Wisdom Keeper by Ilarion Merculieff

at the moment it was within a forty-five-degree angle from either side of our body to allow for the appropriate killing shot right behind the ear. We would synchronize our shooting, taking our lead from the most experienced hunter, and firing within a few microseconds of each other—we were so aware of each other that we could function as a single unit. Acting in complete synchronicity was important because the sea lion would react quickly and begin to dive within a couple of seconds of the first shot. If one hunter fired two seconds too late, he would hit the back of that animal, only wounding it and thus causing suffering. As a result, we always seemed to know that we had killed the animal even before the bullet struck its target.
    On average three to six men hunted with high-powered rifles. In my childhood, we always killed the sea lions; we never wounded them. Unangan hunters were incredible marksmen. Imagine trying to shoot at a fast-moving target the size of a basketball (sea lions expose only their heads when engaged in directed swimming), bouncing up and down in rough water and stiff winds, 75 to 170 yards away. Equally challenging are the fast-moving king and common eider ducks that fly by at dawn. Sometimes flying with the wind rather than against it, it was not uncommon for the ducks to be moving thirty-five to forty miles an hour at distances up to one hundred yards away from us. During such times, I would frequently witness hunters discharging their twelve- or twenty-gauge shotguns far in advance of the ducks, wait for a few seconds, and then watch the duck drop and hit the ground almost a quarter-mile away from where we were.
    We would sit out on volcanic basalt boulders, next to the sea, for hours, frequently six, seven, or ten hours, waiting for a sea lion to come by. No one can tell me that a five-year-old child does not have the ability to sit patiently in one place for more than ten minutes. I was able to sit for hours at this age and be perfectly content. At my young age, I found that it would be very easy for me to be lulled into a serene stupor by therhythm of the waves and the wind, and the sounds from thousands of boisterous seals swimming in the water. There is a background cacophony of sound in this wild environment. When we are quiet in a natural setting of redundant and rhythmic sound, we can easily drift away into a dreamlike state. I used to wonder how the hunters were never lulled as I was. A good hunter has to be fully present, taking in all of these rhythms without being lulled into a semi-conscious stupor. Otherwise, the hunter won’t be successful with the hunt.
    In a seemingly unrelated way, I found out that the only way a human could be there without going into a “mind lull” is to be present in the moment and aware as an unattached witness—to be the watcher side of ourselves. Beginning at age six, I took to walking out of the village very early in the morning to a place three miles outside the village called Tolstoi, so I could be where tens of thousands of seabirds nested and raised their young. I made regular trips like this until I was about twelve years of age, arriving early enough to be present just before sunrise when the seabirds stirred to begin their foraging for the day, eating sand lance, herring, capelin, pollock (a species of oil-laden fish), and tiny sea creatures called copepods.
    Near sunrise, birds began to slip off the ledges and circle around in front of the dark basalt cliffs. Soon, thousands of thick-billed and common murres, tufted and crested puffins, red-faced and pelagic cormorants, least and crested auklets, fulmars, and red- and black-legged kittiwakes would be flying in every direction in loops around the face of the cliff; the air was filled with the rich sound of wings and calls. Some species flew quickly like the murres, some slowly like the kittiwakes. The puffins had burrows near the top of the cliff ledge. The murres and kittiwakes