Now I know that look my mother gave me conveyed her awareness of her mortality, and of the mortality of our prey. She said we're none of us around forever, and we all depend on each other. Caribou, wolf, fox, hare, all need to live and die together. When you want to kill someone, you look them in the eye. They look back, and you know if they're ready to die or not, or how much of a fight you're going to have. It's the conversation of death. It's conveyed in an instant. And its conveyed very clumsily by these human words.
And maybe that's because humans don't understand the conversation of death. I've seen only fear in their eyes. Or sometimes their eyes are blank, unreadable. That's the time I hide, as quickly as I can. The eyes of their domestic animals convey only fear. How can I describe it. It's like they're not animals. They have no spirit. They're not worth killing.
Yet I've killed many of them, I admit, and more than I needed to eat. And tame meat, incidentally, has no taste, it tells you nothing. I suppose, looking back, I could say I was angry, resentful, I hated the men and their herds. But actually I didn't. That's the human fingers distorting my voice. The truth is nearer to I just don't understand humans at all, they don't fit into the world. Maybe my world is wrong.
