now
to be the last
to sing this lonely lament
lonely once more 'tween valleys and peaks
driven
from the great dark forest I love
away from creatures I know so well
by me respected
more than any will know
and few care to ask.

    VII

For they sit now in their cities
in this they call their modern age
and me condemn for who I am
wild before time began
pure in thought
clear in intention
fur to find
fur to catch
fur to cut and care for
fur to sell
and to the forest
to return
to do it again.

Wild I was before time began.
Ready I am to fall lightning struck
ice crushed.
Ready I am
to drop through ice
too thin to cross
to lose the trail to wind
and my body to blowing snow.
Ready as a trapper
to be buried
in frozen stretched stance,
dead from it.
For wild I was before settlers and pilgrims
and ready I was for no good price for fur
for hunger
for loneliness
for dark days and dead quiet nights
for staggering stumbling walks to survive,
for lonely fires and the wolf's howl
for moose kicking my dogs to death
for lonely quiet illnesses wondering
today will I die and freeze?
In that order
when the fire goes out
without me to feed it
this century?

    VIII

Aye! Me always wild and alone.
You would drive me from it.

Me! Who knows it better than biology.
Me! With my doctorate in doing it.
Me! With my tens of thousands of miles in it.
You would drive me from it?

So I sing my trapper's lament
my great cry like the wolf's howl
from a place you can't see
from a place so far distant
even from the hunter's vision
that no bullet ever reaches it,
a howl so full of this wild life
a howl so angry and dead slow long
its at once so beckoning and so dangerous
I expect you not to understand it
but to let it be.

For I am with the wolf wild too.
Here we, the wolf and I,
come together in the day
and in the night,
the one with fang
the other with brain
well met in the wilds
wit for wit
stalker and stalked.

Wild we be.
To be left.
This my lament.

Fairbanks. 04/18/98

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Catalogue Information

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