Hunter? Part 1

I brought the mail in, the pile of letters towering due to my notorious inability to check the mailbox on a frequency indicative of functional adulting. Mostly junk, per usual. Among the unsolicited waste of trees was a letter from Fish Wildlife and Parks. Inside, the most exciting news awaited.

I had been successful in drawing a bison tag. I read the first sentence a few times before it sunk in. Bison. Like, a bison. A bison! I called my dad and brother immediately. My dad had put me in for the hunt as a gift, more so for points toward future draws than expecting me to receive such a random token of fortune. The odds are infinitesimal: .0006%, to be exact.

Following the paragraph about this unfathomable and frankly unmerited luck, a description of tag 385-21 ensued. This hunt would be in the Beartooth Mountains. A backcountry hunt in wilderness required pack animals and extreme bear caution.

In short, an epic adventure awaited.

I immediately began planning the logistics with my brother. We went to the FWP office in Bozeman and got the tag printed off. The cashier congratulated us on the draw as I folded the tag and placed it securely in a little plastic bag.

My brother was giddy, if slightly annoyed that I had drawn the tag instead of him. Thing is, I’m a newish hunter. Qualified people (i.e. my brother) apply for bison tags every year throughout their lives without fruition.

The fact a novice hunter like myself received this gift wasn’t fair. It was a deviation in rationale—the wink of a trickster god.

In my mind it was a family tag. A shared blessing. It was also a personal invitation to step more fully into this activity, this identity, I had flirted with for over a decade but never fully owned.

Could I be a hunter? That was to say, could I actually kill another living creature and desire to do it again?

Hunting up to this past year had involved me following my brother into the woods, unarmed. I had a decent shot with a bow thanks to a decade of sporadic practice, but my rifle skills were functionally nonexistent. Each fall my brother would teach me how to track and stalk elk and deer. Mostly day trips, but there were a couple of longer hunts throughout the years.

Most memorable of them being a hunt deep in the Montana mountains during the elk rut a few years ago. A new moon made the rut extra potent this fall, as the elk would be more active during the day given the lack of visibility at night.

My brother most graciously agreed to let my cousin and I tag along during this prime time for bow hunters. My cousin and I were more of a liability than an asset, but my brother values generosity and family loyalty above most things, which are reasons among many of why I admire him. 

We hiked for hours. And by hike I mean we stepped very slowly over deadfall with the delicate precision required to move without sound in off-trail terrain, all the while keeping our ears, nose, and eyes open for signs of elk and our faces to the wind. While I am an athlete trained for rock climbs and mountain pursuits, this kind of slow, deliberate movement, paired with unwavering attention, wore my physical and mental vitality down in ways that were as surprising as they were extensive.

The first day out we had found tracks and scat, and we had heard a bugle or two, but the elk remained bedded somewhere secret. They are remarkably intelligent creatures, elk, with a knowing of the land and a sense of the wind that most of us humans can only remember in the deepest of dreams, if at all. And they are quiet—so quiet—despite their titanic size.

They also benefit from the allyship of squirrels. More than once we felt ourselves close to a cluster of cows when a squirrel would erupt in chatter, informing the entire forest of our presence. Twigs snapped as the elk tiptoed away, hidden by the growth between us.

Back at camp, I slept hard, the smallest muscles and the largest bones aching. We were up the next morning in the dark. My brother was ready a half hour before me. On hunts, he keeps everything simple. From the food he eats to the pack he carries, all details serve what is required to be successful: presence. Unwavering presence. This is something I did not know how to do.

I am a creature of modernity, my life made awkward and cumbersome with too many. Too many things, both in possession and on my Google calendar. Too many thoughts in my head, debris collected from virtual floods of information, distracting me from the here and now.

I became increasingly aware of my shallow attention span this second day out, as fatigue from the day before lingered despite sleeping well. I moved louder, less aware. My hips ached from my pack, a foretelling whisper of my current condition of advanced osteoarthritis.

Nonetheless, spirits were high: we were in the woods. We were animals hunting animals. We were alive.

We spooked a couple of sleeping cows, their abrupt departure a reminder to be yet more present, yet quieter. We crossed rivers and creeks, skirted the boundaries between private and public lands, and descended into a thin canyon by way of a steep and rock-loose game trail. If I thought yesterday was a big day out, I was ignorant to what a big day meant to my brother.

Here, six miles in, the forest quieted, the trees thickened, the sunlight thinned. I spotted a cougar sleeping in a cave. Wolf tracks intertwined with moose droppings. Claw marks high up on lodgepoles told of bears standing on hind legs. Big bears. Grizzly bears.

“Spray out,” my brother whispered over his shoulder.

What the fuck? my cousin mouthed to me. We shucked the orange safety caps off the canister releases.

I realized how strange this must be for my cousin, how terrifying. Hailing from Nebraska, grizzlies had once roamed the plains of his home state. Yet it’s been nearly a century since Euro-American settlers shrunk their habitat in the lower forty-eight to two percent of its historic expanse.

Not that I wasn’t terrified, despite being born and raised in the Greater Yellowstone. In theory, I wax poetic about the rightful place of grizzlies on the land. They embody the power, the beauty and the horror of wildness. They remind us that we are a humble slice of nature pie; when faced with a triggered griz without a deterrent like pepper spray, we are pitifully small and helpless.

In real time, with my thumb hooked through the spray loop and every sense of edge, the awesome theory of a griz becomes the vision of claws and jaws with T-rexesque ferocity. While I obsess about grizzles, they usually don’t care much about me or any human for that matter. They prefer to keep their distance, given the chance. This is why loud noises like “hey bear” and voluminous conversation works wonders to decrease human-bear conflict, especially if the wind carries both your scent and sound to them. 

Yet hunting, concealing scent and sound are crucial for success, as game animals and bear alike will hear or smell a human approaching and bolt. The weight of the canister hanging from my thumb offered a margin of comfort—studies show bear spray stops aggressive bears ninety percent of the time.

Deterrent at the ready, we descended and ascended a few more hills before signs of elk picked back up. At this point I was starving. We stopped to glass the forest. My brother breathed into his cow elk call, but no one answered.

“I can smell them,” he whispered.

I brought my attention from my stomach to my nose, seeking the scent. What did elk smell like? There was pine, and woodsmoke from a large wildfire somewhere in Montana, casting the experience in haze. And there it was, threaded into the obvious: a smell kin to cattle, mingled with wild grasses.

Was this me becoming a hunter? As I set up a camp stove to boil water for a dehydrated meal, I received an answer.

“What are you doing?” my brother asked, his whisper pitched. He waved his arm downhill. “Two bulls are on the move. We need to go. Now.”  

As I burned my fingers trying to put the stove away, my movements made loud with haste, my brother shook his head, his expression nonplussed. We shared a silent laugh. Note to self: hunters do not cook a meal in the middle of actively pursuing one.

I ate my half-cooked dehydrated meal (a regretful choice) as we followed the bulls. We dropped deeper and deeper into the forest. The world was quiet save for a moaning tree, a raven cutting through slivers of sky. A watering hole appeared through a break in the firs and pine. We could still smell the elk, but they eluded our eyes and ears.

My brother marked the tiny pond on his GPS. With the sun well past its apex, we decided it prudent to return to camp.

“You’re not done hunting until you’re back at the truck,” my brother reminded us. “And sometimes not even then.”

I was not ready for him to be right.