Seth Kantner was born and raised in the wilderness of northern Alaska. He has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Fiction, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for his debut novel Ordinary Wolves, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou. He is also the author of Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska and a collection of essays, Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. His writing and photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Outside, and Alaska, and he has been a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, Orion, and other publications. Originally schooled at home and on the land, Kantner attended the Universities of Alaska and Montana and has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades. He lives in the Northwest Arctic.
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Ordinary WolvesA Novel
I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.
Ordinary Wolves:A Novel -
Ordinary WolvesA Novel
...last spring I’d had to shoot Figment. His testicles were pink and swollen from freezing for so many winters, and irritability kept him picking fights and growling through the nights. I walked him out on the tundra and he padded along, the same floppy-eared shambling dog whose only ambition had been food and to slip his collar once in a while and maybe get laid or chase rabbits. Figment had never taken offense at getting drifted over at night or curling up in harness and waiting while I checked traps or show-shoed after caribou. Each sled dog developed a personality of its own, like a friend, and when I tied him to a tree he sat painfully, and patient, and when I pulled the trigger, all the memories of my friend flashed and cracked and the death in his eyes was that unearthly creature.
Ordinary Wolves:A Novel -
Ordinary WolvesA Novel
At Diamond Mall I locked my bike to a light pole, pulled the wrinkles out of my jeans, and strode into America. Multiple floors, lights, glass, glitter—invitation sweet as roses, with price tags and pretty-woman scorn waiting to thorn the poor and nonconforming. The mall was an aggregation ground for herds of young people. I moved along, longing for someone to invite me home for soup, the way people in the bush invited a stranger in, though that was beginning to seem as likely as a caribou following me home to be soup.
Ordinary Wolves:A Novel
“Seth Kantner's first novel, Ordinary Wolves, is a magnificently realized story about a boy's coming-of-age in a difficult, distant place . . . His novel comes across as smart and authentic. It's hard to imagine a better start.” —Mark Kamine, The New York Times Book Review
"Shockingly beautiful . . . Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves is to the mind what a chunk of pemmican made from dried caribou, cranberries, currants and rendered fat is to the body: It's going to stick to your ribs for a long time." —Sarah T. Williams, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Suspense and heartache are matched by wry humor and outrage, and all is infused with Kantner’s humility and deep respect for the wild as he decries the practices of high-tech trophy hunters, and maps his own metamorphosis from trapper and hunter to writer and photographer. Crafted with the precision and nerve acquired by living off the land, this is a powerful and important book of remembrance, protest, and warning.” —Booklist (starred review) [on Shopping for Porcupine]
Selected Works
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