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B o o k R e v i e w s 105 Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. By Richard Nelson. New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1997. 389 pages, $27.50. Reviewed by O. Alan Weltzien Western M ontana College of the University of M ontana Richard Nelson’s preceding two books, Make Prayers to the Raven (1983) and The Island Within (1990), show him dramatically extending his territory as a writer. Nelson has lived in three parts of Alaska for the past three decades, and in his long awaited “deer book,” he shifts his gaze, for the most part, across the lower forty-eight states. With the publication of The Island Within, Nelson placed himself in the front row of our growing ranks of nature writers. It is as good a book in its genre as any I’ve read in recent years and the fruit of his long years of study with Inuit tribes in northern and central Alaska. With Heart and Blood, this poet of southeastern Alaska has set himself new challenges, which he handsomely meets. Any reader of it will emerge thinking about our three types of deer—perhaps our most familiar fauna, often taken for granted—in new ways. And those Americans who do not hunt deer or dislike the practice altogether might well rethink their ideas after spending time with such a gentle and persuasive writer. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Nelson learned a new way of life—including subsistence hunting—in the north country, and he has been living and writing about that life for many years in Sitka. If there is any­ thing a writer such as Nelson supremely models and teaches, it is a lifelong lesson in humility. This personal credo inspires his lyricism and makes hunting an always sacred act. It also grants him the wide view necessary for this book’s topic, summarized by his subtitle. What does it mean to any of us to “liv[e] with deer in America”?What responsibilities extend to us, par­ ticularly to those Americans seeing deer through the rosy distortions of Bambi and to that majority of us residing in suburbs or cities? Heart and Blood’s first chapter surveys nineteenth-century overhunting of deer and their healthy resurgence in our century. He foreshadows that resurgence by tracking and explaining deer through their “yearly round,” the seasonal cycle from spring through winter. Later chapters make clear that deer rep­ resent one of our most adaptable species, as they have resided in suburbs and cities for decades. Our ambivalences about deer influence, in every pos­ sible way, our efforts to stabilize their increasing populations. Heart and Blood differs considerably from The Island Within, though the former book grounds and frames the latter, as is evident in “Beginnings,” “Prologue,” the final chapter, and “Epilogue.” To define and understand what living with deer in America means, Nelson has researched and trav­ eled widely, as his expository chapters and final two sections (“Bibliographic Essay, Information Sources, and Acknowledgments” and “Literature Cited”) abundantly testify. To explain the symbiosis between the history of American 106 W A L 34(1) SPRIN G 1999 deer hunting and the logging of old-growth forests, Nelson focuses on his nearby Tongass National Forest and features the Channel Island (south­ eastern Alaska) blacktail deer project as his case study. To explain parkland deer overpopulations, Nelson writes extended scenes on Angel Island, in northern San Fransisco Bay, and Fire Island, beyond Brooklyn and Coney Island. To explain the proliferation of suburban and urban deer, he writes about River Falls, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee), and Boulder, Colorado. In a later chapter, he examines the conflicts between burgeoning deer popula­ tions and agriculture by taking us to Westchester County, New York; Marin County, California; and southern Wisconsin. Nelson never obscures his own passions for deer and deer hunting, which are not the same, of course. His humility and open-mindedness enable him, in one chapter, to camp with the enemy. He looks at the ethics of hunting by accompanying animal rightists in southern Wisconsin, and he studies their arguments, which he gently exposes as seriously anti-ecologi­ cal. This chapter follows two of his...

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