I’ve always been a casual bird hunter. More of a wingshooting diletante, honestly. Fly fishing is my first passion, and it’s tough for me to drive over a trout stream without stopping, let alone wander the forest trails and creek bottoms looking for grouse without pulling out a fly rod and casting to rising fish instead.

The Kigluaik Mountains stretch across the Seward Peninsula of western Alaska like a spine, their jagged ridges keeping a record of time. The Inupiaq have long read these ridges and valleys as a living story: Fire and fracture have marked the rock, and glaciers’ slow grind polished it. The talus slopes gleam in the low fall sun, meltwater from the snowfields spilling into streams that thread across the map of caribou trails on the tundra below.