Hunter? Part 2

Earlier in the day, while the sun peaked and the elk slept, we hunkered down on the side of an old logging road for food and rest. It was August 2020, the peak of COVID. My jetboil warmed water for instant coffee as my brother, cousin, and I chatted about hypothetical ends of the world.

The concept of infrastructure collapse wasn’t something I thought of often prior to March of that year. Now, I’ll never forget when the reality of a pandemic hit me. My husband and I had been camping and climbing in the Buttermilks outside Bishop, CA.

We didn’t have cell phone service for a few days. COVID up to that point had been whispers on the news of an illness in China, a town shut down, a flight cancelled home: all signs pointing to the destination our world was veering toward, but only if one understood that pandemic was a likely reality.

When it was time to come back to town for a (much needed) shower and groceries, we walked into the supermarket to find shelves void of pasta, flour, and, strangely, toilet paper. I called my family immediately and received urgent pleads to return to Bozeman. We left California soon thereafter, on March 18th, a day before the governor issued a stay-at-home order.

The weeks to follow—a time that is now, three years later, both a vivid memory and a vague nightmare—were a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Fear that I or someone I love would catch COVID, a disease that was still mysterious in who and how it might kill. Anxiety of food shortages, the economy capsized by social isolation measures, and hospitals and governments around the world scrambling to respond to the emergency.

Though the situation never escalated to infrastructure collapse, I realized, on trips to the grocery store, where rice and flour had become hot commodities and toilet paper rations the norm, that should SHTF, as doomsday preppers call it, I would be wildly unprepared to provide for myself or community.

Even if it wasn’t doomsday, per say, but some degree of disturbance that delayed or halted distribution of food, the truth was laid bare: I did not have the basic knowledge of how to procure basic necessities.

Sure, I could garden. Not well, but perhaps well enough. Yet it was March, still winter in Montana. What would I have done if all the food did disappear from grocery stores?

Six months into the pandemic, things had settled down. Essential workers at hospitals, farms, grocery stores, gas stations, construction sites, power plants, and water treatment facilities kept society afloat in the torrent of uncertainty and heartbreaking death tolls.

Essential became the theme of meditation for someone like myself working a nonessential job like novel writing. What skills do I have that would help provide for my family and community in a time of crisis?

Books would make for good toilet paper once the rolls ran out. I know, I know: entertainment and intellectual stimuli within literature could be argued as essential in preserving mental health and perhaps even the humane in humanity.

But really. I craved to become more useful in practical ways. While I had hunted for recreation in years past, this fall, 2020, I decided to become a “serious” hunter. That was to say, someone capable of hunting.

So, there I was, in the woods, still hunting as my brother, cousin, and I walked back to the truck. Twilight pulled the shadows longer, deeper. We crossed a river and worked our way through felled timber. I tried to stay quiet, but my feet were lead weights and I was dizzy with hunger. All I could think of was eating a huge meal in my camp chair and passing out in my sleeping bag afterward.

Yet dusk is often prime time for animal movement, a fact made real when my brother gestured emphatically for my cousin and I to hunker down and STFU. We did as told, crouching behind a stand of lodgepoles. I watched through binos as my brother, arrow-nocked bow and cow call in hand, slipped between trees to the bottom of a gully.

He chirped a few times into the cow call. A bull, unseen, responded with barks. A few more cow calls, silence, and then the bull bugled, loud and high. This noise felt like diving into an alpine lake, a thrill of sensory shock. The bull threaded in and out of view. He called again to this mystery cow, asking her to reveal herself.

Are you an honest voice? Prove it. 

Receiving more bodiless chirps to his demands, the bull dissolved back into the forest as quietly as he had materialized. I was surprised—embarrassed—to find myself relieved and thankful. This was partly because I did not want to clean an elk at night in grizzly country during hyperphagia.

But more so, I did not want to silence the bugle. I was not ready to witness the death of an animal, especially one so fiercely alive. 

Adrenaline quickened our way back to camp as our headlamps projected trepidation into the shadows of night. At the truck, we laughed about the experience and shared in the awe of the elk. The beauty of his call, the intelligence of his elusion. In the comfort of my sleeping bag at last, I contemplated fear and my relationship to it.

Fear of witnessing death. Fear of my ability, or lack thereof, to survive without the conveniences of modern society. The two, blending into a reality I named the Holy Paradox in my Ancient Language of the Earth series.

That is, our existence requires the death of other creatures. Even the meals of vegans often demand rodents to die in order for rice and beans to successfully grow. The wolf eats the elk, the elk the grass, the grass the wolf as she decomposes. The Holy Paradox holds that the price of life is death, death, life.

I turned over in my sleeping bag, the exhaustion from the day competing against these questions of my place, of my function, in the world. After failed experiments as a vegan and vegetarian, where my health plummeted due to my genetic disposition, eating animals for me personally was not a choice, but a necessity. A necessity I did my best to fulfill with buying ethically raised meat.

Buying, though, was not always the same as providing. It depends on circumstances; circumstances we learned in 2020 that weren’t a given, but a hard-earned benefit of a functioning society.

I had set out before dawn this morning to learn whether or not I could be a hunter. The answer remained as aloof, as hidden, as the bull who had disappeared back into the trees. His elusion, a relief.