TWENTYMILE COUNTRY -- When the mallard took off running along the bare ground beneath the alders with its broken wing flapping, it was obvious it was doomed. On firm ground, no matter how thick the brush, it didn't stand a chance against the dog.

Only a few heartbeats earlier on the edge of the marsh, Hoss had ceased his agitated sniffing of the air and put his nose to the ground. Then he was off. I gave chase as best possible, but even nose down on a scent trail, Hoss is way faster.

All that allowed me to stay close was the erratic trail of the duck as it headed away from the marsh through the alders toward the river. Steve and I had both shot at this mallard 15 minutes earlier when it rose quaking from the marsh. We watched it miraculously fly away through a shower of steel shot only to drop quickly into the grass just short of the brush along the river a quarter mile away.

The behavior was unusual and though the duck gave no obvious sign of being hit, we understood the responsible thing was to work our way over toward where it went down and see. Steve had the spot marked well enough to get Hoss within yards of the quarry, at which point that always-impressive Labrador nose took over.

By the time Hoss busted into the alders with his nose down, he was already so hot into the chase I wasn't sure he could be called off, and so I followed, worried what might happen if the duck made the river and jumped in the fast current. Hoss had been known to chase a long way. Over on the Placer River to the west, he'd once disappeared for 20 minutes in pursuit of a wounded duck. When he didn't respond to repeated calls, I worried that I'd lost him, but he came trotting out of the alders carrying a duck, still alive, in his mouth. I killed it by wringing its neck.

I hate that, the barehanded killing. That isn't the way things are supposed to die. Or at least that isn't the way things are supposed to die when I kill. I like to kill clean and quick, comfortable in the thought that the dead -- be they animals or fish -- never knew what happened.

You think about these things when you do your own killing, as so many of us in Alaska do. And anyone who spends much time in that wild land outside of Los Anchorage inevitably turns into a killer. Everyone. It's part of life there. Not even the most devoted of vegans can resist the urge to strike and kill a mosquito or mosquitoes -- living, breathing, sentient beings -- when they swarm in that summer intensity that fills air with a steady buzz. The reaction is instinctive. It is the behavior of a cornered animal.
To survive, you kill.
What kind of killer you become in Alaska is only a matter of degree. Some who would never think of putting a bullet in a moose, who can barely stand the idea that wolves are slaughtered by gunners in airplanes, will beat salmon senseless with great glee along a riverbank in summer. Some of them think of salmon as a lower life form, down there on the order of the mosquito, but life is life.

Personally, I often feel worse about smacking a salmon than putting a bullet through the heart of a moose or deer or caribou. The salmon is always pulled flapping and struggling from its natural environment into a foreign world of air it cannot breathe, and no matter how quickly you dispatch it, the fish knows a strange and scary passing from life into death. The moose or the deer or the caribou, if the job is done well, escapes that end. It passes from life to death in the blink of an eye.

I feel best about that sort of killing. It makes me different from the other animals on the planet. Few of them kill quickly. None of them, for certain, dwell on the unfairness of life for the animals lower on the food chain. Mere existence is hard and brutal there. Most of the non-human animals are destined to die as juveniles. I feel sorriest for the weakest among them. I catch myself thinking about them at odd times.