A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou

by Seth Kantner

Overview

2023 Independent Publisher Book Award GOLD in Environmental/Ecology
2022 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in Natural History Literature

"A Thousand Trails Home is a book of supernal majesty, a book to break and restore your heart. Seth Kantner’s devotion to the living pulse and unity of the skein of wonder that is the Alaskan wilderness haunts and inspires me." -- Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman

• Bestselling, award-winning author of Ordinary Wolves, a debut novel Publisher’s Weekly called “a tour de force”
• Conservation-based story of changing Arctic from an on-the-ground perpective
• Features full-color photography throughout

A stunningly lyrical firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou, A Thousand Trails Home encompasses the historical past and present day, revealing the fragile intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape of cultural and climatic change sweeping the Alaskan Arctic. Author Seth Kantner vividly illuminates this critical story about the interconnectedness of the Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, and the larger Arctic region. This story has global relevance as it takes place in one of the largest remaining intact wilderness ecosystems on the planet, ground zero for climate change in the US. This compelling and complex tale revolves around the politics of caribou, race relations, urban vs. rural demands, subsistence vs. sport hunting, and cultural priorities vs. resource extraction—a story that requires a fearless writer with an honest voice and an open heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594859717
Publisher:	Mountaineers Books, The
Publication date:	09/01/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	99 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Seth Kantner was born and raised in northern Alaska and has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, wildlife photographer, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, and Smithsonian. Kantner is the author of the award-winning novel Ordinary Wolves, memoir Shopping for Porcupine, and collection of essays Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. He has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades and lives in the Northwest Arctic.

Editorial Reviews

The breathtaking photographs that illustrate this book, in concert with essays that describe all that is happening underfoot and beyond the horizon to unravel this beauty, make A Thousand Trails Home gut-wrenching in its impact.

Wall Street Journal - Richard Adams Carey

…his own personal story…reads as the adventure Jack London and Jon Krakauer wished they had lived

Booklist Starred review

Beloved Alaskan author Seth Kantner has written his magnum opus. A Thousand Trails Home is an inspiring and important book about Alaskan culture, biology, philosophy, history—and love for the creature at the heart of life on the tundra. Through deft storytelling and exquisite, gut-wrenching prose, Kantner shows us how caribou might be the ultimate harbinger of what is to come for humanity if we can’t slow down and learn from the land, the elders, and those animals on whom our very existence depends.

author of The Raven’s Gift - Don Rearden

Beautifully written and deeply introspective, A Thousand Trails Home may be the book Kantner has been aiming his powers at all along, a masterwork only he could deliver.

Anchorage Daily News - Nancy Lord

Seth Kantner is the most interesting person and the finest writer I know. I savor his writing as I have savored the work of Annie Proulx and John McPhee. Nature is not landscape or subject matter for him; it is sustenance, literal and emotional. He doesn’t just write what he knows; he writes what he lives and breathes. This book is extraordinary.

author of Stiff, Gulp, and Grunt - Mary Roach

A Thousand Trails Home is a labor of love that advocates for more balanced ways of treating caribou and protecting the amazing Alaskan wilderness.

Foreword Reviews

Through a series of narratives, author Kantner unveils a life that revolves around the wilds of Northwest Arctic and the twice yearly migration of caribou. It’s about a life of subsistence – a life that had sustained native Alaskans, the Inupiat, for centuries. The hunting of caribou was central to their existence, and consequently there are frequent depictions of hunting in this book. But it is also about changes over the last decades – social, political, technological – which have altered the lifestyles of those who live there. It’s a book filled with wild passion and love of place that will keep you absorbed well into the night.

National Outdoor Book Award Judges

A Thousand Trails Home is a literary tour de force that reaffirms Seth Kantner’s place as one of Alaska’s premier writers. An amalgam of intimate autobiography and impeccable nature writing, Kantner’s luminous prose transports the reader to a timeless world, shaped by great waves of hooves and antlers.

author of A Wolf Called Romeo - Nick Jans

A Thousand Trails Home is a book of supernal majesty, a book to break and restore your heart. Seth Kantner’s devotion to the living pulse and unity of the skein of wonder that is the Alaskan wilderness haunts and inspires me.

author of The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich

A Thousand Trails Home is both an intimate memoir of a family who made their home above the Arctic Circle, and a well-observed natural history of the caribou they hunted and consumed. Seth Kantner has become an important Alaskan writer with a singular voice—a humble and exacting observer of a world he is privileged to have experienced. The result is extraordinary.

poet and author of the Cecil Younger Mysteries - John Straley

An exceptionally well written, impressively informative, and inherently fascinating read from first page to last.

Midwest Book Review

2021-05-27
A richly illustrated adventure with the Arctic caribou on their land, “veined with their ancient trails.”

Alaska native and conservationist Kantner has been among caribou all his life. His back-to-the-land father hunted the migratory creatures, and his take formed an important part of the household economy. As his narrative opens, he is out on familiar ground, “along the Kobuk River where I was born,” watching vast herds move across the landscape as summer gives way to a brief fall that will soon turn cold: “everything knows that winter is coming.” There is almost nothing related to caribou that the author does not cover in this wide-ranging book, which is especially good, like Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, in welcoming the knowledge and stories of Indigenous people. Minnie Gray, one of them, was an especially rich source of information: “She was an elder before she was old,” Kantner writes, who “shared her wisdom freely, without conditions.” That wisdom has been instrumental in Kantner’s work preserving migratory pathways and otherwise helping conserve caribou populations in a time of drastic climate change throughout the north country. As the author makes clear, the caribou should by rights retain their role in the native economy among hunters who recognize that “the land is an endless grocery store, and everyone here has known times when mile after mile, every shelf was bare.” (He even includes a recipe or two.) Kantner admits the dangers to the caribou and other Arctic species are so profound that his pen was often stilled: “Who cared anymore about caribou lives and struggles? Didn’t most people consider, say, the stock market infinitely more important?” His book, featuring more than 100 full-color photos, is its own answer, and though sometimes a touch too purple, his argument makes a good case for why we should care.

Readers will gain a new appreciation of these magnificent ruminants through Kantner’s sharply focused eyes.

Kirkus Reviews