Hunter? Part 4

The year’s first big cold snap began the week we planned to go on the bison hunt. We rented snowmobiles for Saturday, with the forecasted high being 10 degrees. Not ideal weather, to say the least, but schedule Tetris between my brother, Brett, and I had landed us on this weekend.

A perk of a bison hunt in the Hebgen Basin near West Yellowstone, rather than the Beartooth Mountains backcountry, would be my dad’s ability to participate. He and his best friend, Uncle Vaughn, would provide backup support from a truck parked near the hunting zone.

My brother and I dressed in all the layers: I wore long johns and puffy pants beneath snowpants and waterproof pants on bottom; two thermal shirts, a sweatshirt, a thin puffy and a big puffy beneath a waterproof shell on top.

My dad gave us hot-hot hand and foot warmers. It’s a running joke, hand warmers alongside batteries, my dad’s gift staples of every Christmas stocking in memory. (Last year we received “battery daddies” for the decades’ worth of batteries.) Later, though, the hand warmers would prove to be more than a joke.

The snowmobile renter showed us how to start, stop, and steer the machines. Like the first time I rented a boat, they show me the basics and then set me loose, a big kid in charge of a big toy, for better or worse. All giggles, we zoomed down the town’s snow-covered streets and onto the trail matrix. I wore my ski helmet, goggles, and a couple of gaiters, wishing I had opted for the heated, full-face visor helmet rental available at the snowmobile shop.

There weren’t any other riders on the trails leading north toward the public lands surrounding Hebgen Lake. The forest was quiet, with snow weighing down pine boughs. A bald eagle watched us pass from its perch in a leafless cottonwood.

I enjoyed the thrill of speeding up, often riding standing as sitting hurt my hips. We zipped back and forth across Highway 191 and over the Madison River. There were no bison tracks for miles. We looped north around the lake’s Madison Arm and sought a vantage point from Horse Butte.

On our way up to the fire lookout tower, we passed by a man and his female partner on a snowmobile. The man said he was hunting bison and asked me if my brother had a bison tag as well. Nope. I continued up the hill, passing cow elk bedded in the snow off the trail. From the lookout a snow-covered Madison Arm of Hebgen Lake faded into the grey overcast. A midmorning sun made its attempt to break through.

With no signs of buffalo, we zipped back down, coming to a stop alongside the couple from earlier. Somehow, despite a trail three-times as wide as a sled, he had become stuck in the thigh-deep snow a stone’s throw from the packed path. By the time I figured out how to get my snowshoes on and my shovel put together, my brother had dug them out.

We continued down, rode east around the butte, and stumbled upon three hunters cleaning a bison.

“There’s a cluster of them right up over that hill,” one of the guys told us.

I looked up to the farthest of the hills. It would be a mile hike, if that: a much easier expedition that I was expecting. “Up over there,” I said, pointing toward the highest plateau.

“No, like, literally right over that hill.”

I was still confused. He was pointing to a spot 200 yards away. But hadn’t they heard the gunshot? Hadn’t they run off further, startled? Didn’t these hunters’ success mean we’d have a harder time tracking down the animals?

“The herd didn’t even move,” they told us.

A man rode up on his sled. He wore mittens made of bison fur and had the weathered look of a person who makes his living outdoors. Receiving the same news as us from the hunters, the man was excited. He looked behind him.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The people I’m guiding. They were just there.”

My brother and I shrugged.

“Wait here,” the guide said. “We can go up together.”

He took off on his sled to find the couple Brett and I had run into earlier that day. I was even more confused.

“Why would we wait?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Brett said.

“Let’s go.”

We parked our sleds and tromped up the snow in the steps booted down by the other hunters. Sure enough, a group of five cows and two yearlings munched on grasses beneath the shelter of boughs.

My heartbeat tripled. All the months of target practice had funneled into this moment. All the years of wondering whether or not I could take another animal’s life had dropped down to the period in the question mark.

“Get in position,” my brother whispered.

I set up my backpack on the ground and lay on my stomach. No, not here. The trees blocked a clear view. I moved my pack over five feet, lay down. Not here either. Moved it again. Tried sitting. Tried supine. Tried sitting again.

All the while the bison munched and munched. A cow drove the yearlings away from the grasses she wanted to eat. She did it again. This was no mother to the yearlings. I decided to aim for her.

I lay on my stomach, steadied the gun, and waited for a clear shot. Over the hill, the guide and his hunter appeared. I brought my focus back to the moment, to the purpose, to the question mark’s period centering my sight.

What is my role in my ecosystem? Who am I as a human on earth?

Holding my breath, I squeeeeezed the trigger. The shot resounded as a punch to my gut. There was no longer a bison in my sight. I looked at my brother and immediately panicked.

“Did I miss? I missed, didn’t I? Did I miss? Is she dead? Did I kill her? Did I miss?”

He lowered his hands and calmly said, “Kelsey, take your finger away from the trigger.”

I did as told. He looked through his binoculars. “Be prepared to take a second shot.”

“I missed, didn’t I? Is she suffering?” I struggled against tears.

“Breathe,” he told me. “She is dead.”

I forced myself to look and saw that she was twitching. I panicked again. “She’s not dead.”

“This happens when animals die.” Electrochemical reaction in the nerves, I’d read later.

“It was one and done, right behind the ear,” he said. “You did good. You did good.”

Relief and grief flooded me at once and I closed my eyes to witness their intensity. I whispered a simple prayer: thank you, thank you, thank you.

With my eyes still closed, the guide came over and asked if they could borrow my gun.

“My client broke his sight when he crashed his sled…again,” he explained.

I whipped my head toward him and said, louder than necessary, “I need ten minutes of alone time.”

Brett and I walked over to the bison, slow with caution. I still couldn’t believe she was dead. That I had killed her. That her death was immediate. That I had killed her.

After convincing me to lend my gun to the guide’s hunter, Brett walked it to them as I sat alone with my first animal harvest. A bison of Yellowstone, with her complicated ancestry of Native kinship, Euro-American massacre, the ongoing imperfect efforts of restoration, reparation, collaborative approaches to maintain a sustainable, healthy population for the future. This hunt included in those Tribal and State efforts.

I marveled at her size, her strength, this gentle giant of the mountains and plains: fellow dweller of my birthplace. With no natural predators in the park aside from increasingly frequent but still uncommon (and often unsuccessful) attacks from wolf packs, she had not run in fear. Neither had her companions, even as she died ten feet from where they ate.

She would feed my family, I reminded myself as the grief welled. She would provide a hide blanket for my nephew and niece. She would provide food to the bald eagle in whatever we could not take with us.

Another shot resounded, and the bison, at last, retreated, down three members as they trudged up and over the farthest hill.

My brother returned to where I sat, eating a sandwich. He told me to put it away. The true work now began, hours too late. I rode out on my sled and brought Uncle Vaughn from a warm truck cab out into the single-digit day for help.  

Taking a successful shot was my first doubt. The second, my ability to stomach the cleaning. But something took over. Something primal? Something familial? Something that was me all along? I got right in there with the guys, doing whatever my brother told me to do.

I grew hungry. We all did. My brother stressed we didn’t have time to eat or drink more than a bite of a bar, a swig of warm electrolyte water. The sun brought the temperatures down as it descended into the west. It wasn’t grizzlies we sought to outpace, but the dark. We clenched our hand warmers between palms and knife handles, their heat allowing our work to remain speedy.

I trudged down to my sled to retrieve more knife blades and passed the other hunter’s female companion. She wore the guide’s gloves as she sat on the sled, shivering as she waited for them to finish cleaning their kill. We exchanged pleasantries. My face covered in frozen snot, my clothes splattered with blood, she looked at me like I was an alien creature from this frozen, alien world.

We finished the cleaning as dusk reached its inky fingers across the land. Now time to bring the quarters, head, cuts of meat, and hide to the sleds. Three hundred pounds of parts total, I would guess. The guide offered to help sled out the harvest, which we gladly accepted. We dragged the meat bags down the hill, as they were too heavy to carry.

My hips. Oh, my hips. They began to falter. The irregular steps through the snow, combined with the pulled weight, sent my arthritic pain from its constant three to a seven. The surgery I had scheduled for two months later couldn’t come soon enough.

On my third or fourth trip, I ended up crawling backward down the hill, dragging the meat bag toward me as I went. Brett and I could only laugh at the absurdity of this enormous effort, at the threat of hypothermia pushing down on us, at a memory born in literal blood, sweat, and tears.

We managed to get the harvest loaded in my dad’s truck shortly after sunset. Brett and I still had the twelve-mile sled ride back to the snowmobile shop. Speeding up was no longer a thrill but a race against the plummeting temperatures. In the car ride from West Yellowstone to Bozeman, we blasted the heat. I wouldn’t stop shivering, though, until a half-hour hot shower, three hours later.

The meat came back from the processor as burger, steaks, and roasts. Brett, my dad, Uncle Vaughn, and I split the cuts. I gave some to friends. Last night, I sauteed the burger with vegetables.

Eating the stir fry, I read articles for this essay, anticipating criticism for my participation in such a controversial hunt. Protestors of bison harvests argue it’s slaughter; it’s not fair chase. Having experienced it for myself, I agree. This was not the hunt Brett has trained me for all these years, sneaking through the woods, learning to read signs, listen, smell, be present.

I mean, we rolled up on noisy machines requiring little fitness to operate and walked two-hundred yards; I took my time with the shot, chatting with Brett about strategy as I fumbled about. There are no shortcuts around cleaning: it was hard work.

But still, my first hunt was not the athletic and skillful feat I had dreamed of for years. It was shared with other hunting parties in ways that didn’t exactly lend the experience to some sacred passage into ecosystem immersion I had imagined.

The hunt, like wildlife management itself, was messy. Imperfect. When Yellowstone bison populations are left without predation, they die in hundreds from starvation and disease. For millennia Native nations served as the bison’s primary population check. Indigenous tribes hunt the bison today as a continuation of their ancestral practices. 

This year, my bison was one of the 75 non-Native resident tags filled. The guide’s hunter we encountered was one of five out-of-state tags filled. Ninety bison were shipped to slaughter houses, the meat then distributed to Native folk. And Native folk themselves harvested over a thousand bison, providing meat for their families while nourishing their cultural and spiritual traditions.

The total amount of bison killed this winter (2022-23) thus reached 1,530. In previous years, hundreds of bison were sent to slaughter houses to help maintain sustainable and healthy populations in the park. This year, more bison migrated out of the park due to a harsh winter, resulting in larger harvest totals and less bison sent to a slaughter house.

The ideal solution to slaughter houses would be more land for the bison to roam upon, spreading out forager pressure and reducing herd susceptibility to disease. The Yellowstone Bison Conservation Transfer Program seeks to accomplish just this, testing bison for brucellosis.

Disease-free animals are then trucked to tribal land like the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana. This year, about 300 bison were being tested for transfer as of February (2023). Moving free-roaming bison to suitable habitat managed by Native nations will take years, if not decades. 

As one of 75 non-Native hunters who killed a bison this winter, the question mark remains, its ink still wet: what is my role in my ecosystem? Who am I as a human on earth? Because that’s what I’ve really been wondering when I ask myself am I hunter.

Hunting is a way I seek to connect with my lineage: my family hertiage and my ancestry as a human-animal. It’s a way I seek to forge ancient survival skills in our modern world and relate to nature as an active participator in the circle of life.

While these ideals may be noble and poetic, they’re complicated and morally ambiguous in practice given the inherited circumstances of the 21st century. The answer to my question—am I hunter?—remains unanswered. Perhaps, as I continue to hunt, I’ll find an answer out there in the places on the map we call public—concerning the people as a whole—land.