Gender Nouns in S. Hammond

Something I noticed throughout "Hill and Lakes" was Hammond's assertive use of gender pronouns to refer to the creatures and natural forces around him. I couldn't help but think that Hammond and his guide, Tucker, were attributing gender to such things, since there were little to no descriptions of certain animals that would distinguish them as being male or female (save deers and bucks, which have antlers to distinguish them as patriarchs). In cases of trout, fishers, mosquitoes, and cougars, for example, how could Hammond have discerned gender so quickly? Perhaps there are gender markers of these animals that the author did not describe in his collection of anecdotes that I do not have knowledge of, but Hammond's references to streams, the sun, his canoe, among other things, as being either male, female, or neutered/gender neutral leads me to believe that the pronouns he uses reflect his own presumptions that stem from his identity as a white male. 

Below I have compiled a list of some instances of gendering that I have found in his work. I found it interesting that sometimes the author would refer to a body of water as a male, and sometimes as "it". This inconsistency is further evidence that his use of language is a product of himself, rather than a cultural grammar rule. In English, it is proper to refer to thing that we do not know the gender of as it/its/they/them/theirs. If we do know that the object is a male or female, whether it be a wild animal or a human, then we should use he/she/her/his. The exceptions to this rule are some boats and countries, which are often referred to with the female pronoun, i.e. mothership, motherland, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English) The fact that some people refer to animals with masculine pronouns when they do not know of its gender frustrates me, since it expresses the male-dominated society that America is. 

In 1973, Muhammad Ibrahim concluded three main functions grammatical gender: 

1. In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express the natural gender of animate beings.
2. Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents.
3. In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender)

While I think it is a flaw in English grammar that we must repeat some nouns when referring to them to clarify the object a verb is referring to, and often, we must rely on context in order to understand the subject of a sentence, for the most part, I am glad that English is not a gendered language. Even though the gender of a word does not necessarily agree with the natural gender of the object the word is describing, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis remains plausible; language has the power to both (to an extreme) determine how we categorize our thoughts (linguistic determinism) and (to a lesser extreme) influence our thoughts and some non-linguistic behavior (linguistic relativism). https://courses.washington.edu/linganth/Intro/notes-week2-1.pdf

In some cases, gender is utilized more as a linguistic category, and various languages have more than two genders. For instance, Swahili has 18 noun classes! However, by refraining to attribute the most widespread type of grammatical gender, - a binary of male/female, - to words, I think that we can have the most freedom to interpret our surroundings in a way that is more in tune with our nature rather than our nurture. A canoe is a vessel that can be both strong, sturdy, wavering, and guiding in the water. Our culture emphasizes that words that express strength and brawn are masculine, and words that express delicacy and weakness are feminine. If we rid of this mindset to the best of our ability, we can see that every object and being has the capacity to display and possess qualities across the gender spectrum, thus reinforcing the fact that gender is merely a cultural construct. 

19- a general mountain stream (he)
20- Chazy Lake (it)
30- canoe (she)
31- lagoon (it); 
31- Mount Lyon (he)
34- deer (he)
37- "musquitos" (he)
39- fawn (it)
40- mother deer (she)
42- salmon "Sockdolager" (patriarch, but unclear if referring to one specific trout or in general)
52- unnamed pond/lake (it)
53- fish hawk (he)
54- fisher (it, then he)
56- storm (it)
57- sun (he)
128- Swedish nightingale (she)
128- "iron horse"/locomotive (he)
141- "painter"/cougar-- 141 (he)
155- old duck (she)