Free North of Hope by Shannon Polson Page B

that he was not to physically threaten anyone in our family. Later, Dad was overcome by emotion. It was one of two times I’d seen him cry, the first when he and our mom had told us they were divorcing. “I shouldn’t have confronted him like that,” he said. “I shouldn’t have challenged his manhood.”
    “Really, Dad? Instead, you’d just let him threaten the women in this family?”
    Of course Dad wouldn’t let that happen; he was the force moderating Ned’s anger and physical threats, whether they were directed against my mom, Kathy, or me.
    But that had been more than a decade ago. People grow up, I thought. Young men become men, don’t they?
    I gave Ned a quick hard look, then looked away.
    As the three of us walked to the kitchen site, I rested the shotgun on my shoulder.
    The decision to bring weapons had not come easily. Since the Inuit always travel with high-caliber weapons in the Arctic, it seemed a good idea. Still, many naturalists and other adventurers do not believe in bringing weapons into the wilderness. And I couldn’t help thinking of Faulkner’s Ike leaving his gun behind.
    A month before departing for the Arctic, I’d met my younger brother, Sam, off I-5 halfway between Portland and Seattle to pick up Dad’s two guns, which Sam had stored at his house in Oregon. He handed me the long black plastic cases in a fast-food parking lot. I placed them carefully in my trunk. The gravity of transferring firearms weighted the cases even more. It felt like an illicit activity. It also felt like the first real step toward the Arctic trip.
    I also knew how important it was to be comfortable using them. My good friend and running partner Trea, a marine, agreed to go with me to an indoor range before the trip. Inside the one-story, warehouse-style building, well-maintained weapons hung on the walls and neatly stacked boxes of ammunition sat on shelves. We each carried a gun case.
    The manager, a middle-aged man in jeans and an untucked plaid shirt with a knife case attached to his belt, didn’t try to suppress his amusement at two women coming through the door. We laid the cases on the counter.
    “What do you have there?” he asked.
    “45-70 Copilot and a pistol-grip shotgun,” I said, feigning confidence and suppressing a laugh at the clash of what I’d come to understand as city life in Seattle and large caliber weaponry.
    The manager raised his eyebrows. “What you gonna do with those?” The condescension disappeared from his voice.
    “Protection from bear in Alaska,” I said.
    “So you’ll be using slugs in the shotgun, right?”
    I nodded.
    “Slugs are too big for this range,” he said, then hesitated for a minute. “Come on back.” He grabbed headphones and ammunition.
    We followed hopefully into the narrow hallway of firing lanes smelling of gunpowder and metal.
    “Okay, you ever shot this before?” he asked, sighting down the barrel of the 45-70.
    “No, but we’ve both shot other rifles—M16s, M60s,” I said.
    His eyebrows raised again, then relaxed into a smile. “Who woulda guessed? Okay, well, this is gonna kick a lot more than those. See, those have recoil built into them. These don’t. You want to really jam it into your shoulder, like this,” he demonstrated, pulling the butt of the rifle firmly into the pocket where his shoulder connected to his arm. “And you know you don’t want to anticipate the shot. Just take it from there.”
    He dropped a cartridge into the chamber, moved the lever down and back to the stock, sighted down the barrel easily, and fired. A paper target down the lane took his shot dead center. He handed me the rifle. I pulled the heavy wooden stock into my shoulder. Breathe-relax-aim-squeeze-shoot. Wait for the pause after you exhale to pull the trigger. My training flowed easily back, and the stock slammed into my body. I concentrated on the target. Breathe-relax-aim-squeeze-shoot and
wham!
Another slam into my shoulder.
    Trea and I both shot