Why would anyone want to shoot a sea otter?

Every time he hunts, Peter Williams sends a silent message to his prey before he squeezes the trigger: Please give me your life. Ill eat some of your meat, and Ill make something beautiful out of your hide. On a cold afternoon in mid-January, Williams, who is 33, was kneeling on the barnacle- and birdshit-encrusted rocks of an uninhabited island. On all sides was Sitka Sound, a narrow stretch of water off the coast of southeast Alaska. Williams wore an orange raincoat and earmuffs; his rifle rested in a dip between rocks. About a hundred feet away, a dozen sea otters were bobbing in the water. He wanted a stray, at the edge of the group. He was moving with the sureness of ritual. For him this is ritual. When he scans the water for targets, Williamss eyes get unnaturally wide, like a mask, and his head starts to swivel.

His prey seems to have evolved for heart-melting cuteness. Black beseeching eyes, soft triangle nose, puckered little mouth: sea otters look like puppies or human babies encased in fur. Pairs hold hands, paw in paw, to stay together. As Williams says: Theyre very human-like, not only their physical appearance but also their behaviour. Theyre very social, theyre very family-oriented. Theyre intelligent, theyre playful. Sea otters float on their backs, limbs in the air, up to a hundred massed in a raft. Snoozing, they tuck themselves into stringy beds of kelp, to keep from drifting out to sea.

Williams is after their fur, which is the densest and softest in the animal kingdom. Russian traders once called it soft gold. There is no material like it. The black, silky, lustrous stuff is so instantly comforting that it hardly seems like fur at all. Few human heads have more than 150,000 hairs, but sea otters stay warm with a double layer of never-moulting fur, up to a million hairs per square inch.

Williams designs and sells clothes and accessories, made from the otters he hunts. By reviving a forgotten and forbidden market for their fur, he sees himself as restoring a wounded culture. His father was Yupik, from the largest tribal group of Alaska Natives who suffer as a whole, disproportionately, from poverty, substance abuse, suicide and rape. The tradition of marine mammal hunting runs deep among the indigenous peoples of the state, but beginning in the 18th century, white settlement brought the forced conscription of Native hunters and the near-eradication of many species.

Out on the rocks, a muffled shot cracked the stillness. The raft split up, a dozen black heads adrift in seemingly random motion, and Williams picked off a second. A shot to the head is the quickest and cleanest way to kill, according to Williams. Theres a sound when it hits, a thump you can hear when the bullet stops. It mushrooms out, expands, and fractures, he said of the 55-grain, soft-point .223 rounds he fires.

Williams made for the Jenna, his ramshackle aluminium skiff, docked just off the island. He bailed out a few buckets worth of water and set the outboard motor, racing after the harvest before it could sink or float away. Wild little islands lay scattered across Sitka Sound, which opened wide on to the freezing North Pacific in the distance. A volcano stood glazed with snow.

Theres times when I go out to pick up the animal and its still alive. Life is a powerful force

A few minutes later, the Jenna pulled up alongside two floating bulges of sleek fur. Both females: a sub-adult (or teenager) and a hefty old-timer, with distinguished white hairs, maybe 5ft 6in long. Theres times when I go out to pick up the animal and its still alive, said Williams. Thats what I bring the aluminium bat for. Life is a powerful force. He maintains that clubbing is a really efficient way of killing something, especially if you do it right, you club it in the head.

He grabbed the otters by the scruff and dropped them in the skiff. One had blood on its whiskers, and its eyes were filling up with blood. Williams guided the Jenna into a sheltered bay of foam-flecked green water and towering spruces, known as Pirates Cove. On this cold cobble beach, Williams would do the skinning. Blood dripped on his waders as he pulled the corpses onshore. Then he lifted each otters maw in turn and gave the dead their last drink of water, following an old Yupik custom he learned from an anthropologists study. The idea is that spending their life in the salt water, they get really thirsty, he told me later. If they know that the hunter will give them their last drink of water, theyll give their life to the hunter. The spirit of the animal, reincarnated in another body, will visit the hunter again. Williams took a swig of water himself.

I dont really like to do it, said Williams not of the skinning, but of the plastic gloves he was pulling on to do it because of the disconnection. But he wasnt taking any chances: some months earlier he had contracted seal finger, an infection common among people who handle the bones or pelts of seals. First his left thumb blew up like a balloon; he went on antibiotics for months; then came the tingling, the burning feet, insomnia, pain in every joint a possible autoimmune reaction. Work had become almost impossible, whether hunting, designing, or sewing. Still, he had little choice but to continue. Deep in debt, Williams had managed to network, charm, and spend his way into a foothold during New York fashion week in February. Living well below the poverty line, he saw it as his last, best shot to get his business off the ground. Fashion week was less than a month away, and he had a to-do list 37 items long.

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Why would anyone want to shoot a sea otter?