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For Scott: This and everything else.

And for Nathan, who would have been an exceptional hunting buddy or an intolerable one. I wish we’d had time to find out which.

PROLOGUE

I squint down the long metal cylinder of my shotgun, past the red plastic bump at the tip, and imagine what it will feel like to yank the trigger as a bird soars by. It is not the first time I have envisioned this situation. But it is the first time it could actually come true.

The bits of foam I’ve squished into my ears drown out the faint, usual sounds like rustling leaves. All I can hear is my heart. Each beat thrums my whole body as if I’m standing too close to the bass speakers at a rock concert.

A brown-and-white dog named Tessa stands frozen about ten yards to my left. A few minutes earlier, she sniffed out a male pheasant, her stubby tail wagging faster and faster as she closed in on its trail, nose to the ground, until suddenly she halted, her tail standing straight. She’s still standing there now, which, according to her owner, means her eyes have locked on to the bird’s eyes: a primordial staring contest with extraordinarily high stakes, at least for the bird. Tessa’s owner, Gerry, is behind me, creeping toward the dog.

I rub the gun’s ridged safety switch with my sweaty thumb, hesitating, until finally I shove it forward into the “fire” position, the dangerous one. The rock concert in my chest becomes techno.

“Are you guys ready?” Gerry asks in a flat voice.

“Yes,” says Nancy, another novice hunter standing a few yards beyond Tessa, waiting to shoot the same doomed bird. Nancy hasn’t hunted in decades, but she grew up shooting guns with her father and brothers. Her husband goes bird hunting every fall, and now, with her children grown and out of the house, she wants to join him. It makes sense that Nancy is here. Nancy should be ready.

But not me. My dad never took me shooting; he walked me to the local scoop shop, Lickety Split, or we rode the subway to downtown Washington, DC, and visited a museum. My husband doesn’t hunt, and I only decided about a year ago to give it a try.

Now here I am, on a swampy swath of state-owned land in southern Oregon, with a loaded gun pointed at the sky, waiting for a bird. I’m one of twenty women hunting for pheasants on this foggy Saturday in September. We each paid forty dollars to traipse around with volunteer guides and their well-trained hunting dogs. The pheasants were raised in pens and released one week earlier, for a similar hunt for kids. Our goal is to shoot the birds that the kids missed last week. Years later, I will look back on this event and feel slightly embarrassed by its staged phoniness, as if I went back to the Renaissance fair I attended as a kid and noticed that the women were wearing Nikes under their polyester petticoats. Later, I will hunt for real wildlife, not creatures who have been raised by humans and planted for shooting. I will find myself kneeling before a bull elk, up to my shoulders in blood, as I gut the animal and prepare to pack its meat out of the woods. But for now, here, traipsing through tall grass with a loaded gun for the first time, I feel wild and daring.

The night before the hunt, when I should have been sleeping, I instead compiled a mental list of everything that could go wrong. Around three in the morning, assured that I had exhausted every possible horrible outcome, I began to group and rank them in descending order of tragedy:

1. My own death. Shot by another member of the hunting party probably, or a mistaken rifle hunter hundreds of yards away, or perhaps, in a particularly cruel swoop of irony, my own careless trigger finger.

2. The death of someone else, caused by me. I would then endure crushing, paralyzing guilt for the rest of my life, which would probably take me past the age of ninety and involve frequent run-ins with friends and family of the victim. On second thought, maybe this fear should be number one.

3. Any non-fatal maiming of me or caused by me.

4. Embarrassing failure in one of its smaller, more familiar forms. Perhaps, when the time came, I would feel too guilty to pull the trigger and the other, braver hunters would wonder what was wrong with me.

At eight in the morning, when I pulled up to the concrete building that was our designated meeting point, I noticed that four or five of the pickup trucks parked there had camouflage-covered crates in their beds. Dogs whined and barked from inside.

“Shit,” I muttered. I hadn’t even thought to worry about the dogs, who would dart close to the birds and in front of my gun and be easier to shoot accidentally than any human.

But by the time I get here, to this point where my weapon is loaded and my safety is switched off and a real, live bird is in my vicinity, I have managed to avoid these disasters for more than five hours. The list, which consumed my thoughts in the early morning, has almost disappeared from my mind completely. Only the last item—good old-fashioned embarrassment—lingers in my mind. As the day lags on, it looks more and more likely that I will return home empty-handed. This once innocuous outcome has already started to morph, unexpectedly, into a new worst-case scenario. I picture all the friends I’ve told about today’s outing. I grit my teeth and practice telling them, one by one, “Nope, I didn’t get one. Thanks for asking.”

Lori and Debra, two of the four women in my group, have already killed a bird each. They are already using the proud, possessive language of real hunters, who speak as if the purchase of a hunting license includes entitlement to one particular specimen. “I got my pheasant!” They are safe and happy, chatting excitedly about what their husbands and children will say when they arrive home triumphant, with a bird in a cooler.

I don’t have my pheasant. I’m tired of hiking through uneven ground in wet socks and boots, tired of carrying this gun that feels twice as heavy as it did in the morning. I’m tired of being on edge, of staying alert in case a bird appears suddenly. Tired of watching Tessa’s tail for the fast-wagging signal that a bird is near. Tired of eyeing where the muzzle of my gun is pointed and where Nancy’s is. I start to dread the two-and-a-half-hour drive back home to my husband—who remains confused by my nascent interest in hunting—without a feathery trophy of my own.

“When I tell Tessa to release, everything is going to happen in a split second,” Gerry whispers. He stops just a couple of feet behind the dog and lets another moment pass before asking, again, “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“Mm-hmm.” Nancy is getting impatient.

“Ready?” Gerry turns to me. The muzzle is heavy in my left hand. My outstretched arm quivers.

“Yes.” I am ready. So ready I can hardly believe it. I cannot wait to kill this thing.

Gerry steps one long stride toward Tessa, who lunges at the bird. I hear a squawk and flapping, thrashing against the grass. I wonder if Tessa has somehow managed to catch the thing in her mouth. Suddenly a dark bird with a long, spiky tail leaps into view. I squeeze my right hand into a fist around the trigger.

Bang.

CHAPTER 1

GOING WEST

You would be hard-pressed to find an unlikelier hunter than me. I’m a woman, and married to a man who does not hunt. I grew up in a city, terrified of guns. I love animals and even entered college on track to become a veterinarian. Yet, at the age of twenty-six, I made the strange decision to pick up a gun and learn to hunt. It was a complicated choice, but it started with one simple thing that almost all of us—hunters and non-hunters, women and men, city dwellers and country bumpkins—have in common: dinner. Not the greens and grains on the sides of the plate, but the hunk of meat in the middle.

Of course, my decision to hunt was also deeply personal. It was a way for me to explore my relationships with animals—the dog for whom I buy Christmas presents, the mice I occasionally trap in my kitchen, the wolves whom I admire in theory but have never met. It made me rethink what it means to be an environmentalist. The experience transformed me from the person I had been just three years earlier. I’ll start there, when I’m a few months shy of twenty-four, and nothing could be farther from my mind than hunting:

I live with a girlfriend in a cramped apartment in Manhattan, where I work part-time as a personal assistant to a movie director and screenwriter. I also freelance as a production assistant on various film and television shoots. Nearly half of my friends from Wesleyan University moved to New York after graduation, so I know fun, artsy people all over the city. At night, I dress up and attend their theater debuts and gallery openings. During the day, I brush elbows with indie film stars.

But for the past couple of months I haven’t been able to shake this feeling that my life in New York has become one big, glitzy distraction. I spend seventy or eighty hours a week working to bring someone else’s vision to the television or movie screen, yet I still haven’t finished the screenplay I started writing two years earlier. I find myself daydreaming about a new job as a journalist. This isn’t entirely out of the blue—I worked on my college newspaper, as a contributing writer up through editor in chief, and I interned at the Hartford Courant for a summer. I know that journalism won’t be as glamorous, but I’ll hear interesting stories and get paid to write every day.

So the night after Christmas in 2003, I flip open my laptop and go to a job site for journalists that I browsed regularly when I was in college and envisioned a post-grad life as Lois Lane. I search for staff writer positions in New York. Forty-some jobs pop up, but each one requires more experience than I can eke out of my résumé, even with the cleverest phrasing. On a whim, I rerun the search, this time for openings in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, just because the Northwest caught my eye on a road trip one time. Voilà: features reporter in Idaho Falls, Idaho; sports reporter in Columbia Falls, Montana; news reporter in Bend, Oregon. Eleven jobs in all. As I read the descriptions, the hair on my arms perks up. Each job is at a small newspaper in a small town, the kind of modest post I might be able to land with my handful of bylines clipped from the Courant. The exact place doesn’t matter to me at all. I love the idea of a new career in an exotic setting. I stretch out on the floor and start to tap out a catchy, one-size-fits-all cover letter:

Dear ________,

Don’t let the address at the top of this letter fool you. I’m not just a city slicker looking for a Western adventure.

But the truth is, that’s exactly who I am and what I’m looking for. As midnight gives way to early morning, and I polish up the letter, I also compile a mental list of reasons why moving to the rural West is not just an exciting idea, but also a smart one. I’ll learn so much about myself by branching out and living on my own. I’ve always loved the idea of being outdoorsy; here’s my chance. It sounds like a movie: spunky city gal becomes country muckraker. I already own two pairs of cowboy boots. A year or two at a small paper will provide the experience I’ll need to get a better reporting job back in New York.

The next day, I walk to the post office and mail out eleven applications.

Seven weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, my friend Larrison and I pack my belongings into a rental truck and head west toward Bend, Oregon, where I have accepted an offer to write news for the local daily, The Bulletin. Larrison has generously taken time off from her job in the writing department of the soap opera As the World Turns to drive with me to Bend before flying home. Somewhere in Wyoming, an honest-to-goodness tumbleweed bounces across I-80 and we squeal. The desiccated shrub looks as if it rolled right off a Western movie set. But this is real life. In the wild.

Our first stop in Oregon, just across the border from Idaho, is a gas station in a tiny farming town. I start filling the tank while Larrison heads into the store for a soda.

“What are you doing?” A stocky young man in a baseball cap stomps toward me.

I look down to make sure gas hasn’t spilled over the side of the truck. “Uh… filling up?”

“You can’t do that,” he says. “Oregon is full-service only.”

My heart drops. I can’t pump my own gas here? Have I really left my job and all my friends and driven four days straight only to find myself in the New Jersey of the West? I suddenly realize how little I know about my new home. I wonder how much of a hassle it will be to move back to New York in a few months if coming here turns out to be a disaster. I’ll have to find another apartment, not to mention face the embarrassment of telling all my friends and family that my Western Adventure was a bust.

“You must be from out of town, huh?” he asks.

“Yeah, New York City.”

“New York City!” He drawls when he pronounces the name, like one of the dismayed cowboys in that old salsa commercial. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m moving to Bend.”

He nods, as if this makes perfect sense. I’ve heard that Bend’s population is booming, but now I wonder if there’s a steady stream of New Yorkers driving U-Haul trucks into town.

Later that evening, Larrison and I pull into Bend, where we’ve booked a hotel room for the night. It’s just after eight and the traffic lights are already switched off and blinking. The next morning, I check the classified ads and find a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a former boardinghouse downtown. It has polished wood floors, a graceful arch leading into the kitchen and built-in dressers in the bedroom and bathroom. Best of all, I have the place to myself. And for just $495 a month—$305 less than my share of the tiny Harlem apartment. Larrison helps me lug my bed, clothes and futon inside. We spend the next couple of days unpacking and taking breaks to browse secondhand stores and people-watch downtown.

At a sandwich shop, we wait in line behind a thirty-something couple wearing head-to-toe spandex. I can’t help but stare past the corporate logos covering their garb to the sculpted curves of their calves and thighs. I look around the restaurant. Everyone here is thin, but not New York–smoker skinny. They’re muscled.

“I’ve never seen so many good-looking people in one place,” Larrison whispers.

“I know,” I say. “Everyone is so fit.”

“You’re lucky.” She arches an eyebrow.

“I’m intimidated.”

The night before she flies back to New York, we mix Manhattans—an ode to my former home—and sip them from glasses perched on cardboard boxes.

As I hug Larrison good-bye at the airport the next morning, I know that I should feel nervous and sad to see her go. Here I am alone, in a town I barely know, three thousand miles from my family and friends, yet I’m too excited to care. Larrison’s three-day stay has been like training wheels on my new life in Bend. I can’t wait to get started.

The next week, I report to my new job. I was told during my interview a month earlier that the newspaper’s circulation is only about thirty thousand. But The Bulletin is the only daily in the region, and more sophisticated than its size would suggest. It’s housed in a brand-new building on the western edge of town that looks more like a modern ski chalet than a newspaper office. Windows stretch the two-story height of the lobby, with walls of stacked native stone and arched ceilings paneled in stained wood.

The sixty-five-or-so people who work in the newsroom are not locals who learned the business because it was an available job, but professional journalists—mostly city folk like me—who moved here for their careers. Editors came from the Detroit Free Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Petersburg Times. Reporters moved here from Denver, San Francisco and San Diego. Two news reporters even grew up in the same Maryland county that I did.

I’ve been hired to cover a rural area that stretches hundreds of square miles southeast of Bend. I spend the first day scoping it out from the driver’s seat of a used Ford Ranger pickup truck that I found in the classified ads and purchased the day before.

Bend is almost the geographic center of Oregon. Sagebrush-studded high desert splays out to the east of the city. To the west, ponderosa pine forests creep up the volcanic Cascade Mountains. Unlike the Rockies—steep, tightly stacked peaks that form walls of granite stretching beyond the horizon—these mountains rise gradually, one at a time, like snowcapped sand castles. Together, the Cascades form a sort of sky fortress that traps clouds moving eastward off the Pacific Ocean and clutches them over rainy Portland and Eugene, freeing Bend’s skies for a rumored three hundred days of sunshine a year.

In February, in the dead of central Oregon’s long winter, the landscape looks drab and dreary despite the sun. I drive past gnarled trees, scrubby shrubs and clumps of tall, native grass, dried and yellowed by the cold. Bare, reddish ground peeks between each of these plants. Unlike the wetter climates I’m used to, there is no fast-growing underbrush coating the soil here. A few dirty patches of snow cling to the shadiest spots. The sparse needles of the juniper and pine trees look dusty, more gray than green.

I get on Highway 97, and as soon as I cross Bend’s southern boundary, the exit signs abruptly end, along with any other symbols of civilization. This is not like the East Coast highways I am used to, where one town peters out as another builds steam, with no discernible gap in between. Here, city ends. Country begins. I drive over a steep, craggy mound called Lava Butte. It erupted seven thousand years ago and covered nine square miles with black, porous rock. NASA actually trained astronauts for the moon landing on these desolate lava beds. As I travel south, the elevation rises, and a mat of snow blankets the ground.

I am winding down an unlined road toward a tiny regional airport when suddenly, in the middle of the asphalt in front of me, I see a gray, fluffy, dog-like animal. It’s lying down but alert, with its head up, facing me. I brake and lean closer to the windshield for a better look. It’s too big to be a fox. A wolf, maybe? I gasp at the possibility. As my truck rolls closer, the animal gets up and trots off the road, its tail floating perfectly straight behind it, parallel to the ground. It stares at me with pale, intense eyes as I drive past. Then I watch in my rearview mirror as it flops itself back down on the sun-soaked asphalt.

When I return to the newsroom, I run up to the environmental reporter and recount what I’ve seen.

“A wolf?” She laughs. “I doubt it. There are wolves in Idaho, and they may be starting to move into Oregon, but not this far west. It was probably a coyote.”

Of course. A coyote, not a wolf. But I’m not disappointed. I’m in awe. A coyote is a real wild animal, infinitely more exciting than a tumbleweed. The Western Adventure has officially begun.

My life here is a distant cousin to the one I led in New York. There are no gallery openings to speak of, no theater debuts. I have to remind myself each morning to dress more casually than I’m accustomed to, so I don’t stand out too much. My high-heeled shoes are getting ruined anyway, chewed up by the gravel that covers so many parking lots and paths.

Co-workers invite me to parties, where I quickly grow tired of Bend’s unofficial winter greeting: “What did you ski today?” I’ve tried the sport a few times but don’t consider myself a skier. Each time I’m offered this opening line, its speaker is so taken aback by my answer—I don’t ski—that he immediately looks away and repeats the question to someone else. Someone more… Bend. I eavesdrop as other, fitter partygoers recap their mountain conquests, and I’m surprised by the level of detail in their answers. There are two official ski areas here: Hoodoo and Mount Bachelor. People also cross-country ski on trails through nearby forests. They travel all over the West to ride different lifts for a weekend. And they backcountry ski, which involves hiking up a mountain and then skiing down it.

When a Bendite explains what she skied today, she doesn’t simply name a location. Just as the Inuit supposedly have a hundred words for snow, so, it turns out, do ski bums and snowboard dudes in Bend. There’s powder (dry, fine snow), breakable crust (an icy layer that skis sometimes fall through), dust on crust (a thin layer of fresh snow atop breakable crust), boilerplate (ridged ice), ball bearings (loose ice pellets), wind pack (crust formed by wind, not sun), mashed potatoes (wet, creamy snow), death cookies (hunks of ice hidden beneath smooth-looking snow), corn (hard, old snow that sunshine has softened into grains), Cascade cement (ultra-thick snow that grabs your skis), slush (even non-skiers know this one) and many more.

Of course, not everyone in Bend is my age. Young families are moving here, and retirees, too. Most come from California, to escape the traffic jams of Los Angeles or the skyrocketing housing prices of San Francisco. Outdoor recreation is what draws most of them—they ski, golf or mountain bike. Or they simply appreciate having so many sunny days in which to walk along the river and gaze at the mountains. Construction workers flock here, too, to help meet the growing demand for homes. I find myself in the minority not because of where I come from but because of what led me here: a job. In an office, no less. Unlike all of these outdoorsy folks, I’m not sure what to do in my spare time.

I yearn for friends to discuss books with, lazy friends, friends who consider two o’clock a reasonable hour for brunch. Friends who want to unwind at the end of a long week with a movie and a bottle of wine, not a sixty-mile bike ride. Friends with loud political opinions. Desperate for an indoor activity, I enroll in a pottery class Tuesday evenings at the community college. Hunting is still farther from my mind than just about anything. But it is about to move a big step closer.

The morning after my twenty-fourth birthday, a Friday, I stop at a coffee shop on my way to work. You can’t drive two blocks in Bend without passing a coffee shop. One intersection actually has drive-through espresso huts on three of its four corners. I don’t usually drink the stuff but I’ve got a slight hangover from the mint juleps I downed with some co-workers last night, and I figure, what the hell, I’m trying to go local anyway. As I hand my money to the cashier, I hear my name.

“Lily! Hi!”

A tall, fit woman in her sixties waves and starts walking over from the other side of the store. She’s in my pottery class, but I can’t remember her name. I can’t believe she knows mine.

“Hi! How are you?” I rack my brain for names. Barb? No, Barb has longer hair. Is it Ann? Or Annie?

“Oh, I’m so glad I ran into you,” she says, as if we’re old friends. “I need your phone number because I’m fixing you up with someone.”

What? In New York, some co-workers offered to set me up on blind dates a few times, but unlike this woman they asked me first. I always declined. And how does she know I’m single, anyway?

“One of your business cards would be fine,” she adds.

Still struggling for a response, I reach into my purse and pull out a card. The moment she snatches it, I realize that it’s too late to say no to the setup. The card was my consent. I stare at it, in her hand, and I fumble for a polite way to ask for it back.

“Thanks. Well, his name is Scott, and he’s just so sweet.” She draws out those last two words as if she’s describing a puppy. Not a good sign.

Shit. The Western Adventure has taken an awkward turn. I climb into my truck and pretty soon the whole incident slips my mind completely. Monday, I get to the office and check my voice mail.

“Hi, Lily, this is Scott. I work with Janet Windman.”

Janet. I wasn’t even close.

“Anyway, Janet gave me your phone number and told me that you’re new to town, and so I figured, if you’d ever like to grab a cup of coffee or a beer or something, just give me a call.”

The high-pressure date suddenly deflates into a casual chance for a new friendship. I write down his phone number. That night, we make plans to meet Thursday at Deschutes Brewery, a local pub.

After work on Thursday, I hop on my bicycle—still trying to go native—and pedal the five blocks to the brewery. As I crouch down to lock up my bike, I scan the front of the restaurant. A few groups of people in their thirties and forties stand in loose circles on the sidewalk, waiting for tables inside. Only one man in his twenties leans against the wall near the front door. He’s wearing sunglasses, jeans and a red fleece vest over a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up a few inches. He’s about six feet tall, with thick brown hair and a slight suntan.

“Scott?” I try not to sound too hopeful.

“Lily?”

“Yeah. Hi, nice to meet you.” We shake hands and walk inside, where Scott puts his name on the list for a table. We each order a pint and sit down near the bar.

“I liked your story in today’s paper,” he says, referring to an article I wrote about a local toad population that has made an unexpected rebound.

“Thanks. It was fun mucking around in ponds for a day. What did you do today?”

Scott exhales.

“Actually, I got audited.”

We both laugh.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. It’s over, though.”

“Well, cheers to that.”

We clink glasses.

“Thanks.”

It turns out Scott and Janet work for a small nonprofit that collaborates with local farmers and ranchers to restore the Deschutes River, the main branch of which runs through downtown Bend. Every summer, 97 percent of the river’s flow gets diverted into canals for irrigation. Janet volunteers in the office. Scott runs programs: helping farmers switch to newer irrigation systems that use less water, piping canals to reduce the amount of water that leaks into the ground, and buying and leasing water rights to put back in-stream. The job gives Scott an interesting window into fish and wildlife populations, which I will appreciate later.

Scott grew up in the Willamette River Valley, which I immediately recognize from a computer game that I played in elementary school, The Oregon Trail. To win, you have to make it to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, on the other side of the mountains from Bend. I am startled when Scott pronounces the name of the valley will-AM-it. It sounds harsher than the way I always pronounced it, willa-MET.

Both sides of Scott’s family came to Oregon on the wagon trail. His parents were high school sweethearts who grew up in a small town not far from Bend and moved to Portland just after their wedding. They owned a small chain of clothing stores in the Portland area, but Scott spent his summer vacations and as many weekends as possible visiting his grandparents in eastern Oregon. This—the sunny high desert, with air that smells of juniper and sagebrush—is his home. He still spends his weekends exploring it, on skis in the winter and in waders with a fly rod in hand during the summer.

When our table is ready, we sit down and order burgers and more beer and keep talking. I tell him about my own childhood, in Takoma Park, Maryland, a city of seventeen thousand that hugs the northeastern edge of Washington, DC. Sometimes called the People’s Republic of Takoma Park, or Berkeley East, its social hub is a Sunday farmers’ market that straddles the DC-Maryland boundary, just two short blocks from the bungalow where I—like my brother, Nathan, before me and my sister, Gretchen, after me—was born. (Yes, we’re the products of home births, midwives and all.)

Takoma Park is famous for its quirky residents, including Motor Cat, a tabby feline who wore a custom-made helmet and rode on his owner’s motorcycle by digging his claws into a thick patch of Berber installed in front of the driver’s seat. Years before it became hip to raise backyard chickens for eggs, a wild rooster appeared in Takoma Park. Residents named him Roscoe. He migrated between pocket parks and postage-stamp yards. Sometimes he even strutted down busy sidewalks. This went on for years before Roscoe was discovered early one morning, flattened, in the middle of Takoma Park’s main drag. Angry mourners blamed the hit-and-run on a gas-guzzling SUV, probably driven by a Republican. A statue was erected in the bird’s honor, and a pizza parlor adopted Roscoe’s name.

But throughout my childhood, Takoma Park faded into the background while I transported myself to Green Gables, Narnia or a secret garden. Books sustained me at least as much as food did. In fact, no week was complete without a few walks to our local library. My favorite books were Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, which perhaps foretold my eventual journey west. At first I loved the details of life on the frontier: how they churned butter, cured meats and built a sod house. As I got older, I reveled in the emotional undercurrents, such as Ma’s desire for a stable home pitted against Pa’s wanderlust.

Scott listens to all of this and suggests a book that I might like as an adult: Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner, one of his favorite authors. As he summarizes it for me, I can’t help but smile. Here we are, in Bend, discussing books.

It’s nearing midnight, so we split the bill and walk outside. We unlock our bikes—Scott rode his to the brewery, too—and stroll with them toward my apartment. We arrive at my doorstep too soon, despite my efforts to walk at a fraction of my usual pace. We shake hands good-bye and make plans to meet up on Saturday, when, it turns out, we have both been invited to a barbecue at the home of one of my co-workers.

That night I toss and turn, unable to stop thinking about Scott long enough to give in to sleep. He seems both outdoorsy and indoorsy, funny and serious, smart and kind. When he spoke of his grandparents, his love for them was so real I could almost touch it. He made me laugh out loud when he admitted that he has accidentally joined several parades. (In one, he and his brother took a wrong turn and found themselves driving between floats in a gay pride parade. “What did you do?” I asked. “We smiled and waved.”) Our blind date replays in my head on a continuous loop. I can’t wait until Saturday. I want to learn everything about him.

Exhausted, I drag myself through work the next day. When I arrive home, a paperback book is leaning against my door. Angle of Repose. It is inscribed: TO LILY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND HAPPY READING! SCOTT.

I call to thank him but he’s not home, so I leave a message. As soon as I hang up, I phone Larrison to recount the date and analyze the gift.

“I think he likes me,” I conclude. “If he just wanted to be friends, he would have lent me his copy of the book, not bought me a new one.”

On Saturday, Scott swings by my apartment in his twelve-year-old red Toyota pickup and drives me to the party. Afterward, we go to his house, where I meet his giant white dog, Bob. Bob barely swishes his tail at me before lunging toward his leash. He wants a walk, and we oblige. We walk down dark streets and through empty city parks. We walk over footbridges that span the black, swirling Deschutes River. We walk past lit windows framing families washing dishes and winding down for bed. We walk slowly, to let Bob sniff around and, mostly, to savor each other’s questions, stories and jokes.

For the next week, I come home from work each evening and fix myself a quick dinner, then go to Scott’s house. Together, we walk Bob all over town. We talk and laugh and listen. And then for some reason, when bedtime beckons and it’s finally time to say good night, shyness overcomes us. Nine days pass by—countless hours spent talking about everything we can think of—before we work up the nerve for one kiss. Don’t get me wrong, the kiss is slow and sexy and loaded with sweet promise. It’s just not enough.

The next night, Scott has tickets to hear an author, David James Duncan, give a reading. I’ve never read any of his work, but Scott’s a fan. As we walk to the Tower Theater, an old art deco building, Scott tells me about The River Why, Duncan’s philosophical novel about fly-fishing. Instead of bait or lures, fly-fishermen try to attract their prey using pieces of fur and feathers tied to a fishhook to mimic a real, juicy bug. Many fly-fishermen, including Scott, catch a fish for the thrill of it, then let it go. Fishing is a passion of Scott’s, and apparently many others in Bend share it, too, because the theater is packed when we arrive. We settle into our seats, and I make sure our arms are touching on the armrest.

Before one reading, Duncan explains that one of his students was recently bothered by the practice of catch-and-release. She told him that it amounts to taunting fish since it serves no practical purpose like, say, harvesting food. So Duncan responded with this humorous essay from the fish’s perspective. It opens with a fish feeding on insects as usual until one particularly ferocious bug bites back, piercing the fish’s lip. The fish panics as the vicious fly refuses to let go. Suddenly, a benevolent angler steps out of nowhere, finally offering relief from the evil bug. Then the angler, the hero, sends the fish on its way.

As Scott walks me home, our arms linked, I ask him to take me fly-fishing sometime. But by the time we get to my apartment, I’ve forgotten all about fishing.

“Want to come in?”

“Sure.” Scott smiles.

I unlock the door and rack my brain for what to say next. Something witty. Something about how much I like him. Without a hint of desperation or overthinking. The door closes behind us. We look at each other.

I don’t need a line. I need him.

We collide like two black holes. Lips. Arms. Tongues. Legs. Teeth. There’s no time to build sensibly from delicate pecking. We’ve wasted so much time already, with our stupid talking and walking. We rush to uncover the physical facts that have been ignored during this otherwise thorough courtship.

Summer arrives, and the days get longer but never long enough. The nights are also too short. On weekends, we spend every minute together. Some days we sleep late and walk downtown for brunch at eleven—it’s two o’clock in New York, I tell myself. When the snow is melted off Black Butte, per a local rule of thumb, we plant a garden in Scott’s backyard. And then one weekend, he takes me fishing. Fly-fishing will turn out to be my gateway drug to hunting.

We drive north along the Deschutes River, following the water downstream for a little over an hour, until we get to the head of a desert canyon. We park and Scott pulls out two pairs of overall-style waders. The pants and bibs are made from the stuff of raincoats. The feet are neoprene, similar to the fabric used in wet suits. My waders are way too big, and I joke that I belong on a lobster boat. We hike into the canyon, each of us carrying a fishing rod so lightweight that it might as well be a dried reed.

In fly-fishing, Scott tells me, you try to give the fish every possible advantage without totally sinking things in its favor. This will be more complicated than the kind of fishing I tried a few times as a child: Spear a worm on a hook, dangle it in the water, wait. And wait.

Scott chooses a fly for me and ties it onto my line. On a trail overlooking the river, he helps me decide where to cast. A deep pool, perhaps, where fish seek refuge from the hot sun. Or a fast-moving riffle, where they gorge themselves on insects caught in the current. A submerged fallen tree makes a good hiding spot for fish, he tells me, but it can be a deadly trap for a fishing line.

To get my fly to this perfect piece of water, I will have to cast it. Picturing Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It, I request a demonstration. Scott wades a few feet into the water and flings out yard after yard of graceful, looping line. It careers in front of him, then behind him, then in front again. With each toss, the flex of his fishing rod pulls out more line. When he has released enough line to reach a particular spot on the river, he lays it down in one smooth wave across the water, so the fly at the end lands without a splash.

“Now it’s your turn,” he says, reeling in his line.

“Uh, I’m not sure I can do that.”

“You’ll work your way up to it. Trust me.”

I step into the water and feel the cold river swirl against my legs. It’s a strange sensation, wading into a river without actually getting wet. Scott stands behind me, the length of his body pressed against mine, his arms wrapped around my arms. I feel his breath on my neck as he swings me through the motions of a perfect cast. I feel graceful, as if his fishing know-how is becoming mine through osmosis. It’s easy. It’s natural. I should have been fly-fishing all my life.

Then Scott steps away so I can try on my own. I let out just six feet or so of line, and flick my rod backward, then forward. The line plops in a depressing coil in front of my legs.

“That’s good! Next time, try to keep your wrist straight.”

When I finally do manage to launch my fly and keep my line straight, I puff with pride until I notice that the fly is so close to me, any fish who can see it can also see my legs.

I cast again and watch the fly drift past me downstream.

“Eat it!” I whisper.

“If you cast twice in one place and nothing bites,” Scott pipes in, “take a step downstream before you cast again. There’s no point in casting to the same spot over and over.”

“But aren’t they swimming back and forth down there?” I imagine that my fly lands like a neon billboard atop a fish superhighway. Sure, one picky commuter might swim by. But any second now, another will be tempted to stop and take a bite.

Scott stares at me. Apparently he has a different vision of underwater life.

“Uh, yeah,” he starts slowly, “they’re swimming. But not everywhere, all the time. The more water you cover, the more fish will see your fly.”

On my next cast, the hook snags on a branch behind me. Scott hurries up to it and picks it off the shrub. Soon, satisfied that my casting is improving even though it still feels nothing but awkward to me, he wades downstream to start fishing himself.

“You’re doing great,” he says, his eyes locked on to a promising riffle. “Yell if you need me.”

A few casts later, my hook grabs onto a thorny wild rose and won’t let go. Scott is too far downstream, casting what looks like a quarter mile of line, to reach it for me. Branches scrape my arm as I reach for my fly. The line is not only hooked, it’s actually wrapped around the tip of a branch.

After an hour or so, my right arm is tired, even though the rod I’ve borrowed from Scott weighs less than a pound. Something—I’m not sure what—keeps pulling back my arm for one more cast. Then one more after that.

“Fly-fishing is a sport for optimists,” I remember Scott saying.

I haven’t seen a single fish, but Scott has told me to trust that they’re there. And if I ever stopped to think about it, I’d believe him. But I don’t stop to think. I’m so caught up in my own actions—perfecting the motions of my arm, trying to let out a little more line, scanning the river for other promising spots—that I forget all about the fish.

As my fly drifts past me, I try to memorize Scott’s pointers: Cast from the elbow and shoulder, not the wrist. Lift as much line off the water as you can before flinging the fly upstream. Give the line time to unfold in the air before jerking it in another direction. Keep your fly on the water as long as possible—you can’t catch a fish if your fly is in the air.

I’m so wrapped up in all of this that I barely notice when the fluorescent bit of foam that is stuck to my fishing line pops below the surface of the water. I see it, and even feel a little tug on my rod, but I don’t think anything of it. In fact, Scott notices before I do.

“Hey, you’ve got a fish!” He hurries upstream toward me.

Fish! I’d forgotten about fish. Adrenaline floods my veins.

“Keep your rod tip up,” Scott says calmly. “And keep your line tight. When the fish pulls against you, let it take as much line as it wants. As soon as it stops, reel it in.”

I crank the reel, slowly at first. The light tug at the end of my rod becomes a hard, twitchy pull. Something in front of me leaps into the air and flexes back and forth before it splashes back into the river. Stunned, it takes me a moment to realize that the thrashing crescent I just saw fly out of the water is a fish. My fish. A glistening, feeling, living being is on the other end of this thin thread of plastic. It’s practically touching me.

“Reel it in!” Scott jolts me out of reflection. I crank again, dragging the fish closer with each rotation. Scott wades toward it. The fish is just a few yards away from him when it decides to make one more run for its life. This time, the reel spins so fast that I can’t keep my left hand on it. It bruises my knuckle.

As soon as the reel slows, I crank again. Scott takes one more step and closes his hand around my line.

“Wow! Beautiful fish.” He bends down and unhooks the fly underwater. He lifts the fish out of the river. It has gold speckles and shimmering green and red stripes down its sides. It is beautiful, though I’ve never before used that word to describe a fish.

“Do you want to hold it?” he asks.

For some reason, seeing it up close—this slippery alien cradled in Scott’s hands—I chicken out. I’m not sure whether I’m scared for me or for the fish.

“No, that’s okay.” Immediately, disappointment sinks in. The fish gulps at the air. What am I so afraid of?

“Wait,” I say. “I want to touch it.”

“Okay, wet your hands first.”

I dip one hand in the water and brush my dripping fingers along the fish’s taut side. When I pull my hand away, a clear, slimy film coats my fingers. I rub them together, a souvenir.

“I should let him go,” Scott says. “He’s been out of the water long enough.”

“Bye, fish.”

He lowers it into the water and holds it there, its mouth facing upstream. It catches its breath for a second, then darts out of his hands and disappears faster than I knew any living thing could swim.

A week or two later, we return to the same stretch of river with a couple of Scott’s friends and I am surprised by how well I recognize it. Not from the houses or man-made markers by which I usually orient myself; there aren’t any of those here. Just a few months ago I would have described this place as barren, empty: a river and nothing else. But today I notice the lichen-covered rock that I tried to cast from. The giant alder where I lost two flies in a row. The stump where I sat and untangled my line after Scott moved downstream.

In late July, Scott flies to the East Coast with me for a long weekend, to meet my parents and some of my extended family. While we’re there, we borrow my mom’s station wagon and head toward the Beltway when Scott suddenly asks: “What river did we just drive over?”

I pause, wondering if he’s joking.

“We drove over a river?”

“Yeah, what’s it called?”

“I have no idea.” I feel ridiculous. In all the years I lived here, I never noticed that this bit of highway crosses a ravine. I never glanced at a map and learned its name. I never got to know a stretch of its banks as well as I already know one stretch near Bend.

Throughout the summer, we camp and fly-fish almost every weekend, and I start to pay more attention to rivers. When I drive over a bridge, I glance at the water and then look for a sign bearing its name. I check to see if the banks are raw and eroding or anchored by thick rows of willow. I look for a mix of fast-moving riffles and slow, deep pools, knowing that fish like variety. If we are on foot, I put on my polarized sunglasses and scan the water for dark, slender lines that hover, gently waving, over the streambed. These, I know now, are fish, though to the untrained eye they might look like weeds or shadows or like they don’t exist at all. I pick out the fishiest-looking spots, where I would cast my fly if I had my rod and more time. Now a river catches my eye because I know how to decipher some of its secrets. Fly-fishing is teaching me how to imagine some of the life that takes place beneath the water’s surface.

But more than two years will pass before I one day look up from the river, to the surrounding valley, and wonder if it, too, speaks in a language I don’t understand. The place that I have, by dumb luck, chosen to make my home will soon embrace me and steer me toward an unlikely decision. I will wonder if perhaps hunting could teach me to read landscapes the same way that fly-fishing is teaching me to interpret rivers and streams.

CHAPTER 2

PULLING THE TRIGGER

It only takes a couple of weeks for me to realize that the town where I live and the rural area where I work are worlds apart. Bend, my new hometown, is a thriving example of the New West. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 10 percent of the city’s twelve thousand residents worked full-time at the town’s two lumber mills. Others felled trees in the woods or transported logs. Today those mills have been replaced by a Gap, a Victoria’s Secret and a movie theater—part of a shopping area called the Old Mill District.

Tourism and construction have replaced timber as Bend’s economic anchors, and the once sleepy town has been wallpapered with an urban aesthetic. McMansions, groomed ski runs, mountain bike trails and Pilates studios beckon city-dwelling vacationers or retirees. Newcomers want more living space than they had in the city, but not so much space that maintenance becomes a burden. To meet this demand, owners of farms, ranches and forestlands eagerly subdivide their properties into ten-acre, two-acre, half-acre lots. The newspaper is filled each day with stories of rampant development, skyrocketing home values and a steady influx of new people. This is a good thing, economically speaking. New residents bring money and job opportunities. We also provoke a sort of identity crisis. Transplants like me, from bigger cities, are becoming the majority.

My beat has two population centers: Sunriver and La Pine, both unincorporated. The rest of the area is composed of vast ranches and federally owned forestland. Sunriver, just fifteen miles south of Bend, was a World War II military camp that is now a densely populated resort with paved bike paths linking fancy homes to golf courses, riding stables and restaurants.

La Pine, on the other hand, is a rambling, ill-defined cluster of neighborhoods that begins thirty miles south of Bend. Most of these neighborhoods were ranches until the 1950s and 1960s, when they were subdivided haphazardly. A typical homesite here is about one acre and includes a mobile home and three or four other structures. The owner is likely a former logger or mill worker, retired before he planned to because most logging in the region ended by the mid-1980s.

By my third or fourth week on the job, I am already in the habit of driving right past Sunriver to get to La Pine. La Pine, I figure, is where the real stories are. The poverty, ramshackle homes, nostalgia for bygone days of logging largesse: These are the makings of a blockbuster movie or a great novel or at the very least a readable newspaper article. Driving to La Pine each morning feels a bit like driving back in time to Bend in the 1980s. The community is still struggling to recover from the collapse of the timber industry.

Early one morning, I visit a married couple in their sixties for an article I’m writing about a neighborhood-wide property survey dispute. The man is a former mill worker who has suffered some sort of accident. He’s missing one eye and an ear. Smooth, translucent skin has been grafted over the dent where his eye used to be—a no-fuss patch, I suppose. The woman wears glasses and has her short hair set in curls. She does most of the talking as they welcome me inside with handshakes and a mug of instant coffee. We sit around an old metal table in the kitchen.

As a child, the woman spent summers here visiting her aunt, who owned this very piece of land. She remembers when a water witch paced around the property holding a willow bough to sense where to drill the drinking well, which they still use today. She inherited this property as a young adult from her aunt, and the couple built their dream home here. As she says the words “dream home,” she opens her hands proudly. I look around the small kitchen—a worn linoleum floor, cabinets with chipped paint, a hulking cast-iron stove that takes up one-third of the still-chilly room, a calico curtain covering the room’s sole window—and marvel at the modesty of their dream.

As she speaks, her husband gets up and opens the door to the stove. Amber flames warm my face from across the kitchen. The man picks up a pail and begins shoveling its contents into the glowing cavity. An orange peel and a wrinkled piece of plastic wrap fall to the floor.

It’s trash. The man in front of me is burning household waste to heat his home. I stop taking notes and watch as he bends down, picks up the peel and wrapper, and tosses them into the stove. He swings the door closed and then sits back down at the table. Soon smoke fills the kitchen. The man opens the window and sits again, but still the smoke thickens. The woman keeps talking. A few minutes go by and the man gets up to turn on an old wire fan.

“Maybe we should move into the living room,” he says over his shoulder.

“Good idea,” the woman says cheerfully.

Over the next few years, I will often think of this couple as I write my articles. I’ll imagine that they read the newspaper every morning before feeding it, section by section, into their stove. I will try to anticipate their questions, to explain how a ballot measure or a new county ordinance could wriggle into their dream home and make the life inside it a little better or a little worse. I also imagine how they would look at my own life, at my closet stuffed with designer clothes, at my iPod and laptop computer, and scoff at all the excess.

That fall, though I continue to write about La Pine, I also take on a new beat at my newspaper, covering natural resources and the environment. I meet a particularly gruff, beefy logger in northeastern Oregon. We are sitting together on a bus, touring various logging projects and chatting about our lives, when he tells me, unprompted: “You know, the Western larch is my favorite tree.” He has a favorite tree! And when he talks about it, he sounds more like a giddy child than a jaded woodsman. He loves the larch not for its value—the pine-like wood is soft but rot-resistant so its primary use is railroad ties—but for sentimental reasons. Larix occidentalis, sometimes called a tamarack, is that rare combination: a deciduous conifer. In the spring, it boasts feathery tufts of pale green needles that turn gold in autumn and then drop to the ground. The next spring, new needles appear.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’d assumed that because he spends his days cutting down big, beautiful trees, he must not have as much affection for them as I do. Yet he has chosen a vocation that puts him in the woods all day, and requires him to distinguish species and determine the health and value of each specimen. He manages to be realistic about our need for lumber and, at the same time, romantic about the trees themselves.

I begin to question my views about environmentalism in general and logging in particular. By the 1980s, most of the big trees in central Oregon had been cut down. Environmentalists filed lawsuits to slow the logging of remaining forests, arguing that logging displaces wildlife, erodes hillsides and pollutes streams. Old-timers blamed these conservationists for killing the local industry. When I first moved here, I had little sympathy. What kind of people would we be if we willingly traded the splendor of these forests and the life that inhabits them for toilet paper and two-by-fours?

I have come to see it differently. Mill companies in central Oregon have shut down local operations and moved to Lithuania and Bolivia, where environmental regulations are lax and labor is cheap. Meanwhile, communities like La Pine have paid the price. I think of the disfigured mill worker and his wife, who live on so little. More logging and milling here would not make them obscenely wealthy, but every little bit would help.

Besides, no matter how much we love trees, every single one of us needs some of them to be chopped down so we can go about our lives. Fallen trees make up our floors, walls and furniture, fuel our fireplaces and feed our printers. My newspaper career is dependent on paper. When some of our wood comes from local sources, we can carefully plan and monitor harvests with sustainability in mind. Otherwise, we’re simply outsourcing our environmental damage.

As it turns out, loggers are not the only population with whom I’m surprised to find myself sympathizing.

Jim Court, the community’s fire chief at the time, becomes the first hunter I meet in real life. During my first interview with him, when business is done, I ask about his family. Then what he likes to do for fun.

“Oh, I just love to get outdoors,” he says in an aw-shucks sort of way. “You know, fishing, bow hunting…

“Bow hunting?” I must have misheard him. “Like, hunting with a bow and arrow?”

“Yeah.” He pauses. “What did you think I meant?”

I shrug. What I don’t say is: People still do that?

Here we are, the fire chief and I, sitting in his office. And suddenly, much more than a desk is dividing us. Fear is part of it. Court is a hunter, which means he is capable of killing a living thing. Not to mention, he owns weapons. (The mightiness of the pen offers little reassurance next to a high-powered bow.)

There’s another difference between us, too. And this one surprises me.

Court goes on to explain that bow hunters, unlike rifle hunters, must sneak within about thirty yards of their prey to have any chance of making a kill. This requires intimate knowledge of both the animal and the forest it lives in, not to mention a little luck. I will be grateful that my first conversation about hunting happens to be with a bow hunter. With guns removed from the equation, it’s harder to fall back on the negative stereotypes that have, for my whole life, defined a modern hunter.

Growing up, I never knew any real-life hunters. And I never talked or heard much about them. So without even realizing it, I based my opinion on the anti-hunting propaganda that had bombarded me from a very early age. Disney’s 1942 film Bambi, the first movie I ever saw in a theater, gave me the evil poacher who shoots Bambi’s mom and the unethical hunters who ignite the forest to drive Bambi and other deer out of the woods. Looney Tunes offered me Elmer Fudd, who is foolish, inept and clearly no match for the wily Bugs Bunny. In more-serious depictions, such as the novel Lord of the Flies, civility implodes when the characters start hunting wild pigs. In each of these cases, the hunter and the prey are enemies. So it wasn’t a stretch for me to assume that hunters, as a rule, hate their prey.

This portrayal of hunting couldn’t have been more different from my own upbringing, in which animals were cherished companions. Like most modern-day Americans, my closest animal relationships involved pets. Throughout childhood, my sister, Gretchen, and I adopted fleets of gerbils and guinea pigs. We celebrated their birthdays. We bought them Christmas presents. And those were just the rodents. The center of our universe was Daisy, a tall, exotic supermodel of a mutt whom my brother found loping down the street when I was just five years old. We included her in our make-believe games. We shared our Popsicles with her.

During high school, I worked at a veterinary clinic and then a veterinary research laboratory. Yet outside of work and the home, I gave only superficial thought to the animals who contributed to my daily life. I tried not to buy cosmetics or toiletries tested on animals, though I approved of animals’ use in medical research. I’ve long respected vegetarians because they seem to be animal lovers who are consistent in their beliefs. I’ve noticed, however, that when I don’t eat meat for a few weeks, I start to crave a hamburger as a vampire does blood.

Court’s description—of rolling in pine boughs to cover up his scent, then creeping through the woods wearing camouflage face paint—reminds me of stories I’ve heard about American Indian hunters blending into their surroundings, almost becoming more animal than human.

Despite my disapproval of hunting, I have always granted a special immunity to American Indian hunters. Perhaps that’s because Indians are, as I learned in grade school, careful to use every part of the animal. Or because they didn’t traditionally use guns. Or maybe I simply recognize the cruelty of condemning a lifestyle that has all but vanished at the hands of my own non-native ancestors. In any case, bow hunting sounds more like Indian hunting—the good kind—than the gun-fueled Disney kind I am used to.

After that conversation with the fire chief, I go on to meet more hunters nearly every day. Sure, some of them perpetuate the gun-crazed stereotype that I grew up with. But more often than not, I find myself talking to hunters who are surprisingly thoughtful about their prey. They know all of these tiny, fascinating details about the animals they pursue, and they manage to poke this knowledge into unrelated conversations.

When I act curious—which I am—they speak a little louder. Soon they forget to pause politely to let me respond or ask a question. Their eyes widen. They gesture wildly, absorbed in this world of non-human life. They remind me of enthusiastic volunteer docents at a zoo, not testosterone-fueled gun nuts. In fact, these hunters will do something that I never could have expected: teach me to rethink a sport that I once wrote off as the pastime of rednecks. Eventually, this will change the way I feel about my new home. It, along with falling in love with Scott, will compel me to stay beyond the one or two years I originally envisioned.

That fall, a handful of small businesses in La Pine lock their doors and hang CLOSED UNTIL NOV. 8 signs in their windows. The flooring store. The lunch truck that is painted like a cow and drives around selling sandwiches and espresso drinks. The house painters. Even a mechanic’s shop.

“What’s going on?” I ask a local know-it-all.

She looks at me as if I’ve just asked what year it is. “It’s elk-hunting season.”

“Oh. Right, of course.” Though I’ve met many hunters, we haven’t discussed details such as the time frame for hunting a particular species.

As I drive back to Bend, where hunting season is about as noticeable as National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week (also the last week in October, apparently), I think about all the hunters I’ve met on my beat.

I think about the twenty-something man who tracked a group of antelope in late summer so that on opening day, he not only knew where to find the herd, but also knew which individual animal he was going to kill and how to identify it. I think about the middle-aged elk hunter who tells me: “Most years, it doesn’t even matter if I get an elk. I love the meat, and it’s great to fill the freezer when I get the chance. But mostly, I just love to be outside.” It surprises me to hear that the slaughter is not necessarily the object of hunting. These people are not heartless killers as much as amateur biologists, real-life experts in the natural environment—something that I care very much about.

I have always considered myself an environmentalist. But now that I stop and think about it, my résumé is pretty weak. I speak fondly of big trees, buy organic lettuce and chide SUV owners. Until now, that has felt like enough. Lately I’ve noticed some disturbing habits, though: I talk about the destruction of nature as if I play no part in it myself. The timber companies got greedy and cut down every tree. Oil companies are stabbing at the bottom of the ocean. Gas companies are scraping bare the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, I’m printing on paper, working and living in buildings made of wood, driving a car and heating my apartment with gas. It’s me. I’m fueling all of this destruction, even if I’ve arranged my life so I don’t have to see it or admit it. My hands may be clean and free of calluses, but there is blood on them just as there is on the hunter’s or the logger’s.

Perhaps the hunters I’ve met are, in a way, responsible environmentalists like I aspire to be. They come face-to-face with what they take from the earth. They have a vested interest in making sure that wildlife populations are sustained in the long term. They have a better understanding than I do about how those populations fit into the balance of the world. I begin to grow jealous of the conservative hunters whom I interview and write about. They work on the land, while I merely play on it.

It’s funny to find myself looking to hunters as environmentalist role models. These days, celebrity hunters such as Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin tend to be spokespeople for gun rights and right-wing politics, never for the environment. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, modern conservationism was first promoted by hunters, including our Hunter in Chief Theodore Roosevelt. In his biography The Wilderness Warrior, Douglas Brinkley points out that, in the 1870s, while the poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau “contemplated nature preserves in the Atlantic Monthly,” hunters’ organizations such as the Adirondack Club and Bisby Club were taking real action, setting aside private wildlife preserves.

In 1887, more than a decade before taking over the Oval Office, Roosevelt co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club to create bison, elk and antelope preserves for future generations of hunters. Two years into his presidency, he declared Florida’s Pelican Island the nation’s first federally protected preserve and breeding ground for native birds. By the time he left office in 1909, Roosevelt had created or enlarged 150 national forests, fifty-one bird reservations, four game preserves, six national parks and eighteen national monuments. In total, he spared some 234 million acres of our country’s most valuable land from development. Roosevelt believed in a goal of conservation that his friend and colleague Gifford Pinchot defined as “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”

Roosevelt was condemned by some (including Mark Twain, one of his most vocal critics) for his frequent hunting excursions. Other Americans didn’t bat an eye at photos of their president standing over a dead animal. Today, of course, hunting is nowhere near as widely accepted. Urbanization is a big reason why fewer Americans hunt or know someone who hunts. In 1950, two-thirds of Americans lived in cities or suburbs. Now more than four out of five Americans are packed into 366 metropolitan areas.

Our image of environmentalism began to shift in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned of the dangers of industrial pollution and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb foretold the environmental devastation caused by rampant population growth. Humans—including hunters—were pegged as a growing threat to the natural world. “Nature seems safest,” writes historian Richard White, “when shielded from human labor.”

Popular culture has also changed how we think about hunting. I learned only as an adult that the film Bambi is loosely based on a 1923 Austrian novel, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten. Like the movie, the book tells the story of a forest from the point of view of an anthropomorphized deer. But the book is dark, with death as a central theme. Humans shoot birds and deer, including Bambi’s mother. Bambi must learn to avoid snare traps. A fox kills a pheasant in broad daylight as Bambi and others look on. A crow tears apart a young hare and it dies slowly, moaning. A ferret wounds a squirrel, who bleeds to death before magpies land and feast on him. In this Bambi, life is beautiful but also harsh and full of danger.

The Disney film, however, portrays a utopia of frolic and fun. The animals never kill or procreate or even poop. They have just one enemy: man. Though humans never appear on screen, they violate hunting ethics and, in all likelihood, state law. In the film’s most famous scene, Bambi’s mother is shot during spring, with young Bambi still by her side. Later, humans use dogs to track deer and ignite a forest fire to chase the animals out of the woods. In other words, these people aren’t hunters, they’re poachers. There are poachers in real life, too, but they don’t represent hunting any more than counterfeiters represent artists. Yet as anthropologist Matt Cartmill writes, the name “Bambi” has become “virtually synonymous with ‘deer,’ ” and has shaped many Americans’ views of hunting.

I’ve been living in Bend for a year when I take a week off work and meet my family in Recife, Brazil, where my brother now lives and teaches English. Nathan moved from Washington, DC, to this beachfront metropolis in Brazil’s Afro-Caribbean northeast just a few months before I moved to Bend. The strangeness of his new home puts my life in Bend into perspective. In just a little over one year, he has become fluent in Portuguese, adopted the local diet of grilled meats, bean stews and exotic fruits, and embraced the natives’ casual attitude about time (good-bye, wristwatch!). Meanwhile, in Oregon, all I’ve really had to do is learn to live without Vietnamese food and make small talk with cowboys and loggers.

Seeing Nathan so engaged in his new setting makes me notice something else. I’ve always considered myself to be a good, adventurous traveler. I approach a mysterious place with my senses wide open, eager to inhale its smells, tastes and history. But my curiosity fades as soon as I go home. Or, at least, it always used to. I think about how much I took for granted in Takoma Park, including rivers that I never knew existed. I think about the efforts I’ve made, since moving to Bend, to assimilate—drinking lattes, riding a bike, learning to ski. All of that has made me more like the people who migrated here in the past decade, not the ones who have lived here their whole lives. In La Pine, which has become my reference point for the Old West, I still have very little in common with the people I meet.

I frequently hear old-timers complain about Bend’s ongoing suburbanization. “Why do people come here if all they want to do is turn it into the place they left?” one asks me. At first, I’m defensive. I’m not trying to change central Oregon into something it’s not. Am I?

I wonder how I would feel if my own hometown, Takoma Park, were suddenly overrun with people who wanted to shut down the hippie food co-op, cancel the raucous Fourth of July parade or otherwise disrupt the local traditions that I grew up with.

Bend is attracting an athletic crowd that favors sports like running, yoga, cycling, golf and, of course, skiing—things that can be done in a well-groomed park or even indoors. Hunting and fishing, on the other hand, require a living, breathing ecosystem. They’re messier, more complicated activities. Some depth of knowledge is required to excel—knowledge about a specific place and an animal’s life cycle or, at the very least, its preference for food or cover. In a sense, hunting is the embodiment of rural America. Not the romanticized version that appeals to city slickers, necessarily, but the grisly, utilitarian truth of it.

In central Oregon, public opinion about hunting has soured. We newcomers have fueled thousands of acres of development and passed anti-shooting ordinances in surrounding areas, too. It’s simple geometry that as neighborhoods and trails expand, there is less room in the woods for hunting. So perhaps it’s no surprise that nationwide, hunting has been on a steady decline. The age of the average hunter is rising, too, as older hunters retire to less-strenuous activities such as hiking and bird-watching, and fewer of their children take up the sport. Surveys have found that just one in four children raised by hunting parents will learn to hunt.

When I return to Bend from Brazil, Scott picks me up at the airport. As we drive home, I scan the now familiar scenery—dusty juniper trees and slack barbed-wire fences corralling swaybacked quarter horses. I close my eyes and make a promise to myself: I will not take my new home for granted. I will scour the high desert like a hungry tourist. Or better yet, like a true native.

The following summer, I sit down to dinner one evening and cut into a chicken breast that Scott just grilled. I think back to a conversation that I, a lifelong meat eater, had with my aunt Nina, more than a decade ago.

Nina has been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember. I was a teenager when I finally asked her why she didn’t eat meat. She thought about it for a moment.

“If it ever came down to it,” she said, “I don’t think I could kill an animal. And so it seems hypocritical for me to pay someone else to do it.”

Though I’d never thought about it before, buying a package of chicken thighs at the grocery store suddenly seemed a bit like hiring a hit man: not only vicious but cowardly, too.

Hunting—this theme that keeps showing up in my life, this intersection of culture and politics and history—offers a chance, as Michael Pollan writes, “to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved.” I spear a chunk of meat with my fork and stare at it. A question bursts into my head like a firework: Do I have what it takes to find and kill my own dinner?

This same reasoning that led my aunt to a life of vegetarianism is what convinces me to pick up a gun and hunt my own meal. After more than twenty-six years of eating meat, I want to know if I have what it takes to cut out the hit man and kill my own dinner.

When I first moved here, my plan was to get some experience under my belt, have some outdoors adventures and then move back to New York. But now I have fallen in love with a man, and perhaps I’m being seduced by a place, as well. My once flippant goal of “becoming outdoorsy” has morphed into deeper questioning of what kind of relationship I want with nature. My glimpses of La Pine have convinced me that rural life—perhaps even its uncomfortable traditions such as hunting—is worth protecting. But I can’t help protect it if I don’t first understand it.

Here in Bend, where the dominant culture more closely reflects my own, it’s easy to marginalize the old ways. An element that is being dismissed is hunting for one’s own food and the vast knowledge necessary to do it. We risk losing something essential if we deign to define the New West without first understanding its old cultures and traditions. Besides, my liberal heart bleeds for any species on the decline, even if that species happens to wear camouflage and carry guns. It’s time for me to stop talking about giving back to the earth and start understanding how much I really take from it.

I decide to do the unthinkable: I will learn to hunt.

I break the news to Scott. At first, he’s confused.

“If you want to understand where your food comes from, why not get a job at a feedlot?” he asks. “Or a slaughterhouse?”

But it’s not just about the food. Hunting could teach me to read landscapes the way fly-fishing has taught me to read rivers. It could connect me to the rural culture that has shaped my new home. Hunting could also help me delve into the disjointed motifs of urbanization and environmentalism that have haunted my work and my thoughts for more than two years now.

“I’ll help however I can,” Scott says. “But I don’t want to hunt.”

He tells me about shooting and skinning a rock chuck (local slang for a marmot) when he was a kid. At the time, he says, he felt like a pioneer, and killing the animal was an adventure. Now he feels guilty about it.

The way I imagine it, learning to hunt will be a similar adventure. But I wonder if I, too, will kill an animal and then regret it for decades.

CHAPTER 3

GUN-SHY

As a reporter, research is my bread and butter, so I start by going straight to a source: Tony, one of the elk hunters I’ve met on my beat. Tony and his wife own a truck, painted black and white to look like a cow, which they drive around La Pine, selling sandwiches and coffee.

“What would you do if you were in my position?” I ask him. “You’re an adult and you’ve never hunted in your life but you want to try. How do you get started?”

He rubs his beard and purses his lips for a minute.

“I have no idea. Just get out there and do it.”

It may be true that the only way to learn to hunt is by hunting. But I don’t know where to go, what kind of gun to carry or how to shoot it. I visit a couple of local bookstores but strike out, because they don’t carry anything related to hunting. (It’s Bend, after all; there’s not much shelf space between the Pilates and hiking books.) Next, I visit the library, where the relevant books are far too specific (say, Mule Deer Hunting in Eastern Oregon) and assume a base of knowledge that I don’t yet have. On Google, I slam into the same problem: All of the sites about hunting are for people who already hunt. And then it dawns on me: Hunting is a twenty-first-century rarity—something you can’t learn online or in a book. There’s no Hunting for Dummies. There are no intro classes at the local community college.

Most hunters would have you think that theirs is the sport of the everyman. But I’m finding it to be oddly exclusive. Hunting isn’t so much a hobby as an inheritance, passed from one generation to the next. You have to learn from someone, and that someone is usually your dad. But where does that leave me—an adult whose parents are openly disgusted by the idea of killing an animal in the wild? Maybe this decision to hunt was a stupid one. Maybe you’re born a hunter or you’re not. I’m not.

Then one afternoon, Scott invites me to have lunch with him and one of his co-workers, Andy Fischer, a former professional bike racer with red hair and a wiry build. Andy grew up hunting and fishing in Montana. He and his younger brother, Kit, observed this household rule: If you shoot it, you eat it. Once, their parents made them choke down a couple of squirrels the boys had shot for fun. The meat didn’t taste too bad, Andy said, and so later, they tricked their parents’ friends into eating teriyaki-grilled squirrel during a dinner party. The more I hear about Andy’s upbringing, the more it sounds wild, adventurous and, dare I say, idyllic.

At first, Andy doesn’t have any ideas for how I could get started hunting, either. But when I press him for details of his own hunting education, he says something that catches my attention:

“I was probably in sixth or seventh grade when a lot of my friends started taking Hunter Safety, so I took it, too.”

Hunter Safety. It turns out that every state in the Union offers a similar course, usually with a long proper name but known informally as Hunter Education or Hunter Safety. Most are geared toward children because, at least in Oregon, all minors must pass a Hunter Safety course before purchasing a hunting license. Adults don’t need any such qualification.

The next day, I call the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to sign up.

The woman who answers says that although a class for adults is offered every year, I’ve missed the 2006 class by a few weeks. It’s late summer; I can wait eleven months to take an adults-only class or enroll in an all-ages class starting next week in Culver, a small farming town about forty-five minutes away. Culver has more in common with La Pine than Bend, but it’s a closer-knit community than either of the areas where I spend my days. This class meets two evenings a week.

Eager to get started, I give the woman my name and phone number and promise to bring five dollars—tuition for the entire four-week course—to the first class. Then I admit that I feel silly enrolling in a class for children.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Adults take this class all the time.”

The following week, I walk into the Culver City Hall, which doubles as a fire station, and am greeted by a gaggle of about twenty kids much younger than I was expecting. A few grown men are scattered around the room, too. Two of them are obviously instructors, so I home in on a third, a man who looks about ten years older than me. I slide into a plastic chair beside him. He smiles at me, and I smile back and relax a little, taking his friendliness as a sign that he’s a student, too.

One of the instructors sidles between rows of chairs, handing out forms. When he gets to the man next to me, the man shakes his head.

“I’m just here with my son.” He puts his arm around a small boy—maybe ten or eleven—sitting on his other side. I look around the room and sure enough, I’m the only adult holding a form.

Our instructors introduce themselves. The first is E.V., Culver’s one-man public works department. He pronounces his initials like the girl’s name Evie. He stands tall, a stern, no-nonsense military veteran with a trim gray beard and glasses. The second instructor is Jack, a redhead whose seemingly endless patience with children is matched only by his seemingly endless girth, and who also happens to be the county sheriff.

I quickly glean that the primary purpose of Hunter Safety is to instill a healthy dose of fear in these soon-to-be-gun-toting tots. But for me—an adult who arrived already afraid of guns—the fear is paralyzing. We begin by watching a scripted movie called The Last Shot, in which a thirteen-year-old boy accidentally shoots his best friend. At the end, Jack offers one more warning, in case we somehow missed the seriousness of the film.

“That boy?” he says, pointing to the screen where the final frame shows police officers approaching the shooter in the hospital, just after his friend is declared dead. “He is never going to be allowed to hunt again. Think about that.”

The room is silent, but I’m pretty sure no one is focused on the kid’s lost hunting career. That boy is never going to be able to sleep again. Or look at himself in the mirror. Or enjoy one ice-cream cone without guilt beating his insides to a pulp. For the next few days, I question my decision to hunt based on the human safety risks alone. It all comes down to the guns. What could possibly be worth the danger of carrying a loaded rifle through the woods?

E.V. starts the second class with an order: “If you are twelve years of age or older, raise your hand.”

I raise my hand along with about half of the class. The Under-Twelves are sent with E.V. to practice safe gun handling, while we wizened Twelve-and-Overs sit with the sheriff to talk through a chapter of our textbook.

The book, which is more like a thick pamphlet, includes sections about animal identification, wilderness survival and basic gun information. Today’s lesson is about guns—different types, gauges and calibers and their various parts. Earlier this year, I happened to learn the difference between a shotgun and a rifle during the non-stop news coverage of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident. The vice president was hunting for quail when he accidentally blasted his friend in the face. (Yet he managed to avoid the horrific consequences we were warned of in the video.)

A piece of shotgun ammunition is called a shell, and is basically a plastic tube filled with metal pellets. Because a shotgun shoots a spray of metal, it doesn’t need to be aimed as carefully as a rifle or handgun, which usually shoot one bullet at a time. This makes a shotgun useful for fast-moving, airborne targets such as birds. A single pellet, as long as it’s heavy enough and moving fast enough, will kill a bird by intersecting its neck. A gun’s gauge inversely corresponds with the diameter of its barrel, so the larger the number, the smaller the gun. For example, Cheney was carrying a diminutive 28-gauge shotgun during his quail-hunting accident. But if he had instead used a burly 10-gauge (typically reserved for downing geese), his friend probably would not have survived.

It makes sense, then, that hunters tend to own so many guns. There is no one-size-fits-all. You start with a rifle to shoot deer or antelope. Then you decide to buy a bigger rifle to shoot elk or moose. You have a 12-gauge shotgun for rabbits and turkeys. And you don’t want to pulverize small game like quail, so you probably need a smaller shotgun for those.

In class, we will be handling rifles only. According to Jack there are many parts to a rifle, but to me, there are only four that you really need to know:

1. The trigger: what you yank to shoot. Avoid this.

2. The muzzle: the hole through which a bullet exits the gun. Keep away from this at all times.

3. The action: a movable piece of metal that holds the bullet in place in the chamber so that the gun will fire properly. When this part is open, the gun should not be able to shoot. People who know guns can see that the action is open and feel reassured that you’re not about to open fire.

4. The safety: a switch or lever that should be left on—to prevent the gun from firing—until your target is in sight and you’re ready to shoot. Jack frequently reminds us that, like any mechanical part, a safety can fail at any time.

Jack never misses an opportunity to wedge a safety warning into the lessons. In the video we watched on the first day, for example, the boys made the repeated mistake of dismissing their .22-caliber rifle as just a .22. Hunters call these small rifles “varmint guns” because they’re not powerful enough to take down an animal much bigger than a squirrel or rabbit. However, Jack reminds us again and again that no gun is too small to be taken seriously.

“A .22-caliber rifle is never just a .22,” he tells us. “Don’t ever call it that. It can kill you.”

At one point, Jack mentions that in all his years of teaching the class, only two people have ever failed Hunter Safety. Both failed, he tells us, because they could not demonstrate a level of maturity necessary to hunt safely. Ten years older than my oldest classmate and fourteen years older than the average one, I quietly hope that we’ll be graded on a curve.

Soon, however, my classmates’ youth will begin to intimidate me. People like to say that you should never stop learning. The truth is, it’s hard to learn something new—really new—as an adult. As we age, our obligations pile up and free time becomes scarce. But that’s only part of the problem. We also face a relatively short list of acceptable activities to try for the first time. Tell your friends you’re learning to speak French and they’ll likely congratulate your gumption. Mention your beginner gymnastics lessons and they’ll probably laugh. Even activities that are considered lifelong sports, like tennis, are things that people usually learn as kids and then hone as adults. In Hunter Safety, it’s easy to see why. As I’ve aged, I’ve lost my willingness to be bad at something and stick with it anyway. Kids have no choice in the matter—they’re pros at being novices. When the teacher mocks or scolds them, they shrug it off. They’re kids—being publicly humiliated is practically their job. For me, it’s… humiliating.

Before we move to E.V.’s portion of the class, we take a short break and I head to the ladies’ room, along with one of two other females in the class. I’m in the stall when I hear her voice from the next one.

“So,” she starts quietly, “how old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Oh my God.” She practically gasps, I’m so much older than she’d imagined. Then, after a pause, she adds: “I’m thirteen.”

We walk out of our respective stalls and introduce ourselves. Her name is Jade. She wears thick black mascara and clear lip gloss. As we leave the bathroom, she asks, “So, what are you doing here?” I search for a concise explanation of my heady ideas about environmentalism, food and my relationship with nature. Leave it to a thirteen-year-old to tongue-tie me.

“You know,” I say, sighing, “I’m not really sure.”

We sit down in front of E.V., whom we all know is about to hand out the guns. The room is silent. E.V. wastes no time; he turns and addresses the elephant in the room by name.

“Who here is afraid of guns? Raise your hand.”

I fling up my arm before looking around to notice that everyone else is comfortable around weapons or at least has the good sense not to openly admit their fear. My admission bothers E.V., and he will not let up on me until the course is almost over. Each evening, he will ask if I am still afraid of guns. Each evening I will make the mistake of answering truthfully.

“But you drive a car,” he will plead on the fourth or fifth class, obviously irked. “Do you get scared every time you get into your car?”

“No.”

“Yet cars kill way more people every year than guns do.”

“But I’m used to cars.” My whole life, since before I could walk or speak, I’ve tacitly accepted the risk inherent in cars. Not in guns. Guns are a big, sudden leap.

Eventually, E.V. accepts that my fear will take more than a few night classes to overcome. He works on my vocabulary, instead.

“The next time someone asks you if you’re afraid of guns,” he says, “tell them, ‘I respect guns.’ Because there’s nothing wrong with that; you should respect guns.”

I am 99 percent sure that the next time someone asks me if I’m afraid of guns, it will be E.V.

“Okay,” I say, “I will.”

Tonight, E.V. marches over to a wardrobe to hand out the guns: .22-caliber rifles with bulky padlocks attached, so that they can’t actually be loaded. According to E.V., the padlock keys were lost, sentencing these guns to a lifetime of nervous handling by Hunter Safety students. The locks do nothing to allay my fears, however. I’ve been reminded too many times today that guns misfire, that accidents happen no matter what. Perhaps my gun will be the one with an ancient piece of shrapnel wedged inside, waiting to be freed by my careless brush against the trigger.

When I get to the front of the line, E.V. holds a long metal rifle out to me. My palms are sweating so much that I worry it might slip through my hands.

“Action open, safety on,” he says, glancing first to a hole where—God forbid—the ammunition would go, then to a small switch. He looks me in the eye. “Got it?”

I grasp the gun with both hands.

“Got it.”

He lets go of the gun. I hold it away from my body, like a stick of lit dynamite, and walk slowly to join the row of already armed students.

We practice picking the guns up and setting them down to climb over an imaginary fence. We practice handing them to one another across an imaginary stream. We practice carrying them as we walk alongside other hunters. I am nervous the whole time. I only relax when I hand my gun back to E.V.—Got it? Got it.—and he stows it back in the cabinet.

Other students don’t admit it, but many of them are afraid of guns, too. Much more than age, fear is what divides our class. I recognize my fellow scaredy-cats by the way they nervously chew their lips while their rifles lean against their shoulders. They turn the guns a little too often, searching for a comfortable position but never quite finding one. Some of the kids are younger versions of me, with no significant firsthand experience with guns. Of course, they didn’t grow up near Washington, DC, like I did, during the city’s reign as murder capital of the world. Police officers visited my elementary school and said things like, “If you see a gun lying on the ground, do not touch it. Back away and call the police.” Whenever a gun appeared in the newspaper, it was usually illegal and it was, without exception, bad news. Mostly the news was grisly and tragic. In rare, lucky cases it was a reminder of all that could have gone wrong.

To us in the fearful half, this is what we know: Gun = death. QED. Even if the gun is shooting innocuous holes in paper, those shots are preparation for death. Even if the gun is shooting a rodent—even a small, pesky rodent that threatens something we value such as crops or songbirds—the finality of its death is sobering and terrifying. Our teachers hammer that into our heads by saying things like, “Once you pull the trigger, you can never take that shot back.”

They repeat, again and again, how much is on the line when you’re carrying a loaded gun. “You can’t afford to make a mistake,” E.V. tells us. This is what scares me the most about hunting: I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done without making a mistake. In a way, I lied to E.V. when I told him that I’m not afraid of cars. I drive almost every day, but when I stop and think about it, I’m still scared of driving. I’ve had my share of fender-benders. I’ve had close calls. The reason I’ve never hurt anyone behind the wheel, or been hurt myself, is probably as thin and flimsy as I’ve been lucky. I might not be so lucky with guns.

But then there’s the other half of the class, the fearless half. To them, guns are not confined to our sad, simple equation. Guns are a means to death, of course. But they are also a means to adventure, to food, to family bonding. This half includes kids like Grayson, a skinny fourth grader with dimples, a crew cut and a wide grin, who is barely as tall as my waist. Grayson clearly knows guns and is only here to meet the state requirement for buying a hunting license. When he picks up a rifle, checks to make sure it’s unloaded and hands it to a classmate, for example, he automatically points the muzzle in a safe direction. There is no moment of shock as he realizes, woops, the muzzle is aimed straight at his buddy, then fumbles guiltily to readjust it. Safety isn’t a panicked afterthought but a steady instinct. His face and body remain relaxed. To Grayson, a gun is an object or a tool. When he thinks of a gun, he thinks of hunting with his dad, and all the richness that comes with it. He knows how to take his own gun apart and clean it. He even knows, he tells me modestly, how to skin and gut the animals he has shot—a few birds, some rodents.

If you think guns are powerful, you should see one in the hands of a competent child. Watching Grayson handle a gun for thirty seconds makes me think that even if I quit my job and moved into the woods and dedicated my life to it, I would never truly be a hunter. Not like Grayson is. Sometimes I look around the room, filled with people big and small, young and old (parents and grandparents of my classmates occasionally show up to observe), and think about whom I would trust as my hunting partner. Together, we would head out into the forest with loaded guns in our arms and feel safe, trusting each other. Most of the time, I’d pick Grayson. Sure, our instructor knows a lot about first aid and wilderness survival. And one of the kids has a dad who’s a cop. But Grayson is quiet and pleasant and curious and looks, at least to me, like he handles a gun as safely as anyone.

In fact, seeing that rifle in Grayson’s hands is, oddly enough, reassuring. He is proof that children can be raised to handle guns safely and with respect. Of course, plenty of households do contain both guns and children and manage to avert disaster. In 2009, for example, 138 children, ages eighteen and younger, were killed by accidental gunshots in the United States. This figure—any number over zero, really—is undeniably tragic. But consider that more than seven times as many children—1,056—accidentally drowned that year. Or that a whopping 6,683 children died in motor vehicle accidents.

The rate of gun-related accidents seems startlingly low given the astonishing number of guns that we, as a nation, own—roughly 250 million. Our response to the risk of drowning, for example, is not to discourage children from being around water, but rather to educate them, to teach them to swim and be safe. Our preferred response to the risk of guns is the exact opposite—total avoidance.

Accidents represent just a fraction of gun-related deaths—about 2 percent in 2007. Nearly three out of five gun-caused deaths are suicides. This is all to say: Chances are slim that you or I will die by gunshot. The lifetime odds that you will be murdered by a firearm are 1 in 306. Your chances of dying by accidental gunshot are 1 in 6,309. Your odds of death by cancer, on the other hand, are 1 in 7. Heart disease, 1 in 6. The odds that you will die of any cause? One in one.

Why we own all of these guns is another story altogether, and one that has little to do with hunting. Forty percent of U.S. households contain at least one gun. One in four adults owns one or more guns. Yet only 11 percent of firearm-owning households say they hunt. The rest keep their weapons primarily for self-defense.

The idea of keeping a gun for self-defense sounds crazy to me. And the more I handle a gun, the crazier this idea gets. The only way for a gun to be useful in, say, defending one’s family from a burglary would require that the gun be stored unlocked and with ammunition either inside the chamber or close by—a dangerous situation in any household, with or without kids.

Despite my fear of guns, I enjoy the class. More than anything, I enjoy my classmates. At first, they’re amused to have an adult in their ranks. But eventually, they treat me like I’m one of them. One evening, a boy comes in all puffed up because he learned to whistle earlier that day. He demonstrates for me—sucking in one long, sustained note until finally he has to stop to exhale. I congratulate him.

“Can you whistle?” He’s not issuing a challenge, he sounds genuinely curious.

“Yes.” I toot out a simple tune.

His eyes widen. “Wow, you’re really good.”

“Thank you. I’ve had a lot of time to practice.”

Later, when E.V. scolds me for picking up a rifle without checking to make sure it’s unloaded first, my new buddy reassures me.

“At least you’re good at whistling,” he says cheerfully.

One of the students lives on a remote farm with his large family. He is homeschooled, which makes our crowded classroom exotic to him. He tells me that his family raises pygmy fainting goats, which freeze and topple over when they get scared.

“Really?” I can’t tell if this kid is pulling my leg.

“Yep. You go like this”—he smacks his hands together—“and they just fall right over.”

I rush home from class, excited to tell Scott about my latest friend from Hunter Safety.

On the last two days of class, we meet at an indoor shooting range. Technically, this will not be the first time I have shot a gun. In high school, my friend Nick and I went with his father to a shooting range and gun store next to a prison in Jessup, Maryland. Nick’s dad rented the gun for us—a 9mm or maybe just a .22, I can’t remember. Either way, it was a semi-automatic pistol. The store clerk taught us how to shoot. First, he showed us how to snap the magazine into the bottom of the gun. Then he explained what he called “the push-pull technique”: Hold the gun with two hands, fingers interlaced. Push against the gun with the heel of one palm, pull toward your chest with the other. Apparently this steadies the gun. He reminded us to stand with our feet shoulder-width apart and our arms straight in front of us.

We took turns. Nick walked into the range and shot at a paper target with a silhouette of a human bust until the magazine was empty. Then he came out and handed me the gun, and I shot through the magazine. I don’t remember much about the whole experience except that I’d anticipated it would be a thrill. I’d seen Pulp Fiction; I knew how much swagger came with shooting a gun. But in the moment, I was terrified. Even just holding the gun, unloaded, made me sweat.

I am even more nervous now. Today feels more momentous than my onetime target practice in high school. Back then, I was casually trying out a new experience. This time, I am preparing for something in which I have already invested a great deal of time and energy.

Before the rifles are handed out, E.V. gives a stern recap of gun safety principles. Then the kids and I line up to receive our guns, and it occurs to me that if one of them is an undiagnosed psychotic, he could turn his back to the paper targets and open fire on all of us right here, right now. I shudder. But I remind myself again that this situation—blindly trusting the people around me to do the right thing and keep us all safe—is not remarkable. We all do it every day. When I lived in New York City, for example, a fellow subway passenger could have shoved me into an oncoming train, on purpose or by accident, at any moment. But for the most part I choose to believe, as I always have, that it won’t happen today.

Even so, as an adult hands out rifles to a group of eleven-and twelve-year-olds, this social contract into which I’ve placed my well-being is looking awfully fragile. Then I look at Grayson, who is somber and calm. I take a deep breath. These kids have shown me, for four weeks now, that they take guns more seriously than a lot of adults I’ve read about in the news. I heave away my doubts. It’s time to shoot.

I pull on a pair of clear plastic glasses, to protect my eyes in case the gun backfires, and what look like giant headphones, to protect my ears from the noise. The voices around me are muffled, and my heartbeat becomes the dominant sound. I lay my gun on a small desk and walk deep into the shooting range to pin up my paper target, a round bull’s-eye. My heart thumps ominously as I walk back to my gun. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. E.V. walks up and down the line of desks, helping us drape ourselves from the chair onto the desk and gun. The idea is to keep the rifle perfectly still by anchoring as much of my quivering body as possible—feet, butt, elbows, forearms—to the ground, the chair, the desk. I press my right cheek into the cold metal gun, peering down its black neck to line up the metal sights with my paper target. On the desk next to me is a wooden block with five little copper bullets poking out.

“When you are ready, go ahead and shoot all of your rounds,” E.V. barks to the class.

Immediately, guns start blasting. The booms are muffled by my headgear, and sound more like a heavy book dropping on the ground than an explosion. I take a deep breath and load my first round. I take another deep breath and pull the trigger. Bang! My face, arms, torso—everything that is connected to this gun—flinches for a moment. The gun is small by most standards, and according to E.V. it doesn’t kick, but this burst of motion still startles me. I smell gunpowder. I sit up and look around before reassuming my shooting position and reloading the gun. This time, I tense up, bracing myself for the jump when I shoot. I pull the trigger. Bang!

I reload the gun and before I have time to get settled, E.V. is crouched down beside me.

“You’re closing your eyes, Lily.”

No kidding.

“Concentrate on keeping them open when you pull the trigger. You’ll shoot straighter.” He stands up and heads to someone else in need of coaching.

Before each of the next three rounds, I try to take a few deep breaths, to calm my nerves and will myself to hold my eyes open. But with each shot, I flinch and shut my eyes.

When everyone has shot all five rounds, E.V. tells us to go get our targets and see how we did. I take off my earphones and relax when the sound of my heartbeat is eclipsed by the familiar squeaking of sneakers and whispering of kids. My target has five shots on it, one of which is actually touching the bull’s-eye. I’m proud of myself, but worry that my best shot was the first one, before my body knew to flinch with the trigger.

On the last day, after another session at the shooting range, we go into a classroom and take a multiple-choice test. As we are finishing, the kid next to me turns to his father, who is sitting behind us, and whispers, “Dad? How do we spell our last name?”

After a few minutes of grading tests, our instructors announce that each one of us has graduated from Hunter Safety. We cheer and give each other high fives. E.V. calls our names, one by one, and we walk up to shake his hand and receive a small cardstock certificate.

When I get home, I show off my certificate to Scott. Attached is a letter addressed “to the parents of the Hunter Safety graduate,” reminding them that safety should be a lifelong practice. By now, I have described so many of my classmates and recounted my funny interactions with them that Scott can’t help but find the whole Hunter Safety experience charming. By extension, he is starting to get excited about the idea of me hunting in the near future.

Scott’s growing enthusiasm has encouraged me to do something I’ve already put off for way too long: tell my parents about it. The next month, in October, they arrive in Bend for a weeklong visit. The first morning of their trip, we go to a small, empty coffee shop and settle into a pair of sofas. I can think of no way to ease the shock of this news, so I just spit it out.

“Mom and Dad?” I take a deep breath. “I’m learning to hunt.”

They both stare at me, expressionless. I think of one of my gay friends, and how he must have felt when he came out to his ultra-conservative parents. In fact, for one brief moment, this feels like a bizarre version of coming out: I’m shocking my hippie, blue-state parents with a revelation that they reserve for heartless conservatives.

My dad breaks the silence.

“Won’t you be the darling of the right wing,” he says, his voice dripping with disgust.

“Dad, it’s not what you think.”

We spend the next hour or so talking about my reasons for wanting to learn. I explain that the way I see it, hunting will make me a better environmentalist. To my parents’ credit, they listen and eventually soften up to the idea. My mother frets about the guns, but is somewhat reassured when I tell her about the Hunter Safety course. Both are amused by my stories about the kids. Over the next few years, they will become curious, enthusiastic boosters of my hunting expeditions. For now, though, the conversation stalls when they realize that I haven’t actually hunted anything yet.

“How do you know you’ll like it?” my mom asks.

“I don’t think I can know until I get out and try it.”

This is what Hunter Safety couldn’t teach me. Although I am slightly more comfortable handling a gun and I now have a basic familiarity with hunting rules, I still know nothing about how to actually hunt. It feels like I’ve earned my driver’s license without ever sitting behind the wheel and turning the key in the ignition.

CHAPTER 4

PULL

Later that fall, Scott and I decide to get married. I have no doubts whatsoever about Scott. But I am startled to find myself marrying someone so deeply rooted in central Oregon, a place that still feels foreign at times. By marrying Scott, I am setting down roots of my own, gripping this lean, rocky soil.

Friends from college ask me, “Do you think you’ll stay in Bend for the rest of your life?” I hyperventilate at the thought of staying anywhere for the rest of my life. “Who knows?” I answer. “Forever’s a long time.”

Occasionally, I worry about what will happen if my family remains far apart. My older brother lives in Brazil, my younger sister in Los Angeles. I fret about what will happen when my parents, who still live in Maryland, grow old. But most of the time, I shoo away these concerns. I have plenty of time, and so much will happen between now and then.

We rush to arrange a small wedding during the last week in December, when my parents and sister are already planning to be in Bend for Christmas. Nathan won’t be able to come from Brazil on such short notice. We make plans for a reception on the East Coast in May, and he vows to come to that.

“Maybe I’ll come visit you in Oregon, too,” he adds.

My family is all city folk, but none more so than Nathan. Even in Brazil, it took him years to stop dressing like an inner-city American, with baggy jeans and tan Timberland boots (he has since replaced them with baggy shorts and flip-flops). Yet for the last year or so, he has grown increasingly curious about my country life in Oregon. A voracious reader, he randomly discovered The River Why, by the author Scott and I heard speak shortly after we met. This novel has spurred his growing interest in fly-fishing—a theoretical one; he has never touched a fly rod. Scott accompanied me on a trip to visit Nathan earlier this year, so he knows what an odd figure my brother would cut in a pair of waders, with a fly rod in his hand. We joke about testing his touted interest in this technical and sometimes tedious sport by taking him on an overnight float trip. Nathan has little experience outdoors, amid bugs and mud. His fair skin would burn in the sun. His patience would fizzle against hours of fruitless casts and tangled line. Then again, Nathan has surprised me before.

In March, he calls with an announcement that eclipses my nuptials: His girlfriend, Luciana, is pregnant and due in September. Nathan loves children, and he has always wanted kids of his own. But this pregnancy wasn’t planned, and he stammers as he spills the news. At the end of our conversation, he apologizes because he won’t be able to make it to our reception.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, too drunk on newlywed love to take offense. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“No.” He sounds far more disappointed than I am. “It is a big deal.”

Nathan and I have a relationship that swings like a pendulum. For a time, while he was in high school and I was in junior high, we would stay up late together, watching reruns of The World’s Strongest Man on cable. We added our own commentary—trying to mimic the contestants’ accents—and made each other laugh so hard that we struggled to breathe. Then there were years like his first year of college (and mine of high school) when we could barely look at each other without resorting to yelling. Since he moved to Brazil and I to Bend, we’ve slowly grown apart, and our relationship has settled into an unfamiliar coolness.

The news of Nathan’s impending fatherhood highlights the distance between us. Not knowing what to say to each other when we talk on the phone, we resort to mostly small talk. It’s hard to remain close—even harder to close a growing gap—when we live so far apart. But I don’t worry too much about this. It’s part of the ebb and flow of our relationship, I tell myself. Nathan is family—he’ll always be there for me, I’ll always be there for him. One of these days, something will spark new feelings of closeness and we’ll swing back together.

Before I know it, 2007 has arrived and halfway passed, and if I’m ever going to hunt I had better get started. As the summer days shrink, I hatch out a plan. I will try hunting for birds, then move on—if I’m still interested—to big game. My reasons are simple: A smaller animal is less overwhelming and scary. And bird hunting has the added appeal of using dogs as helpers. But one fact is unavoidable: I will need a gun.

When Scott’s family first heard that I was interested in hunting, several of them offered to loan me their heirloom guns—if I’d keep them at my house. I declined. I hated the idea of storing a firearm in my house. For weeks, I brainstormed ways to learn to hunt that did not involve a gun in my home. I considered borrowing one. Or renting a storage unit. Or just keeping my gun in the trunk of my car. Eventually, it became clear that to hunt with any seriousness I would need to own at least one gun, and the responsible thing was to keep it in my house. Locked up, of course, and unloaded, with the ammunition stored someplace else.

There are a few different gun stores in town. I decide to try the biggest outdoors store first, figuring it will have the greatest selection.

I walk in intimidated. The gun department is a long counter with racks of guns hanging on the wall behind it. The area is crowded with men and teenage boys holding different guns and taking them apart on the counter. I stand back and wait for fifteen minutes or so until a salesman is available.

“What can I get you?” he asks brusquely.

“Uh, I’m not sure. I’m looking for a 20-gauge shotgun.”

“Okay, shotguns are over here.” We walk down the counter. “Is it for you?”

“Yes. It’s my first gun.”

He nods. It’s obvious from the guy’s deflated facial expression that I’m the worst possible client. I will require time, hand-holding and detailed explanations and then spend little, if any, money. I won’t be able to gab excitedly about the new semi-automatic Beretta, like the man standing to my right is doing with the other, luckier salesman.

“What will you use it for?”

I don’t understand what he means. What does anyone use a gun for?

“Um, hunting? Birds?”

He sighs. “What kind of birds?”

“I’m not sure. All different kinds?”

“You should get a 12-gauge.” He turns around, pulls a gun off the rack behind him and places it on the counter in front of me. “This is a good entry-level gun. It’s a pump-action. It comes in a wood stock, black or camo.”

“Well, I think I’d rather have a 20-gauge.”

“Why? A bigger gun is more versatile.”

“Uh, well… He’s getting impatient. “I don’t want to have to carry such a big, heavy gun. And I want as little kick as possible.”

“A 12-gauge kicks less than a 20-gauge,” he says matter-of-factly.

This will turn out to be a recurring theme in my gun-related education: Hunters disagree about what makes a gun kick against your shoulder when it fires. Some stick to the intuitive rule that the bigger the gun, the harder it kicks. Others have elaborate theories about how the energy from a wider shotgun shell somehow dissipates more quickly, sending a lighter thud into the shooter’s shoulder. I’m sure it’s true that an expensive, well-designed gun shoots with less of a jolt than a cheap one. But later, when I have shot several different guns, I will reach the same general conclusion I’d suspected all along: To spare your shoulder, shoot a smaller gun. I will be glad that I held my ground with this salesman.

“Let’s just pretend I was going to buy a 20-gauge. Which would you recommend?”

He caves, and plunks down a couple of guns with the muzzles pointing behind the counter, toward him.

Nervously, I pick one up, turn it over and put it back down. I’m not sure what to do with it. The salesman smiles. Finally, I’ve offered him something: amusement.

“Well? Whaddya think?”

I don’t know what to think. Other than price, I have no idea how to compare these guns. I’m not even sure how to hold them. I thank the salesman and leave the store. At another large outdoors store, the salesman is more helpful.

Instead of trying to talk me out of a 20-gauge, he picks one out. As he places it on the counter, he points out the pump action and other features.

“You can’t really go wrong with this one,” he concludes. “It’s well made; it’ll last a lifetime.”

“May I pick it up?”

“Sure. You’ve never shot a shotgun before, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s real easy,” he says, not missing a beat.

He plants the butt of the gun in my right shoulder and softly presses my head down until my right cheek touches cold metal.

“There you go.”

He points out two small metal bumps, one from the end of the barrel closest to my face, the other rising off the tip of the muzzle. To aim the gun, he tells me, I need to line up those two points and use them to underline my target.

He stands up straight.

“Now point it at me,” he says.

“What?” I lift my head off the gun. “No, I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Well, how else am I gonna check if you’re holding it right?”

This feels like an important moment, one that could someday be reenacted and videotaped to scare future Hunter Safety students. Rule number one in Hunter Safety class: Always treat a gun as if it were loaded. Rule number two: Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction at all times. That class, those rules, they are my defining experiences as a hunter so far. They are the only principles I have. If I breach them now, simply to avoid looking like the hand-wringing ninny that I am, what do I have left?

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

He holds his hands up, as if to say, I give up.

The salesman gets out a few other weapons, too. He determines that the “youth” models fit me better than the adult-size guns.

“Lots of ladies buy youth models, because they fit the smaller frame better.” He seems concerned that I’ll be too self-conscious to seriously consider the smaller size. But I’m actually reassured by the idea of buying a gun meant for a child. It feels safer, somehow. Again, I thank the salesman and leave empty-handed.

A few days later, I try a small shop closer to my house that sells shotguns and fly-fishing equipment. There is just one employee, a tall, round man with a trim white beard. His shirt is missing one button. I’m the only customer, and I tell him that I’m looking to buy my first gun, a 20-gauge shotgun. Nothing fancy, just something for a beginning hunter.

“Sure,” he says. He turns around and selects a gun from the rack behind the counter. “I’ve got a Benelli here that might be just the thing.”

In an instant, he shows me that this time will be different: “Here, I’ll open the action,” he says, “so you can see that it’s not loaded. And then we’ll just leave it open the whole time we’re handling the gun.”

The salesman’s name is Russ, and he’s a retired music teacher who is so by-the-book that he might as well be a Hunter Safety instructor in his spare time. This puts me at ease, and I immediately vow to buy my gun from him.

He explains that the reason he likes this gun is because it’s so simple. It’s a pump-action, which means that you push the sheath of the gun forward to move the shell into the chamber. There are no semi-automatic parts to turn finicky after years of use or during poor weather. Next, Russ shows me how to take the gun apart—yes, it actually breaks into pieces—and then reassemble it. Apparently this comes in handy during cleaning.

He also shows me how to hold the gun correctly, and he does so without making me aim the muzzle at his face.

“Are you right-handed?” When I nod, he asks, “Do you know which eye is dominant?”

“My right eye.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.” During Hunter Safety, we learned how to determine this. With both arms outstretched and the backs of your hands facing you, make a triangle with your thumbs and pointer fingers and center the triangle on some fixed object at least fifteen feet away. With your eyes focused on that object through the frame of your hands, slowly draw your hands all the way back to your face. Your hands will end up circling one eye: This is the dominant one.

Russ tells me that women are more likely than men to be right-handed but left-eye-dominant, or vice versa. Men almost always have their dominant eye and hand on the same side.

I notice that I’m relaxed enough to remember all the questions I couldn’t think of when I was nervously trying to keep up with the last two salesmen.

Although he doesn’t have a youth gun in stock, Russ agrees that a smaller gun would probably fit me better. He doesn’t pressure me to buy anything. But he does suggest that whenever I do get a gun, I go to a nearby gun club to practice shooting it. It turns out Russ is a competitive trapshooter. He even offers to lend me some videos on shotgun shooting technique.

While I’m there, I notice the other, fancier shotguns. They have stocks of smooth chestnut, unlike the matte-black metal one I’m considering buying. One has a metal inlay of two dogs—one gold and one black—flushing a bird. Russ opens the action and hands it to me so I can examine it. I rub my fingers over the smooth wood and finely etched metal. It has never occurred to me before that a gun could be a work of art. I flip over the price tag—more than twenty-five hundred dollars—and quickly hand it back.

When I leave the shop, I feel upbeat for the first time in a while. With someone like Russ helping to escort me into the world of hunting, perhaps I will gain admission after all. The next day, I call Russ and place an order for the most basic gun I looked at, a Benelli Nova pump-action shotgun in the youth size. Later, I drop off a deposit, half of the gun’s $419 cost. This is not a small purchase for me. The gun costs about what I bring home in a week of work as a reporter.

A week later, when Russ calls to say the gun has arrived, my first thought is: Shit. Am I really ready to be a gun owner? But Russ sounds genuinely giddy, and a little of his excitement can’t help but rub off on me, even over the phone.

I swing by the shop after work. Russ waves to me as I walk in, then turns and pulls a long white box—like an extra-long board game container—out from behind the counter. I had no idea guns came in boxes.

“You are gonna love this little gu-un,” he sings. I do feel excited to get my hands on it, to see if it really fits and feels as light as I hope.

But first, the paperwork. Name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, Social Security number. A long list of yes-or-no questions about whether I’ve ever been convicted of various crimes. Easy stuff. Next, Russ dips the fingers of my right hand in ink before rolling each one, sideways, onto the page. He looks over the sheet to make sure I haven’t left any questions blank. He asks to see my driver’s license, which he compares with my answers on the page. Then he picks up the phone and dials.

“This’ll just take a sec…

As Russ reads my answers out loud, my palms sweat. For a moment, I let myself imagine: What if I fail the background check? But before I can muster a believable image of prison, Russ hangs up the phone.

“You’re all set.”

He sends me home with my brand-new gun and three borrowed DVDs about how to shoot a shotgun. In them, champion shooter Todd Bender demonstrates proper shooting technique. The first thing I notice in the videos is that Todd really smashes his face against the gun when he shoots. His face is also highly asymmetrical, and I wonder if these two things are related.

A couple of weeks later, I meet Russ at the Redmond Rod and Gun Club to shoot clays. I park my car in the gravel lot, at the end of a long row of American-made pickup trucks. I recently sold my Ford pickup and bought a used Toyota Echo, and it occurs to me that I might fit in better if I hadn’t placed so much value on fuel economy. As I walk around to the trunk to get my gun, Russ sees me and waves. He saunters over wearing an old, broken-in hunting vest. The pockets nearly burst, they’re stuffed so full of lead shotgun shells.

Seeing Russ’s vest reminds me that I don’t have a good way to tote around the shells I purchased a few days earlier. I grab my down coat from the passenger’s seat and unzip the pockets. I throw it on, pick up my gun and shells, and trot after Russ, who is joining a group of older men lounging around a picnic table. The youngest ones are about Russ’s age, probably late fifties or early sixties. The oldest are in their eighties. Most of them are wearing baseball caps that announce membership in a veterans’ group or other military affiliation. Russ introduces me. I shake their hands and some—the hardest of hearing—ask me to repeat my name.

The club itself is just a flat expanse of sagebrush that has been transformed, shot by shot, into a barren patch of gravel and lead. A trailer makes up the office, where I sign in and pay three dollars per round. Several rickety buildings that look like outhouses are sprinkled around the property. These shacks house the machines that fling clay pigeons into the air to replicate flying birds.

There are several games of clay-pigeon shooting, including trap, sporting clays, five-stand and skeet. In each one, shooters move between stations and shoot “birds”—clay disks—that are flung from various positions. Trap is the simplest: A shooter takes two shots from each of five stations, taking aim at two clays from each. Trapshooting first developed in England in the 1700s, and involved shooting live pigeons as they were released from cages called traps. Today trapshooters take aim at standardized four-and five-sixteenth-inch disks, painted fluorescent colors and hurled at about forty-two miles per hour. Inside the trap house, the throwing mechanism oscillates back and forth, so although the shooter knows the general flight path, he doesn’t know exactly where the pigeon will go.

There’s a particular etiquette to a shooting range. When you aren’t shooting, for example, you rest your gun in a wooden gun stand, unloaded. At first, this bothers me. I’m not comfortable leaving my new, expensive weapon lying in a rack where anyone could take it or tamper with it. But the shooting range is a little bit like a fraternity. Trust is important. And it’s impolite to pace around carrying a gun while everyone else is sitting unarmed. Besides, I quickly learn that my 20-gauge youth model is downright laughable to these über-shooters, many of whom own custom-made shotguns designed specifically for trap. In the rack it goes.

As a group of people shoot, Russ narrates the game of trap: Five people at a time participate—one at each station, arranged in a semicircle. Each person loads two shells at a time. When everyone is ready, the person on the far left shoulders his gun and yells, “Pull!” A sensor detects the noise and releases one pigeon from one trap. The shooter shoots it. The shooter yells, “Pull!” again and shoots a second pigeon. Now he steps back a bit and the person to his right takes a turn. Everyone gets to shoot twice from each station.

Soon my name is called. I run to get my gun. I step up to the station and shoot an entire game of trap without hitting a single disk. Even my voice when I yell “Pull!” sounds inadequate—higher-pitched and more tentative than the others, as if I’m asking a question instead of barking a command. When it’s over, I slink back to the picnic table. Russ pats me on the shoulder.

“Lily, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” An older, shorter man is standing next to him. He holds out his hand. “This is Del, and he’s one of the best trapshooters in the whole country.”

Del walks me away from the group, asks me to shoulder my gun, and gives me a few pointers. Some of it contradicts what I learned from Russ’s videos. The videos spent a lot of time explaining how to lead a moving target—in other words, how far ahead of the pigeon you must aim to hit the disk where it is instead of hitting thin air where the disk recently was. Del waves off this advice.

“Don’t lead the bird,” he says. “You’re standing close enough to it, just lock on to it—move with it for a second to make sure you’re locked on—and pull the trigger.”

Next time when my name is called, Del walks to the trap station with me. He stands a few feet behind me. When my turn comes, I take a deep breath. “Pull!”

The bird flies out of the house. I lock in on it and pull the trigger. Pow! The clay sprays apart like a firework.

“Good girl,” Del says.

“Pull!” I lock in on the pigeon and pull the trigger. Bang! This time, I miss. The clay sails into the sagebrush, unharmed. Del steps toward me and whispers some advice.

“Keep your weight forward; you want to stand right over the gun, not behind it.”

I shoot a few more rounds of trap and, with Del’s help, hit about half of the pigeons. He congratulates me and I thank him for his patience. Over the next month, as I go back to the range to practice, Del waves and occasionally offers a few words of advice.

Surprisingly, none of the men at the range hunt. Their sport is shooting, not hunting. Every year, a few weeks before hunting season, hunters like me flood the range. The rest of the time, these men—and a handful of women—have the place to themselves. They arrange car pools to shooting competitions. They rib one another. They drool over one another’s guns.

It’s not uncommon to meet hunters and non-hunters who fetishize their guns. They name their weapons and own more than they can possibly use. I write about a burglary in which more than fifty guns are stolen from the La Pine home of one couple. Turns out they had an entire room devoted to firearm storage. Others, like Scott’s family, end up with heirloom guns that they don’t use but can’t bear to sell or give away.

Andy starts calling my shotgun “The Peacemaker,” poking fun at its diminutive size in all-business black. Eventually, I will call it that at times, too, though I never feel emotionally attached to the gun itself. Most people I hunt with will carry more elegant-looking guns and ask when I’m going to upgrade mine. Yet I will remain satisfied with my plain-Jane shotgun. It does its job. I see no need to glorify it.

Soon I agree to take in an heirloom shotgun from Scott’s cousin. It’s a 12-gauge, which will allow me to hunt bigger birds. I try not to think about the fact that I now live in a house with two guns.

CHAPTER 5

GUTS

I awake in a panic. It’s the first day of September and I’m about to go on my first hunt for doves. As I wait for Andy to pick me up, I joke to Scott that it’s symbolically appropriate for my first hunting experience to involve shooting at the international icon for peace. (This image was appropriated back in 1949, when a Pablo Picasso lithograph of a dove was selected as the emblem for that year’s World Peace Council meeting in Paris.)

I won’t be downing any birds, however. I’ve packed a water bottle and lots of neutral-colored clothing but not my gun. Leaving it at home is a strategic excuse to merely observe the other hunters. Despite all of my preparations, the idea of killing something still terrifies me. I don’t want to be pressured by a group of seasoned hunters into doing something I’m not ready to do. Or, perhaps worse, chickening out in front of them.

Andy picks me up this morning and drives us to a farmhouse, where about a dozen people are going to hunt doves on a privately owned farm. Later, I learn that being invited to join this troop is a bit like drawing Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. If you know someone who owns a large piece of land and lets you hunt on it, you automatically gain two advantages. One, you’re not competing with other hunters for space, like you do on public land. And two, the owner of the land can act as a guide, sharing hard-earned secrets, such as where the animals tend to bed down and along which paths they travel and when.

It’s chilly but clear when we pull up, and Marc, the owner, invites us onto his kitchen deck for a cup of hot coffee and a slice of store-bought coffee cake. Andy chats with the other hunters. I take a few bites of cake but I’m too nervous to eat more. I pace across the deck, peering into the sky for a glimpse of dove.

Mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) are considered migratory birds, though some of them stay put year-round. In Oregon, dove hunting is allowed for about one month in early fall, just as the birds are beginning to fly south to spend the colder part of the year in Mexico, Arizona or California.

Across the country, doves are a particularly popular hunting bird. In the 1970s and 1980s, biologists estimated that hunters killed fifty million doves a year—more than all other game birds combined. Despite the high rate of “harvest”—that’s biospeak for death by hunters—doves remain abundant throughout the country. Car accidents, animal predators, disease, weather and miscellaneous causes account for four to five times as many dove deaths as hunters do. One 1993 study, for example, estimated that domestic cats were responsible for about 70 percent of them.

Last week, in preparation for this day, I purchased my first hunting license. Across the country, wildlife is the property of the state in which it resides. That means each state gets to set its own rules for hunting and fishing. (The one exception is for federally listed threatened or endangered species, which fall under the purview of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.) It also means that even if a dove lands in my yard, it’s not my dove. It belongs to Oregon, and if I kill it without a license or out of season, I’m poaching, or stealing that dove from the state.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses in the 1950s. License sales peaked in 1982, when about 16.7 million Americans paid for the right to hunt. That number has slipped steadily since. By 2006, about 12.5 million people hunted, a 25 percent drop even as the population grew more than 30 percent.

Buying a license was easy. I walked up to the counter at a sporting goods store and gave them my driver’s license. Because I’ve bought fishing licenses each year I’ve lived here, my information was already in the state’s database. The clerk printed out a license, and I signed it, paid for it, and headed home.

As the morning warms up, Marc walks us down to a flat gravel road that divides an irrigation pond from a grove of juniper trees. He explains that he’s been watching the birds for weeks now, memorizing their routine. The doves are currently eating grains off the floor of nearby fields. Doves are adaptable eaters, munching on a wide variety of seeds, grasses and forbs. At about nine thirty each morning, they fly through the junipers, parallel to this gravel lane, he says. The hunters spread out across the road. I stay close to Andy but make sure I keep a few feet behind him. Everyone is fumbling with shells and loading their guns. I’m worried about the guns. There are too many for me to monitor the direction of each muzzle. To calm down, I look instead to the horizon: a small grassy hill to our right. It doesn’t help, though, because I’m also worried about the doves. I hope some of them—how will I know how many are enough?—survive the shootings. Then I worry that this means I’m not a hunter, and never will be. After all, there can’t be too many people who wake up early to go on a hunt and then spend the morning fearing for their prey.

My thoughts are interrupted by a stage whisper from Marc: They’re coming. I squint. Yes, tiny spots are soaring over the hill. Doves. I roll my foam earplugs between my fingers and squish them into my ears. Andy shoulders his gun.

A flock of doves is sometimes called a dule or a dole. There are places in South America where dules can reach tens of thousands of birds. Here, there aren’t that many—a hundred, maybe. As the birds reach the trees in front of us, I notice that when they stop flapping their wings and glide through the air, they strike a pose immediately recognizable from any peace flag or greeting card (but without olive branches clutched in their beaks). Andy and the other hunters begin blasting. I try to control my shoulders, to avoid shuddering with each shot.

The doves are fast, fancy fliers. They glide, then accelerate without warning. It’s hard to tell from my angle, but they seem to weave left and right as they fly. This is why ammunition manufacturers love dove season: It takes a lot of shots to bag one bird. After a minute or two, when a few of the birds have fallen from the sky and the rest have flown to safety, everyone lowers their guns. Andy heads into the trees to find the birds he has downed. I follow him. I’m having trouble hearing him, so I remove my earplugs. We hike down among the trees, and I relax a little. Andy thinks one of his birds has fallen in this general vicinity.

Suddenly the shooting resumes. Another dule has arrived along the same flight path. Andy waves, then yells, “Hey! We’re down here!

“I just want to make sure they see us,” he explains to me. He doesn’t look alarmed, as I am.

“Here it is,” he says as he reaches down and picks up a bird. “I’m pretty sure I got another one, too.”

We pace around, but instead of looking at the forest floor, I keep looking at the bird dangling from Andy’s clutch. He holds it casually, upside down, and the bird’s head flops like a ball on a limp string.

Andy finds the second bird, and as he bends down to grab it, I hear what sound like heavy raindrops. Andy raises his eyebrows.

“Let’s get outta here,” he says.

The dripping sound was shotgun pellets hitting juniper branches as they fell from the sky. Some hunter is aiming too close to our vicinity for Andy’s comfort. We walk briskly back to the road. I would sprint but I don’t want Andy to know how scared I really am. When we arrive, Andy hands me the birds so he can shoot at the next dule.

I hold each bird by its neck, which is no thicker than a Sharpie and surprisingly warm. One at a time, I lift them up and examine them. The birds are small, with blue eyelids. Other than their tails and wings, which are mottled black and white, their bodies are covered in the tiniest grayish brown feathers I have ever seen. Their fanned tails are outlined in white, as if the edges were dipped in paint.

Later, Andy shoots another dove and finds it still alive, twitching slightly. He calmly clutches the animal with two fists and twists, like he’s opening a jar. Just like that, its neck breaks and the animal goes limp. I know it’s the humane thing to do, but his calm shocks me. I try to imagine what it would feel like to wring a bird’s neck with my own hands. By comparison, shooting it from twenty yards away seems so detached it might be easy.

In the early afternoon, we gather around a trash can to clean the birds, which, it turns out, we’ll be eating for lunch. A short, pudgy older hunter shows me how to do it. He grabs one of the birds from a nearby pile and holds it in one hand, on its back.

“These birds are so small, you don’t bother cleaning the whole thing,” he tells me.

I stare at the tiny, perfect bird cradled in his hand. It has no blood on it, no sign of the metal pellet that caused its death. Its eyelids are closed, which makes the animal look cold but peaceful.

“So you just breast it out, taking these two parts.” He touches his thumb and pointer finger to either side of the bird’s breastbone. He clutches the two areas he just touched, one with each hand, and rips, violently. I flinch. The skin tears with a little zip, like the sound of splitting pants. Inside, there is no blood, just taut breast muscle. It’s purple, much darker than the thighs of a chicken.

“Then you fillet the breasts,” he says, cradling the bird on its back again, now with its loose skin dangling on either side of his hand. He takes a small knife in his other hand and draws it along the breastbone, until he has separated one breast from the bird’s body. He drops the dark purple slab—only slightly larger than a chicken nugget—into a stainless-steel bowl that the other hunters have already filled halfway with their boneless, skinless dove breasts. Some of these fillets have a small, dark spot on the muscle, announcing the entry point of a pellet. Once the piece of steel is removed, the meat will be as good as new.

“And that’s all there is to it,” he says, starting in on the second cutlet, which he then plops into the bowl. He drops the rest of the animal into the trash can and wipes his hands and the knife on a small towel.

“You’re not going to do anything with the rest of it?” I ask, peering into the can at the pile of half-emptied birds.

“Nah, there’s no meat left,” someone else pipes in.

“Here ya go,” my instructor says as he hands me a bird.

I pinch the skin covering the breast with both hands, then look back at the man.

“Just tear it?”

“Yep.”

I jerk my hands apart and am surprised at how easily the skin rips. It’s no thicker or stronger than a green oak leaf. How does an animal this fragile survive the bumps and scrapes of daily life?

The bearded man nods approvingly and hands me his knife. I pierce the muscle with the tip and start feeling around for the bone as a guide. Satisfied that I’m following orders, he picks up another bird and rips into it.

By the time I’m halfway done with my second bird, the two or three other hunters have cleaned the entire pile—thirty or so doves in all.

Marc takes the bowls into the kitchen. There, he chops the meat finely, mixes it with ground chicken thighs and stir-fries it in a wok. Half an hour later, we are sitting on his sunny deck, spooning the meat, which is drenched in sweet soy sauce, onto crispy rice noodles and eating it, wrapped in iceberg lettuce leaves, with our hands. Despite my hesitance about eating it, the meal is delicious.

On the car ride home, Andy tells me he’s disappointed that, beneath the sauce and the ground chicken, we didn’t really get to find out what dove meat tastes like. I don’t admit that after watching the slaughter, I didn’t have much appetite and felt grateful that the resulting meal didn’t taste any more exotic than chicken, my lifelong comfort food.

I stare out the window and wonder, yet again, if I actually have what it takes to kill an animal. Just two generations ago, almost any American would have answered this question about herself long before turning twenty-seven. Even those who didn’t farm or ranch went to butcher shops where they saw their meat before it was hacked into roasts or ground into burger. They knew what went on behind the scenes. In a very short amount of time, we have become completely detached from the gory, grisly truth about what we eat.

More than 96 percent of Americans—298 million of us, give or take a few hundred thousand—ate at least one piece of meat last week. Most of us ate meat more than once a day. Strips of bacon with breakfast. A sliced turkey sandwich at lunch. A quick snack of beef jerky. Grilled chicken breast for dinner.

As a nation, we raise and slaughter nearly ten billion land animals each year—more than one million each hour—for food. That portions out to about two-thirds of a pound of meat per person per day, or 241 pounds a year, which happens to be more than twice my body weight. It’s also more than twice the international average. The average American today eats eighty pounds more meat per year than in 1942.

On a global scale, our appetite for meat has literally changed the face of the earth. Add up the weight of all land animals on the planet—monkeys, mice, elephants—and domestic livestock accounts for one out of every five pounds. Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface is now used to raise meat, either for grazing or growing grain for feed. All of that land was once habitat for wildlife and native plants, making livestock one of the main reasons why, every hour, an average of three species go extinct from our planet. The meat industry is a leading cause of deforestation, erosion and water pollution. It’s responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than transportation. The production of merely 3.8 ounces of beef—enough for just one McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburger—releases about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a sedan emits by driving eighteen miles. And that’s not including the gas it takes to get to the drive-through window.

Unless you eat wild game or raise your own meat, you can bet that the meat on your plate lived a miserable, confined existence. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes in his vegetarian treatise, Eating Animals, “We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film.” Still, it’s easy to live a well-fed life in the U.S. without thinking about where any of that meat came from. As a lifelong meat eater, I feel a responsibility to see for myself that uncomfortable thing that has always been at the heart of a human diet, since long before meat animals were domesticated and their upbringing industrialized: death.

CHAPTER 6

FIRST KILL

When I read about a hunting workshop offered by the state, I jump at the chance to enroll. It’s part of a series of workshops—on fishing, camping, paddling and the like—bearing the unfortunate name “Becoming an Outdoors Woman” and aimed at females with little to no outdoors experience. For forty dollars, a woman may hunt for real, live pheasants with the help and advice of experienced volunteers, all of whom are male and own well-trained bird dogs. As with the dove hunt, my main goal is to leave with a better idea of what it takes to find and kill an animal in the wild. Actually shooting a pheasant would be a bonus. Or perhaps, if I feel as guilty as I expect to, a curse.

The workshop starts at eight in the morning in a cement barracks-style building where we eat donuts, sip coffee and listen to a state wildlife employee lecture us on hunting safety. Next he shows us photos and explains how to identify the gender of a pheasant. This is important because we are only supposed to shoot males, sparing the females to lay eggs and raise babies. As with a lot of birds, the two sexes hardly look like the same species. Roosters are gaudy, with a shimmering teal head with a scarlet patch around each eye, a white collar and bodies speckled with copper, blue, purple, brown and white. Hens are plain by comparison, with mottled brown-and-white feathers covering the whole body. Both sexes have long, pointed tail feathers with horizontal brown stripes.

The state employee gives us no other background on the animal, so it isn’t until I return home that I learn ring-necked pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) are native only to Asia. Today the birds are found in farmlands all over the country, although populations in many places have declined since the 1960s. Wildlife biologists say that small American farms used to contain rugged, overgrown vegetation along the fence lines. Now, as many of those fields have been fully tilled and consolidated to make operations more efficient, there is little nearby cover left for the birds to hide and nest in.

We’re in the Klamath Wildlife Area, a state-owned piece of land in southern Oregon whose primary goal is providing habitat for wildlife, especially birds. There are a few wild pheasants here, but mostly we’ll be shooting the pen-raised birds that were released last week for a similar workshop.

We head to a nearby field to practice shooting some clay pigeons, then divide into small groups and head out to hunt for real, live birds. At first, the morning feels similar to that of the dove hunt, full of nervous excitement. This time, of course, there’s more gravity because I’m carrying a weapon. Another, smaller, difference is that all of the other gun toters are women. But that doesn’t help me feel like I belong. All morning, I keep thinking: I’m not one of these people. These other women may not know what they’re doing, but they seem confident that it’s a good thing to do. Their faces strain with concentration. Each of them wants, without question, to shoot a bird. Me, I’m still not sure.

We hike along a dirt road, swing ourselves over a barbed-wire fence and start picking our way up a small, treed hill that Gerry, our volunteer guide, finds promising. We spread out and walk side by side in a straight line. This way, if a bird flushes in front of us, nobody is caught in the line of fire. This does little to allay my fears of being shot, however. I’m on the end of the row, with three other women to my right, and it’s easy to imagine a scenario that ends with an accidental shooting. What if a bird flushes to my left, and an eager hunter swings and shoots before noticing me? What if a bird flushes between me and the hunter to the right, and we shoot each other? My imagination gets plenty of time to run wild because despite hiking for over an hour, we still haven’t seen any birds.

Until we’re halfway up the hill, that is, and my doomsday-dreaming is interrupted by some commotion to my right. Tessa’s tail is wagging in double time, and Gerry is getting excited. Before I have time to make sense of it all, there’s a loud squawk and some thrashing in the tall grass. A huge bird rises like a phoenix in front of us.

“It’s a rooster!” Gerry yells. “Shoot it!” I lift the long neck of my gun off its rest on my shoulder and settle its butt into my collarbone before noticing that the entire weapon is upside down.

Bang!

I haven’t even turned my gun over and Lori has already popped the bird. It flops into the tall grass and Tessa jogs over to it.

“Wow! Nice one!” The group convenes around Lori. Tessa drops the bird in front of Gerry. He tosses it a few feet in front of the other hunting dog, seventeen-year-old Teesha. She picks it up in her mouth and proudly walks it back to us. Gerry takes the bird from Teesha’s mouth and hands it to Lori.

She admires it for a moment, then slides it into a large pocket on the back of her hunting vest. Its talons and the tip of its tail poke out an opening on the side. We spread out again and resume hunting. This time, to be prepared, I carry the gun horizontally.

Ring-necked pheasants don’t fly very well, and prefer to run from danger. This makes them particularly easy for dogs to track, because they leave a scented trail on the ground. When the birds do lift off, the wings betray their struggle with loud, clumsy flapping sounds that startle an unsuspecting hiker or a hunter who has allowed herself to daydream for a moment.

Sometimes Gerry sees a bird land in some bushes, far away, but his dogs don’t notice. So he pulls a slender whistle from his pocket and blows into it—its sound is imperceptible to mere human ears, but the dogs stop in their tracks and turn to him. Gerry swings out one arm in the direction of the bird. The dogs immediately head off in the direction he pointed.

I think of my pet dog, Sylvia. I rescued her from a pound just a few months after moving in with Scott. She’s a black mutt with lots of retriever instincts; nothing makes her happier than chasing a tennis ball or catching a Frisbee. She knows how to sit, lie down, stay, come and go to her bed on command. She even fetches the newspaper each morning and brings it inside. Yet she still hasn’t mastered the correct response to pointing. If I drop a grain of rice on the floor and point to it, she nudges my finger with her nose. I have to lower my hand until my finger is practically touching the rice before she sees and eats it.

So much training goes into hunting dogs, they don’t usually hit their peak until five or six years of age. As a dog owner who has poured countless hours into training, I am amazed at what these dogs are capable of. I can’t even fathom how I would convince Sylvia to tolerate the bang of a gun. As we hike, I ask Gerry how he trained Tessa and Teesha, who are German shorthaired pointers.

“It’s easy,” he responds, adding that any dog can overcome gun-shyness; all it takes is patience and—these are my words—tough love.

“There needs to be two of you,” he starts. “And then what you do is, you have someone bang two pots or pans together at the exact moment that you place the dog’s food on the ground. If the dog flinches or runs away, immediately pick up the bowl. The dog skips that meal. At the next feeding, try it again.”

I immediately picture Sylvia, emaciated from fear and starvation. I take a deep breath, trying to prevent my disapproval from leaping into my throat while I ask: What if the dog doesn’t get it?

“I’ve never, in all my years, seen a dog take more than three tries,” Gerry says before continuing with the lesson plan.

Once the dog is acclimated to the sound of banging pots, you have someone shoot an air gun or a BB gun when you put down the food. This technique rewards the dog (with a big bowl of food and praise from her owner) for managing her fear as well as for tolerating the bang of the gun.

“I know it sounds mean,” Gerry concedes, “but it works really well. Pretty soon the dogs associate gunshots with something really good.”

It’s Rambo’s version of Pavlov’s bell, and if Gerry’s dogs are any indication, it works. These dogs don’t just tolerate guns—they get so excited when they hear shots fired that they drool and whine to be let loose. In fact, the dogs are making this day much more enjoyable than I could have imagined. They are enthusiastic and happy, and when one of them sidles up to me, wagging her tail, I can’t help but feel enthusiastic, too. Hunting is their instinct; it’s in their blood. These dogs have never known hunting without humans—and guns.

We humans certainly benefit from the dogs. I don’t have to try it to know that bird hunting without a dog would be far less efficient. I would have to systematically walk up and down an area that looks like good habitat, covering every square foot and hoping to stumble across a bird. A dog, on the other hand, simply has to stick her nose in the air. She can catch a whiff of a bird who’s more than half a mile away. Her stubby tail oscillates slightly, like the meter on a stereo with the volume turned down. The dog trots in large, loose circles until she finds bird scent on the ground. Then she zigs and zags, nose to the ground, with her tail wiggling faster as she closes in on the animal.

The hunter pays special attention to that wiggly little tail. It dictates where to walk and when to pick up the gun and get ready to shoot. Nose to the ground, as the dog homes in on the bird she focuses on one small area, tail still wagging furiously. When the dog’s tail freezes, she has found the bird.

A good pointer will stare directly into the bird’s eyes, Gerry tells me. If she remains perfectly still, the bird usually does, too. The bird is hypnotized by fear. Once the hunter is close by and ready, she releases the dog, who flushes the bird. The bird hoists its heavy body into the air, flapping loudly, feet dangling, tail cocked. The hunter has a couple of seconds to get off a shot before the bird flies out of range, usually gliding to a landing a few hundred yards away and disappearing under a tree or some heavy brush. So many elements—the bird, the dog, the hunter, the gun—must harmonize for a successful hunt.

We are wading through tall grass and soft mud when Tessa locks in on a pheasant tucked in a ditch beside the road. She holds the bird for what seems like an hour, while Nancy and I make our way over to her.

“Go past those tules,” Gerry whispers, his eyes locked on Tessa.

Nancy and I start walking toward the dog. As soon as we’re out of Gerry’s earshot, I whisper: “What are tules?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

We both giggle. For the first time, I relax a little. Maybe I do have something in common with these hunter-women, after all.

Gerry holds out his hand, motioning for us to stop. We raise our guns to our shoulders.

“Go ahead and switch your safety off,” Gerry whispers.

I place my thumb over the switch and hesitate. I vaguely remember learning, in my hunter education class, to keep the safety on until the bird flies. But Gerry knows so much more than I do. Maybe he’s right.

My right thumb works the safety forward to the “off” position, ready to fire. Then I stand, frozen, while Gerry asks, for the umpteenth time, if we are ready.

“Once I release her, you’ll just have a second to shoot,” he says.

“I’m ready,” Nancy and I say. I want to tell Gerry to hurry up and release the dog already, but saying anything more might break my concentration.

My gun feels so heavy and I’m clenching the barrel so tightly that my left arm starts shaking. My right cheek, pressing the gun down into my shoulder, isn’t helping.

Suddenly I hear rustling and frantic flapping. The bird’s head pops into view, neck outstretched, eyes open wide. I wrap my index finger as far around the trigger as I can, just as Del taught me. Then I squeeze.

Boom!

The bird drops with a thump, landing not twenty feet away. A few loose feathers drift down leisurely. It was a head shot—a clean, perfect kill.

Burnt gunpowder hangs in the air and I notice, for the first time, its faint sweetness.

“Yeah!” Lori and Debra whoop and holler from the nearby road. “Wahoo!” They jog toward us, the tall grass leaving wet stripes on their pants.

Tessa bounds over to the bird, scoops it up in her mouth and trots a victory lap around us. Nancy and I slap each other high five. Gerry shakes our hands. Everyone is smiling. Gerry tells Tessa to drop the bird. He hands it to me. I hold it by the neck, again thin and warm in my fist. Its feathers are beautiful—green, blue, purple, red, white, brown, black. I can’t think of a color that doesn’t appear somewhere on this body. The feet, for some reason, are what really amazes me. They are covered in blue-gray skin that is so wrinkled it looks reptilian, but feels soft and taut over perfect, complicated bones. There are talons and toes and ankles, connected by real, working joints. I push my finger against the bottom of one of the claws, and the toe bends gracefully in two different places, a movement I recognize from my own fleshier toes. It is real.

I have imagined this moment hundreds of times. Each time, the act itself was to be simple: Bird sails into view, I pull the trigger. Bang. A single shot. A clean kill. The emotions, I figure, will be the messy part. I brace for a strong cocktail of excitement, pride, guilt, sadness, even disgust. I wonder if I can stomach it.

In the end, it’s the other way around. The action, I realize later, was muddled. Nancy and I shot the same bird at precisely the same time, so I will never be sure of that one critical fact: if my shot was fatal. But my own feeling, as the pheasant falls from the sky in a surprisingly slow, graceful flutter, is singular and pure: euphoria.

It isn’t until later—weeks after I’ve eaten the pheasant—that doubt will begin to creep into my head. It starts as a niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right. Yet it’s not the kind of doubt that I was expecting: remorse over killing the bird, guilt over relishing it. That happens, too, but not until months later, when I am gluing the bird’s feathers onto a Styrofoam ball to make a Christmas ornament. No, in the more immediate aftermath, instead I begin to worry that maybe I hadn’t killed the bird. Maybe Nancy killed it. Maybe I simply synchronized the impotent pull of my trigger with her fatal one. I’m startled to realize how much I want to be the one who took the bird’s life.

On the way home from the hunt, I stop at Walmart and buy a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice. I place the cooler in my backseat, throw the ice inside and gently lay my bird, double-wrapped in plastic shopping bags, on top. The stacked bird-on-ice is too tall for the lid to close, so I tear open the ice and pour half of it onto a grassy median before putting the bird back on top, faceup, and carefully lowering the lid.

During the long drive home, I replay the final shot, over and over. So many events and lives managed to collide for that one perfect moment. Tessa employed thousands of years of instincts, hundreds of years of breeding and six years of practice to find that bird and hold it in place until I was ready. I was in exactly the right place at the right time. The bird was in exactly the wrong place at the right time. I somehow found it in me to pull the trigger. This is the part that amazes me the most—that I actually did it, I shot the animal. Someone banged two pots together and I didn’t run away. I didn’t flinch. I dug in.

It feels, in retrospect, like a miracle. Then there’s the relief. A post-adrenaline warmth, like stepping off a roller coaster, spreads across my body as I marvel that my entire hunting party escaped unscathed. Every time I think about what I have done, I am amazed all over again. Weeks ago I had never held a shotgun. Now I have killed a bird and will soon eat it for dinner. I roll down the windows, crank up the radio and sing along at the top of my lungs.

Euphoria, I learn later, is a common reaction among first-time hunters. Almost every hunter I’ve ever interviewed has been surprised by it. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan is bowled over by the sensation after shooting a wild boar. He describes a flood of pride, then relief and then, unexpectedly, overwhelming gratitude. “The animal,” he writes, “was a gift—from whom or what I couldn’t say—but… gratitude is what I felt.”

As I hunt more, I will find that no other kill—nearly all of which will be much harder-fought—evokes such pure elation as my first. Still, there is a visceral sense of satisfaction in each of them. And I begin to see how a hunter might crave that special intoxication that oozes from a clean kill.

Some of our greatest writers, from Hemingway to Faulkner and many, many more, have tackled the subject of the hunt. But I never fully appreciated these contributions to literature before I related to this mysterious thrill of killing. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, for example, Captain Ahab hunts whales in general and the white Moby-Dick in particular with such vicious antagonism that 822 pages cannot explain it. To Ahab, hunting is more addiction than sport or profession or anything else. In one scene, he acknowledges to a mate that his single-mindedness has chewed up his life and spit out his marriage: “Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!” Before I started hunting, this is how I viewed any thrill-seeking hunter I encountered in books—someone plagued by an addiction that I could never truly understand.

After killing just one pheasant, I begin to think differently about these fictional characters and their reactions to hunting. My own post-hunt euphoria was, I think, rooted in satisfaction and awe. Thanks to the popularity of gardening, many Americans can relate to a version of this feeling. Garrison Keillor, in a story about his fictionalized hometown of Lake Wobegon, describes how a child feels when he grows his own tomato:

We all go through these terrible things in childhood. Somebody looks at you and says, “You look funny. Your eyes look funny… And you’re scorched, your little heart is scorched by it. And you never completely get over it. But, if you can make this beautiful thing—a tomato, a perfect tomato—that you hold at arm’s length and it smells of tomato. And you eat it; you eat it with maybe a little fresh basil and a little piece of cheese. Or you just put a little sugar on it. Or you just put a little French dressing on it. And you realize: this is as good as any tomato anywhere in the world. And all that the best chefs of New York or Paris or London could do for this tomato would only be to cover it up. To realize that most of the fancy seasonings and sauces and marinades ever made in the world are orthopedic in nature. That this, you can find the best, you can produce the best of something in Lake Wobegon or Kalamazoo: this is a redemptive experience.

Growing food is an experience that offers pride not only in one’s self but, perhaps more important, in one’s place. At its essence, hunting is finding food in the wild. Whether hunting for birds or for mushrooms, it evokes an exaggerated form of the satisfaction that Keillor describes. It feels miraculous. Shooting my first pheasant gave me the same exhilaration that I got from reading my favorite chapter books when I was nine or ten years old: The world around me suddenly became bigger than I had ever imagined and, at the same time, it moved closer within my reach.

It’s increasingly rare for Americans to relate to this. The continuing decline in hunting mirrors our overall tendency toward spending more time indoors and online, detached from the natural world. Ironically, this has coincided with a sharp rise in meat consumption and, more recently, a growing interest in where our food comes from. Farmers’ markets have popped up all over the country—there are now at least 4,385 in the United States. But only about 3 percent of farmers’ market vendors sell meat. Most of us still stop at Safeway or Stop & Shop on the way home, to buy steaks to put all of those locally grown vegetables around.

As we distance ourselves from the meat we eat, it’s tempting to view any decline in hunting as a reprieve for wildlife. Counterintuitively, hunting can actually protect the health of a wildlife species. When hunting is overseen properly—with scientific study, responsible quotas and enforcement—hunters play an important role in population control. Overpopulation of deer, for example, is a growing problem. The animals have fewer natural predators in the wild. Roads and other development have disrupted their migration routes, which means more deer are crowded into smaller spaces. Deer numbers can skyrocket during years of mild weather and then plummet during a harsh winter, when limited food and habitat can’t sustain the inflated population. Say, for example, that a population has grown 30 percent larger than the winter landscape can sustain. This rarely means that 30 percent of the population will die off before spring. Instead, it is likely that the entire population will run out of food before the winter is over. Allowing hunters to cull a certain number of deer helps prevent mass starvation that could collapse the species for decades.

Good hunters are intimately familiar with the land where they hunt, so they can be the first to notice ominous changes in the environment. They value wildlife habitat and will work tirelessly to protect it from urban sprawl. This is the message I hear from one hunter, Lew, who grew up in a part of Colorado where nearly everyone except his own family hunted. His father, he explains, was a pacifist who didn’t want to participate in a killing ritual, even though he ate meat on a regular basis. Lew never thought he was missing much until, in adulthood, his writing career led him to a job editing a hunting magazine.

A couple of stories about wild pig hunting in California somehow beckoned him, and when Lew got to the end of one article, he tells me, “I knew I had to do that.” He booked a trip to wine country and hired a guide to lead him on his first-ever hunting excursion. As Lew got more interested in hunting, he paid more attention to development news and various issues facing the environment.

“Before hunting,” he says, “even though I would hike and camp and fish, I didn’t think about those things. I was just moving along with my own life. I never appreciated the precarious nature of the whole ecosystem… With hunting, I started to understand just how limited some resources are in certain areas. I saw the ways that we impact the landscape.”

Lew got to know hunters who bemoaned changes to their old hunting grounds. Soon he, too, had a personal interest in seeing valuable habitat spared from development. Hunting had turned Lew into a conservationist.

My reporting job introduces me to Greg, a retired Oregon State Police trooper who spent his career enforcing fishing and hunting laws. Standing more than six feet, two inches tall with thick silver hair and a mustache, he looks the part of a retired cop. Back when he first joined the force, in the 1970s, every police academy graduate wanted to be a game warden. It was a state trooper’s dream, the intersection of career and obsessive hobby. Greg tells me that when he grew up hunting in central Oregon, he knew the game wardens personally. To law-abiding hunters, he says, the wardens were superheroes. They were the community’s badasses, protecting the game on which every hunter in the state relied.

Wardens have to be experienced hunters themselves, to have knowledge of typical hunters’ behavior but also to be able to talk to suspects, hunter-to-hunter (or hunter-to-poacher). Wardens say that poachers frequently admit their crimes, and even brag about them, to other hunters.

Poaching is the illegal killing of wildlife, whether it’s hunting without a license, hunting out of season or using illegal means to lure and shoot an animal. The reasons people poach are as varied as the ways in which they break the law. Some are too poor to pay for a license and tag. Some are thrill seekers.

Like any illegal activity, poaching is difficult to quantify. But studies indicate that it’s a much bigger problem than even most wildlife biologists would like to admit. In Oregon, not far from Bend, biologists placed radio collars on five hundred mule deer in July 2005. Five years later, 128 of the collared deer had died. Poachers were found responsible for nineteen of those deaths—nearly as many as the twenty-one shot legally by hunters. Cougars killed fifteen. Coyotes killed five. Eight were hit by cars. Five succumbed to disease. Four got tangled in fences or endured some other fatal accident. Fifty-one died of unknown causes, though scientists admitted that poachers could have killed at least some of them. “Sometimes,” one biologist told The Oregonian newspaper, “we just find the radio collar [lying] out in the sagebrush.”

During his career, Greg underwent a change that he says eventually happens to all game wardens. His lifelong love of hunting wildlife was gradually replaced with love for a different type of hunt: “Catching a poacher became much more satisfying than shooting a deer,” he says.

This new type of hunting held all the familiar appeals: nervous anticipation, stealth, frustration that eventually cracks and gives way to satisfaction. But the technique was so much more challenging, the stakes so much higher. This was the kind of hunting that animal rights activists joke about: The prey carried guns. By comparison, Greg tells me, “hunting for deer and elk wasn’t fun anymore.”

In recent years, however, Oregon has struggled to find qualified and interested candidates to become game wardens. Officials chalk it up to low interest in hunting, overall. The children who eventually become state troopers no longer grow up hunting each fall and revering their local wardens. The decline in hunting, in other words, is self-perpetuating.

CHAPTER 7

OFF THE MARK

When I get home from my pheasant hunt, the house is dark. Scott hasn’t returned yet from his day of fishing. I leave the cooler on the front porch and check the telephone for messages. There is one from my mother.

“Hi, Lily and Scott, it’s Mom calling.” She sounds as excited as I feel. Maybe she heard about the bird somehow?

She goes on to announce that I have a niece. Luciana had her baby today—a girl named Sofia.

“I love you both,” she signs off before adding, “I’m a grandma!”

I smile as I hang up. This day could not have been more perfect. The cycle of life has not only excused my killing but rewarded it. The bird died and a baby was born. What a trade!

The next morning, I am still on a high. Scott and I admire the bird, which is now stiff and ice-cold, before carrying it into the backyard to pluck, gut and clean it. Hunters refer to this process using the rosy euphemism “dressing.” Neither of us has done this before, but I have a pamphlet with instructions and line drawings titled How to Field Dress a Bird. I slip my wedding ring into my jeans pocket—I don’t want guts stuck in it—and place the bird on a cutting board perched on top of a trash can.

To start, I pluck small bunches of feathers from the bird’s breast and shove them into a plastic bag for future crafts.

This takes a long time, mostly because every part of the bird’s body contains a different color or texture of feather. I want all of them, vowing to make the most of this bird whose life I’ve taken. But I’m also postponing actually picking up the knife and cutting. Eventually, Scott gets antsy.

“Are we going to do this?” he asks gently.

I nod and wipe the down from my fingers. When the knife is in my hand, Scott begins to read.

“ ‘Begin by making an incision all the way through the skin from the breastplate to the vent’—that’s the anus.”

I shiver at his last word, then take a deep breath. My knife pierces the skin and I glimpse not blood and gore but taut, pink, familiar muscle. I relax a little. It’s a sight I’ve seen hundreds of times, whenever I peel back the plastic wrap on a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts. The remaining steps are simple and reveal surprisingly little blood. It’s not much different from pulling the giblets out of a Butterball turkey, really. The organs are small and easy to throw in the trash and then forget about.

Guidebooks call pheasants large birds and they are, at least when you see them bobbing around in the wild. But plucked or skinned, even a mature male pheasant looks terribly scrawny compared with the fryer chickens I’m used to cooking.

We invite Scott’s parents, aunt and uncle, all of whom live nearby, to dinner. I spend the whole day preparing our meal. I decide to leave the bird whole because it somehow feels more respectful than cutting it into pieces like fried chicken. I brown the bird on both sides. Then I sauté some sliced onions and apples, stir in white wine and apple cider, put the bird back in the pot and slide the whole thing into the oven, covered, for a couple of hours.

Scott insists on buying steaks to grill, too, because the bird only weighs a couple of pounds, not enough for six adults. I protest at first, not wanting something as mundane as supermarket beef to overshadow my hard-earned pheasant. But I’ve never had pheasant before, and know that it might not taste very good, so I give in.

Before the guests arrive, I smooth our best tablecloth over our small metal table and carry the chairs from our desks into the dining room. I fold cloth napkins and place them around the table. I light candles.

When I carry the bird to the table, everyone oohs and ahhs. I am too nervous to take the first bite but Scott’s aunt Kay spears a bit of breast with her fork, pops it into her mouth and chews.

“It’s good,” she says, her eyes widening so I know she means it.

I taste it. It is good. Sweet and tender. Not at all exotic or gamey, it tastes like an especially flavorful chicken. Comfort food. As we eat, I retell the story of the hunt. The guests listen politely as I gush over Tessa’s pointing abilities and build to the story’s dramatic, execution-style conclusion. At the end of the meal, there are no leftovers.

As Scott and I wash the dishes, I reflect that this is what eating meat should be. The animal was the centerpiece of the entire meal—the entire evening, really. We talked about its life—what little of it I glimpsed, anyway—not just its taste. We marveled at its place on our dinner table, and we felt grateful. We did not take it for granted, like we would a hen raised in cramped quarters and then killed, wrapped in plastic, frozen and tossed into a grocery cart.

Eager to hunt again, I sign up for another workshop, this time for rabbit. One morning in January, I wake up hours before sunrise to drive over the mountains to the Willamette Valley, to a wildlife management area that appears to be one giant mass of blackberry bushes—a horribly invasive species in this part of the state—intersected by a few winding paths of mowed grass. As in the pheasant hunt, we divide into small groups and head out onto state-owned land with the help of experienced volunteers. This time, not all of the hunters are female, and about half are teenagers.

As in the last workshop, we sit through a brief classroom lesson before we bundle up and head into the chilly fog. I’m nervous again, and still uncomfortable with my gun. I’m also excited to get started, mostly because of the dogs, whom I can’t wait to see in action.

The volunteer guides each have three or four beagles with triangular bells dangling from their collars. The dogs are actually tied together with a thick rope. There’s enough slack that they can run around comfortably, but if one tries to break out on his own, he gets dragged alongside the others until he can get his feet back under him. When I first see them, I can’t help but smile. They’re adorable, with pudgy bellies and floppy, velvety ears. They look like Snoopy, except that their muzzles are fuzzier and their big brown eyes are wetter and sadder than in the comics. It has never before occurred to me that they’re hunting dogs.

When the dogs catch a whiff of rabbit, they start to whine and pull toward the bushes where rabbits are supposedly hiding. The guide lets go of the rope and the dogs dart into the thorny thicket.

One of our guides explains that when a rabbit is scared out of hiding, it tends to run, like most wildlife, in a big circle.

“Nine times out of ten, the rabbit will end up where it started,” he says confidently.

This doesn’t make sense to me. The place it started is the place it was roused from safety by a yelping dog. Why go back there?

But the guides seem to know what they’re talking about. When the dogs are out of sight, our guides listen to the yelps and peeling bells and order us around: “Run! Get up there!” “Get ready!” “Back up!” “Hurry, you’re out of position!” I follow the orders until, suddenly, a rabbit darts out of a shrub to my left.

“Shoot it!” one guide yells.

The rabbit runs straight across a wide path in front of me. I shoulder my gun and line up the sights. I pull the trigger and nothing happens. I fumble for the safety and then pull the trigger again. Bang!

The rabbit somersaults to the far side of the path, then lands on its side.

“Nice!” The guide slaps me on my back and runs over to pick it up. The dogs emerge from the bushes and hurry over to sniff the rabbit.

“The first rabbit of the day!” Another guide shakes me by the shoulders. Other hunters walk over, smiling at me and peering at the rabbit in the guide’s hands.

This must be what it feels like to win an Academy Award (minus the gown). Everyone is congratulating me. I feel excited but so stunned that I can’t quite believe it’s really happening to me. I want to get that rabbit in my hands.

Before I do, one of the volunteer guides takes out a pocketknife and cuts off the animal’s head and feet, then tosses them, like softballs, into a nearby blackberry thicket. When he hands it to me, the rabbit is half the mammal it used to be. It’s still warm, and it feels surprisingly thin in my hands. I expected it would be chubbier.

Next, he instructs me in skinning the animal. I start around the neck, tugging a little at a time until the hide peels off like a union suit. The skin is slippery and translucent on the inside, with lusciously soft fur on the other. The guide raises his eyebrows when I wrap it in a plastic grocery bag and tuck it in my backpack.

“Just chuck it into the bushes,” he tells me. “You don’t have to pack it out.”

“No, I want to keep it.”

“What? Why?”

As I struggle to come up with a reason, I suddenly picture Scott at home, tying fishing flies on a winter evening. Rabbit fur is commonly used in flies, and sometimes costs several dollars for a three-inch swatch. “My husband ties flies,” I tell him. “We’ll use it.”

The guide nods toward the blubbery wad of skin and fur now inside my backpack and smiles and shrugs, as if to say, Sure you will.

Next, he tells me how to gut the animal, which is basically the same procedure as gutting a pheasant. Once I’ve cut the abdomen open, he reaches in and pulls out the liver, a thin, black, gelatinous sheet that looks far too big to have come from the rabbit in my hands.

A small percentage of wild rabbits carry tularemia, a bacterial infection that can be transmitted to humans. To determine whether your rabbit is infected, the guide says, you should inspect the liver.

“This one looks good,” he says. “See how it’s smooth and uniform? An infected liver will look like someone sprinkled salt on it.”

With that, he tosses the liver into the bushes.

“Go ahead and pull all that stuff out,” he says, pointing generally to the offal, “and toss it, too.”

He assures me that it will be eaten, enthusiastically, by vultures, coyotes and other scavengers. I start scooping parts out and plopping them onto a weedy shrub next to me. Gravity slithers them down, branch by branch, until they hit the ground. I look down at the animal in my hands. It looks like a skinned cat.

That night, I arrive home with one rabbit and no appetite. I open a bottle of wine and pour most of it into the ziplock bag containing my rabbit. Or what’s left of my rabbit, anyway. I pour the rest of the bottle into a pint glass and start sipping. I don’t feel particularly guilty about killing this rabbit. But I do feel awfully sorry for myself that I have to eat it.

I go online and identify my rabbit as an Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), one of the most common members of the rabbit-hare family. These animals spend most of the day sleeping in a tangle of brush or a burrow in the ground. At night, they come out and eat a combination of leaves and grasses. Rabbits are often considered a nuisance because of the damage they can wreak on crop fields. Oregonians with a valid hunting license may hunt varmints, including rabbits, 365 days a year.

The next day, I debone the meat and cut it into chunks, which I toss in flour and sear. Then I simmer the meat, along with carrots, onions, potatoes, celery and peas, to make a stew. The meat is light-colored and sweet, like pork. And because I accidentally overcook it, it’s slightly rubbery, but nonetheless delicious, and Scott and I polish off the whole pot in two meals.

Over the next year, I go on trips with friends and hunt for duck, goose, grouse, chukar, Hungarian partridge and pheasant. I hunt all over Oregon. I take a bird-hunting vacation to Montana, to visit Andy and his girlfriend Jessie, both of whom recently moved there for graduate school.

As I bring home meats that I’ve never tasted before, I can’t help but grow more interested in cooking. I spend hours online, reading through recipes for a dish that will do justice to my latest quarry. I borrow wild game cookbooks from the library. I buy them from bookstores. What used to be a chore—something to hurry up and get through so I could quell my grumbling stomach—suddenly becomes an honor.

One of the things I appreciate most about hunting is that it highlights the uniqueness of each animal, each meat, each meal. Instead of “thighs” or “breasts,” a meal is composed of something specific, such as “the American widgeon from that slough in Montana on a cold, cloudy day last fall.”

An animal’s uniqueness extends to its taste—animals are what they eat, and wild animals eat a more diverse diet than livestock. Farmed animals in the United States feed almost entirely on corn. In fact, if you analyze the typical American diet down to the molecular level, processed corn makes up most of it: from the feed that our livestock turn into meat, to the corn syrup that sweetens our drinks. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan quotes a biologist who refers to North American humans as “corn chips with legs.” In my own post-hunting meals, I notice huge taste variations within a single species, particularly duck. I begin paying close attention to what was inside the gullet of each individual. I try to connect a duck’s food preferences to the taste of its flesh, which falls somewhere along the spectrum between “fishy” and “beefy.”

There are many wonderful cookbooks written about wild game. As with everything DIY, many come with a heaping dose of nostalgia. One of my favorites is Fish and Game Cookery, published in 1945. In it, author and outdoorsman Roy Wall laments the decline of wilderness—and Americans’ corresponding wildness—in a chapter titled “In Case of an Emergency,” which lists recipes for roasted beaver tail and young muskrat. “When America was an expanding frontier, when vast wilderness areas were trackless, it often became necessary for persons to eat anything and everything they could get their hands on,” he writes. “Now, with civilization making picnic grounds of these once remote regions, something to eat is much less accidental.”

Hunting has changed the way I shop for food. Now, when I saunter through one of several massive groceries in Bend, I take note of the swollen displays of produce flown in from all over the globe. And I realize, yet again, how detached I am from what I usually eat. In the past, whatever I felt like eating, I bought. There were no skills required, no special habitats, no exclusive seasons. When torrential rains ruined the blueberry crop in Oregon, shelves were stocked with blueberries from Maine. When I got a hankering for fresh berries in January, well, I was in luck because a shipment just arrived from Chile.

This could not be more different from the days to which Wall was referring, when our diet depended on where we lived and what plants and animals could survive there. If you didn’t own livestock and didn’t possess the skill necessary to stalk and kill a wild animal, you probably didn’t eat much meat.

I’m not ready to forgo store-bought meat altogether, which would turn me into a vegetarian for all but a few meals a year. But I do start paying closer attention to where my food is raised. I stop buying produce that is grown outside of the United States. I have no trouble finding poultry that was raised in Oregon or Washington. Beef and pork, on the other hand, rarely bear any such labels. I hesitate over the meat cooler, turning over each package of steaks or chops, hoping to find more fine print. For all I know, these cuts of meat could come from the other side of the world.

As I grow more confident carrying a gun in the field, I find I’m still uncomfortable coming home and admitting to certain people that I’ve been hunting. When we visit with cousins who have young children, and my mother mentions my recent pheasant hunt, I feel cruel. My eyes widen and I shake my head at her, pleading with her not to talk about it. How could I explain to a child what I’d done? All of my rational justifications for hunting seem so meek compared with the basic idea of doing no harm.

I consider what it means to call myself a hunter, and why I’m embarrassed about it. A colleague of mine tells me that he took his son to a Hunter Safety course in Virginia, where the instructor told the students upon graduating: “Congratulations. You are now a member of a despised community.”

When friends from college and high school hear that I’m learning to hunt, the first question out of their shocked mouths is usually: “Are you a member of the NRA now?” At first it surprises me that they would even think this. I’m still the same person I was before I started hunting. I still support reasonable gun control. Of course I haven’t joined the National Rifle Association.

My friends’ question reveals a familiar assumption. Before I moved to Bend, I, too, viewed hunters and NRA members as an interchangeable throng of gun nuts. But opposing gun control wasn’t always the primary goal of the NRA, which was founded in 1871 by two veteran Union officers. The men were dismayed by the poor marksmanship of their Civil War troops, so they founded a group to promote safe gun handling and target practice. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the NRA became highly politicized. Rising gun violence—including the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—prompted a national debate over the interpretation of the Second Amendment. Amid this discussion, the NRA’s voice grew louder and louder. The organization stoked fears that liberal politicians were coming to pry every last gun from our hands.

On its website, the NRA proudly calls itself the “largest pro-hunting organization in the world.” Yet, during election season, I notice that the NRA endorses politicians who oppose gun control, labeling them “pro-sportsmen” despite pathetic voting records on environmental issues. Meanwhile, only a fraction of proposed gun bills would apply to the basic rifles and shotguns used in responsible hunting. In fact, even if several of the NRA’s worst nightmares simultaneously came true—expanded background checks, mandatory waiting periods, limits to the number of guns purchased by an individual per month, a permanent ban on assault weapons—hunting could continue as it has for more than a century. A hunter has about as much use for a semi-automatic Glock 19 pistol—which can shoot more than one round per second—as a chef does a hand grenade. Why, then, should we allow the NRA to use hunting—the most sane, responsible reason for modern gun ownership—as its argument for weapons that have nothing to do with the fair pursuit of wildlife?

The truth is, many of us don’t. The NRA has about 4.3 million members, which is less than 5 percent of American gun owners. At my Hunter Safety class, however, and at every hunting workshop I’ve attended, I’ve received a handful of NRA pamphlets and a formal invitation to join the organization. This has reinforced my long-held belief that hunters have adopted gun rights as their leading political cause. (And my own experience suggests that they’re succeeding: Buying a gun remains quick and easy to do.) That’s not to say that I think everyone who belongs to the NRA is a nut. The NRA runs many admirable programs, including a massive gun safety campaign for children and cheap, accessible basic firearms training for adults. The NRA also does hunters a service by compiling hunting-related news on an easy-to-navigate website.

Every once in a while, a different kind of pamphlet is slipped into the stack handed to me at the end of class. There’s one from the Oregon Hunters Association. Or the Boone and Crockett Club. Hunting is, by definition, a mostly solitary pursuit. Still, there are thousands of sportsmen’s groups in the United States. And unlike the NRA, most of them are focused not on firearms but on wildlife habitat and hunting access. It is only when I’m flipping through these pamphlets that it dawns on me: The politics of hunting extend way beyond the gun.

Looking to join a hunters’ organization other than the NRA, I start researching various groups. But I’m shocked to discover how many of them oppose, for example, sensible bans on toxic lead ammunition. Ducks and other birds ingest small stones to help grind up food in their gizzards. If they swallow lead shot on a beach or at the bottom of a lake, they could eventually die of lead poisoning. Since 1991 it has been illegal to use lead shot for hunting water-fowl. But lead is still the norm in big-game hunting and hunting for other, upland birds.

Nationwide, three thousand tons of lead are shot into the environment by hunters every year, another eighty thousand tons are released at shooting ranges and four thousand tons are lost in ponds and streams as fishing lures and sinkers. The effects of all this lead on an ecosystem can be tragic. The California condor, for example, once lived throughout the southern United States but is now one of the rarest birds in the world—in 2010 there were fewer than two hundred wild birds left, all near the California coast. Condors, unlike other vultures and coyotes, have especially strong acid in their stomachs and can actually digest lead fragments, leaving them particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning. (When a hunter shoots an animal with lead, fragments of the metal usually disperse into the animal’s organs, which are often dumped in the field and left for vultures and coyotes to eat.)

With ammunition now made of steel, tungsten and copper, there is no good reason to keep spewing lead into the environment. As one hunter told me, “If you only shoot steel, then that’s what you’re used to. And you’ll hunt very well with it.” Lead remains cheaper, but if more people bought non-toxic ammunition, the cost would likely drop because it would no longer be manufactured as a specialty item.

Some of the hunting groups that I research argue for the expansion of off-road vehicle use on public lands, which could damage fragile wildlife habitat and destroy the remote backcountry hunting experience. Other groups complain about responsible hunting quotas, modest fees and game management laws.

The more I read, the more frustrated I become. These hunting groups are arguing against their own long-term interests. My responsibility as a hunter seems obvious: If I am serious about preserving our nation’s hunting heritage, I must also be serious about protecting the environment.

I decide to join the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which has a long-standing reputation for conservation-and wildlife-oriented policies. The organization has played a major role in successfully restoring elk populations in North America. But my esteem for the foundation sours in 2010, when the president announces that one of the organization’s top priorities is to oppose Endangered Species Act protection for gray wolves, recently reintroduced to the western United States. I am disappointed in the organization’s uncharacteristic shortsightedness.

As hunters, we should understand better than anyone the importance of natural predators in a healthy, functioning ecosystem. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after being eradicated decades earlier, of course elk numbers dropped—that’s what happens when a predator is introduced to prey that has lived virtually without threat. But elk numbers didn’t drop nearly as much as some biologists had feared. In fact, they noticed changes that helped the entire ecosystem. The elk moved around more, instead of overgrazing certain riparian areas. This allowed native plants to recover, boosting nearby beaver and fish populations. Coyote numbers dropped a little, due to the competition from wolves. Bird populations flourished. Elk became more wary of humans, too. In short, the presence of wolves brought balance to the ecosystem and made elk behave more like, well, elk.

What first attracted me to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation was the priority it placed on habitat protection. That’s what makes this anti-wolf vitriol so hard to swallow. Wolves are native to much of elk country, which means that wolf habitat and elk habitat are often one and the same. Moreover, there are millions of people out there who don’t hunt and don’t care much about elk, but who care very much about wolves. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is squelching an enormous opportunity to ally itself with wolf proponents and protect even more habitat in the long run.

At the same time that he denounces wolves, the group’s president pledges that the organization will “become more engaged in the core issues of our time that threaten our hunting heritage and that of our children.” But what if environmentalists like me—who wish to see not only ample elk populations but full, healthy ecosystems that include wolves—are the future of hunting? I consider joining other hunting organizations and get the same feeling from many of them—they don’t represent me.

There is no shortage of conservation-minded sportsmen’s groups that specialize in one species: Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation. Don’t get me wrong, these groups represent a true benefit of hunting: A constituency develops around a particular species to help pay for its habitat protection and vote for its long-term interests. And protecting the habitat for one species nearly always benefits others, too. But from an ecological standpoint, it doesn’t always make sense for hunters to focus on one species. That’s why I value groups like the National Wildlife Federation, which was founded by a hunter back in 1936 and still reaches out to hunters and anglers today. The National Wildlife Federation aims to protect entire ecosystems. In doing so, it’s one of a handful of organizations working to bridge the way-too-distant gap between hunters and conservationists.

In my Hunter Safety class, our instructors spoke frequently about protecting what they—like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation president—called “our hunting heritage.” E.V. told our class, “You might be the only hunter that a person ever meets. And so you are representing all of us.” That’s a big responsibility, and one that merits some real thought about how we are perceived by non-hunters. E.V. encouraged us, for example, to cover our dead deer when transporting it, rather than sprawling it over the hood of a car.

“Some people are offended by the sight of a dead animal,” he said, “and we need to respect that.”

I meet some hunters who boast about being offensive. They enjoy making non-hunters uncomfortable, plastering their bumpers with stickers that say things like VEGETARIAN: OLD INDIAN WORD FOR BAD HUNTER. They brag, as that Hunter Safety instructor in Virginia did, about being despised. But for every American who considers herself a hunter, there are at least nine who don’t. In just about every election, non-hunters cast more ballots than we do. Non-hunters decide whether to post NO HUNTING signs on more acres of land than we do. They submit more comments than we do when hunting bans are proposed in public spaces. E.V. was on to something that many other hunters aren’t: The future of hunting will largely be determined by non-hunters. It is in our best interest to try to get along.

CHAPTER 8

WILD TASTES

After a day of goose hunting, I bring home a goose, as well as a duck that another hunter shot but didn’t want. The next week, I buy a whole chicken at the grocery store. As I cut open its plastic casing, I wonder about its life and how it compared with that of the goose I grilled just a few days earlier.

The greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons) is a grayish brown bird with orange feet and a white mottled front that inspires its colloquial name, the speckle-belly. Hunters sometimes call them “specks” for short. Whatever you call them, there are more than one million of them in North America. Like most geese, specks are gregarious, social animals that migrate between winter and summer grounds. They travel in large clans called skeins in the air and flocks or gaggles on the ground.

I’m not sure if my goose was a male or a female, as sexing this particular species requires expertise that I don’t yet possess. But I’ll assume, for the sake of personalization, that it was a she. I’m not sure of her exact age, either, but as a bird with mature coloring and an average weight (somewhere between four and a half and seven pounds) she was at least one year old, and more likely two or three.

My goose hatched from an egg in Alaska, where her flock spends each summer. She was probably one of about six chicks in the nest. She and her siblings fledged quickly but stayed close to both their parents. As summer turned to autumn in her native land, my goose and the rest of her gaggle soared south. They traveled for several months before settling for the winter in California’s Central Valley or, perhaps, western Mexico. When spring warmed the air, the flock flew north again, returning to Alaska.

During the second year of her life, my goose found a mate. Specks, like most geese, are monogamous. But unlike Canada geese, who commit until one partner dies, specks are prone to their own version of divorce, and may switch partners after a few years.

On the last morning of her life, my goose awoke on a large farm pond in central Oregon. She and her traveling companions began arriving from the north about three weeks earlier, and found everything they needed—food, water and a lack of predators—within a short distance. The days were getting colder and shorter. Soon it would be time to fly south, but the group was not yet in any hurry. Until this cold mid-October day, that is, when mist wafted off the water as the sun crested over the surrounding buttes. My bird did not know it yet, but it was opening day of goose season.

If she was feeling especially peckish that morning, she might have awoken early and tilted her tail in the air so her beak could reach down for a weedy underwater snack. But she saved her real appetite for a nearby barley field. At about seven thirty, just after sunrise, my bird and the others lifted off the pond and flew to the field for breakfast. Here, she waddled up and down the rows, gorging herself on rich, golden kernels. Swallowing grain after grain, she began to fill the long crop at the bottom of her esophagus. It acted like a silo, dribbling food into her tiny stomach as quickly as it was pumped out into her gizzard.

While my goose ate her breakfast, I pulled a borrowed camouflage jacket over my fishing waders. (I left home the blaze-orange cap that I wear while hunting for rabbits or even pheasant, which rarely fly overhead. Geese—like other birds—have keen eyesight, and the same fluorescent clothing that alerts other hunters to my presence could also tip off a goose in the sky.) Then I crouched beneath some willows at the edge of the farm pond where she had spent the night.

Two hours later, the gaggle had filled their crops, and their overloaded digestive tracts declared an end to the meal. Three particular geese took flight. The skein usually traveled with three vanguards in front, testing a location to make sure it was safe for the others. The birds called to one another as they flew, and from the ground it sounded like manic laughter. My goose hung back with the hordes, waiting until the front-runners floated safely on the pond before setting her wings and gliding in for a landing.

As she approached, I stood up from my blind, shouldered my gun and switched off the safety. I’m not sure why my eyes locked on to her, instead of some other goose in the skein. I lined up the tip of my gun with her neck, to better my chance that one round ball of steel would intersect her slender neck or head. For a second, I held the tip of my gun so it just covered her, making sure my own movement matched the speed of her flight, twenty yards away. Then I pulled the trigger.

She fell into the water immediately. A couple of her feathers drifted behind her in a lazy zigzag, as if in a cartoon. Unlike a cartoon, though, my goose did not pick up her head and roll her eyes at the camera. Stars didn’t swirl around her head. She did no double take. She was dead. This time, unlike when I killed the pheasant, remorse wasted no time in finding me. I felt guilty as soon as I picked her up. One moment, this beautiful, well-traveled bird was soaring overhead. The next, she was floating limp in a pond. All because of me.

But her death, I told myself later, was just one part of her life. And her life, though undoubtedly strenuous—if she was just two years old, she had already flown thousands of miles and seen more of the continent than most American citizens do—was not necessarily sad.

My store-bought chicken (Gallus domesticus) was another story. As with my goose, I’m not sure whether it was male or female, as both sexes are raised for food. Let’s say, for the sake of storytelling, that my bird was a male Cornish rock. My chicken’s eventual packaging identified him only as a “broiler,” the industry’s generic term for a chicken raised for meat (as opposed to a “layer,” who provides eggs).

He hatched from an egg and likely spent all but the last few hours of his life in a low-slung shed with about thirty thousand other chickens the same age. Shortly after he hatched, the tip of my chicken’s beak was cut off, without anesthesia. For the first week of his life, the lights were left on twenty-four hours a day, to encourage him to eat as much as possible. After that, the lights were turned out for just four hours a night, again to minimize sleep and maximize weight gain. Although he was technically a free-range bird, there is a chance that he never set a claw outdoors or felt a ray of natural sunlight. To earn the “free-range” badge, chicken producers must provide a small outdoor exercise yard. But because these doors aren’t opened until the chicks are a couple of weeks old, the birds have no incentive to leave the one home they have ever known. By the time they’re full grown, the chickens are so tightly packed—in most commercial operations, each bird occupies a space smaller than an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of printer paper—that those located near the center of the shed can’t easily reach the door.

Unlike most chickens, mine was organic. His feed, therefore, did not contain growth hormones to rush his physical development. But even without performance-enhancing drugs, his breed was developed in the 1940s with the primary goal of growing pornographically large breasts at an astonishing rate. If my chicken was lucky enough to be able to walk until the last day of his life—and let’s say optimistically that he was—then it’s safe to assume that three of his four closest neighbors were not so lucky. The broiler just to the north of him, for example, its wing touching my chicken’s wing, one day felt its leg snap under the weight of all that breast meat. This injured bird was not removed from the shed, but left to lie and wait until the entire flock had reached slaughter age, about seven weeks. Lame chickens are slaughtered and sold along with the sound ones. (Dead chickens, however, are removed from the shed every day or so, and are not sold as meat.)

The last day of my chicken’s life began as all the others had, with the shed’s bright lights switching on. He opened his eyes and began to eat. At some point, the doors at one end of the shed opened and a group of people wearing white hazmat suits entered. They grabbed chickens upside down by their legs. Clutching several birds in each hand, they thrust them into transport crates. Some of the birds were dead by the time these workers reached them. They were tossed in a pile and discarded. The live, crated birds—including mine—were loaded onto a truck and transported to a slaughterhouse. There, my bird was unloaded by a different worker, who slid his ankles into shackles. As he hung upside down, a conveyor system dragged him through an electrically charged water bath that paralyzed most of his body. His eyes and beak might still have been able to move as he reached the next station, where a mechanized blade sliced through his throat. My bird’s two-month life was over.

To me, the story of my chicken’s life is an undeniably sad one, although I can’t know what my chicken thought and felt. All of animal ethics hinges on assumptions about what it means to be a species other than human, something we can imagine and guess and study but can never really know.

Here is what I do know: I bear responsibility for the death of my goose. But I bear responsibility for the entire life and death of my chicken. And one of those scenarios is more bearable to me than the other.

My goose probably endured near-misses by other hunters and possibly cars. She endured hard, hungry winters. She may have lost a mate to hunting or to disease. Some of her goslings were probably snatched up by a fox before they could fly. But none of that was my fault. My chicken would never have lived at all if not for demand by meat eaters like me. No matter how little I saw of it, everything about my chicken’s life and death was my doing. A natural death was out of the question because his entire life was, in a way, unnatural.

At times, I catch myself romanticizing the idea of a “natural” death. I think of it in terms of a peaceful human death: He died in his sleep. But nature can be as brutal as any slaughterhouse worker. If my goose hadn’t been shot, she could have suffered a broken wing or leg and eventually starved to death, slowly and painfully. She could have been torn apart by a coyote or chopped to pieces by an airplane engine.

As far as I was concerned, both my goose and my chicken had tasty, nutritious afterlives. I skinned and gutted my goose within an hour of her death. We took one bone-in breast to the house of some friends and grilled it, then ate it with fresh salmon that one friend had recently caught. The meat was dark and rich, more like steak than chicken. A few days later, I deboned the rest of the goose and cut the meat into long, thin strips. I marinated it, in the fridge, in a bowl of soy sauce, garlic, brown sugar and dried red pepper flakes. We got out a small metal smoker that I recently bought used. I stoked a charcoal fire in a pan at the bottom, then laid the strips of meat on a grill on top. Hours later, the jerky was stiff and dry. We nibbled on some, and saved the rest to pack on long ski trips.

I unwrapped the chicken’s plastic suit and tossed the giblets in the garbage can. I patted the bird dry, then filled its cavity with a paltry amount of stuffing. (I’ve often wondered why these carefully engineered birds aren’t bred to have larger cavities, since I’d take a second helping of stuffing over more breast meat any day.) I roasted the bird and served it as the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving-like feast.

But unlike with the goose, there was no talk of the chicken’s life, no heartfelt toast. Just dinner as usual.

Or, rather, what has only recently become usual. My interest piqued by imagining the lives of my chicken and goose, I seek out books about the industrialization of food, which I am startled to discover is such a recent phenomenon. Agriculture itself is only about eleven thousand years old. In An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage tells us that if all of man’s 150,000-year history were likened to one hour, “it is only in the last four and a half minutes that humans began to adopt farming, and agriculture only became the dominant means of providing human subsistence in the last minute and a half.”

Today more than nine out of ten land animals killed for food in the United States are broilers. Fast-food chain KFC alone buys nearly one billion per year. On top of that, more than 250 million chicks are destroyed each year, most of them layers who—oops!—turned out to be males. Michael Pollan writes: “The industrialization—and brutalization—of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.”

I read through stacks of books on modern food production, and the more I learn about the treatment of livestock, the more enthusiastic I become about hunting as a compassionate, alternative meat source. These animals are free-range, and if their lives are not exactly easy—life in the wild is full of hardship—well, at least they are free. Before it lands on my dinner plate, a wild duck gets a chance to be a real duck, to dabble and splash and migrate and do everything that other ducks have done for thousands of years.

The meat that I buy from the grocery store cannot be as special to me as the meat I hunt and kill myself. But those few, extraordinary meals that result from a hunt can—and do—change the way that I feel about even boring old livestock that I still buy from the grocery store. As I nick the plastic with my knife and unwrap the seal around a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, for example, I recognize the taut, quivery flesh of my pheasant. I recognize the graceful curve that was once covered by skin and adorned with feathers. My experiences in start-to-finish butchery have granted me the ability to mentally rebuild the bird, bone by bone, slice by slice, pluck by pluck. I can picture its former self, like a ghost. Until even the floppiest, most unrecognizably boneless, skinless cutlet is no longer just a piece of meat. It’s a piece of an animal. A piece of its life.

I used to forgo packages of thighs or breasts in favor of a whole animal—a chicken or turkey—only once or twice a year. Just rinsing it, patting it dry and placing it in the roasting pan felt daunting. Its animalness was too obvious, too on display. I felt guilty and clumsy while handling it raw. I hurried to get it in the oven, so it could be transformed into something easier to sit with—a browned, aromatic meal. But with each animal that I gut and dress, I gain confidence. I begin to buy whole chickens from the supermarket, instead of packages of breasts or thighs. It’s cheaper this way. And there is less waste—something that is becoming important to me.

A 2009 study found that more than 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is thrown away instead of eaten. Waste occurs during food manufacturing and distribution, but most of it is attributable to consumers who buy the food and then throw it away. After shooting a bird and seeing it as not only a piece of meat but a whole life, I find myself loath to throw away even a scrap of meat.

Something else happens—unrelated to hunting—that makes me even more conscientious about wasting food. Scott and I become friends with an elderly man named Raymond who lives next door to us. Raymond lives in the same seafoam-green bungalow where he was born. It has two bedrooms and one bathroom. Raymond was born with some sort of developmental disability, one whose name we never learn. When he speaks, he slurs and is hard to understand. With nothing but meager Social Security and disability payments to keep him afloat, Raymond must pinch pennies to make sure he has enough to eat each day. Soon Scott and I find ourselves driving Raymond to various grocery stores so he can take advantage of coupons. Each outing turns into a long ordeal. He doesn’t read very well, so it takes him several minutes to discern whether a sale price applies to a particular can of stewed tomatoes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look at the canned chili and stale donuts in Raymond’s grocery cart. Because he is always seeking the best deal, he rarely ends up with the makings of a healthy diet.

I think of Raymond when we finish eating a well-balanced meal. If we have leftovers, I pack them into Tupper-ware containers and carry them next door. Every once in a while, we invite Raymond to eat dinner with us.

One night, Raymond sits at our table and tells us a story we’ve already heard dozens of times: After his father got into a car accident and was unable to work at the lumber mill in Bend, the government awarded him a scholarship to go back to school to learn a new trade. The whole family moved to Klamath Falls, about 130 miles south of Bend, for two years.

“Did you like Klamath Falls?” I poke around for a new layer in this oft-cited tale.

“Eh,” he says, shrugging. “It was okay. Not as good as Bend.”

“Why not?”

“The water didn’t taste as good.”

Occasionally, Raymond does this: He reduces something to such a basic level that he ends up saying something profound. After all, when considering how to rank two small eastern Oregon towns, what could be more essential than comparing the quality of our most basic need?

Living in Bend for more than four years, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a place worth calling home. I’ve grown frustrated at work, and I’m toying with the idea of applying for jobs in other states. Reporters move a lot, which is just a fact of the profession. And I’ve been here so much longer than I ever planned. Maybe it’s time to move up to a bigger, more respected newspaper. I browse the dwindling job ads, but it’s a tough time to be in the market for a reporting gig. In my head, I turn over the name of each place—Anchorage, Salt Lake City, Sarasota—and wonder if it would be worth it to move there.

I’ve always seen myself as a city person, but now that I’m faced with the choice of staying in Bend or moving to an only slightly larger city, I find myself reconsidering what it is that appeals to me about cities. The diversity interests me most, the hodgepodge of languages and backgrounds, the variety of ethnic foods, the array of nightlife. More people means more chances to make friends, right? But I can’t shake this niggling feeling that maybe these things aren’t what I want, after all. Maybe what I’m finding right here—in Bend and the surrounding landscape—is just as valuable.

I hash out my dilemma with Scott. He tells me that he will go wherever I want, but I can tell that deep down, he wants to stay in Bend. For the umpteenth time, I run through the pros and cons of moving to a larger city, a larger paper. When I ask for his opinion, he sighs.

“Lil, I don’t think about these things the same way you do.”

“What do you mean? You don’t ever think about leaving your job for something bigger and better?”

“I don’t know.” He pauses. “I guess I don’t want as much as you do. I mean, yes, I want a job that gives me some amount of satisfaction. But at the end of the day, it’s always going to be just a job to me. More than anything, I want to come home to you. I want us to go camping on the weekends, maybe fishing, maybe skiing. Maybe go to a movie, maybe stay home and read. That’s all I want.”

I’m embarrassed that I’ve spent so little time thinking about how much good is in my life right now, right as it is. The things that Scott just framed as modest desires, aren’t they really the biggest, most important things in life? Someone to love, a decent income, hobbies that make us happy. Why should I—why should anyone—want more than that?

In the fall, our friend Betsy takes us mushroom picking. Mushroom hunting—like animal hunting—had a bad reputation in my family when I was growing up. We actually knew of one person who hunted mushrooms on the way home from the subway station, which was fine in theory—there were no guns involved, after all, and no animals were harmed. But still we concluded that this man was crazy. All mushrooms looked pretty much the same to us. What if he plucked the wrong kind by accident and died of mushroom poisoning? How could one ever know without a doubt that a particular wild fungus is safe?

As with animal hunting, my life in Oregon has dulled these concerns. For thousands of years, people have foraged for wild food and survived. There is a body of hard-earned knowledge out there, practically begging to be passed on to other generations. The people I know who forage for mushrooms have reassured me: If you know what you’re doing, it’s very safe. (And if you’re ever in doubt, they add, you don’t eat it.) Only a few known species of mushrooms are, if ingested, capable of killing an otherwise healthy adult. Most poisonous mushrooms cause run-of-the-mill food-poisoning symptoms: diarrhea and vomiting but nothing close to death. Besides, after hunting with loaded guns, mushroom hunting sounds relatively stress-free. So one Saturday morning, we pull on comfortable, layered clothing and sturdy boots and gather a few canvas tote bags to carry our bounty, in case we get lucky.

In the car, Betsy turns to us and delivers a stern lecture.

“The biggest rule in mushroom hunting is that you never tell anyone where you went,” she says. “I’m serious. I’m showing this place to you because I trust you.”

This code of secrecy is common among practitioners of all different sports in Oregon. When I first moved here, it annoyed me. Anglers complained when a prominent outdoors magazine profiled their favorite “secret” fishing holes. Skiers lamented any published ballyhoo of their favorite backcountry trails. Hunters bemoaned that a guide led a paying customer to the clearing where they, unguided, shot a buck three out of the last five years. I understood the fear that a favorite, seldom-visited spot could suddenly become overrun with outsiders. What bothered me was the sense of ownership underlying that fear. I want to say to each of these whiners: You think you discovered this snow-covered slope? This deep bend in the river? This patch of browse? Sorry, bub, it’s the twenty-first century. People have scaled this hillside, fished this stream, hunted this piece of ground for thousands of years. You are not the first. This world is everyone’s to explore.

But when I try mushroom hunting, I sort of get it. There are exceptions, but the general rule is that mushrooms tend to grow in the same spots, year after year. And they don’t fruit year-round. More than one person can ski the same slope, fish the same waters, hunt the same forest. But if you return to a familiar, fertile ground and another forager has just picked it clean, you’re out of luck. Betsy has spent years hunting mushrooms with a friend’s Japanese American family. Her friend’s grandmother knew, for example, that one particular pine tree was surrounded by one mushroom species at a precise time of year. One year, she went to the tree and other pickers had not only removed all of the mushrooms but raked the ground. Some pickers do this to churn up every last mushroom, but raking can destroy the underground roots that would produce next year’s fruit. Betsy saw this woman mourn a true loss that day.

As Betsy recounts this story, I realize: What is the harm—other than grouchiness—in laying claim to a place? Perhaps that’s our best hope for protecting it: a constituency of people with real connections to the land.

Mushrooms are not technically plants, and they’re obviously not animals. They are the sole occupant of a third kingdom of life: fungi. The capped mushrooms that we’re used to—the kind you could slice and sprinkle on a pizza—are actually the reproductive structures of an organism that is largely invisible. It’s off-putting to think of these delicacies as genitalia so we use the more polite, poetic term: fruiting bodies. Unlike plants, which produce their own food, mushrooms must ingest nutrients from another source. The mouth and digestive system—the gut of the fungus—is a web of thread-like fibers called mycelium. In most of the fungi we eat, the mycelium is buried underground. In some, it weaves through a tree trunk.

Betsy takes us to her secret spot, and we hike around looking for chanterelles and matsutake. She quickly finds one of each and explains how to identify them. The chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius and C. subalbidus) look like trumpet-shaped coral. Some are white with amber edges; some are yellow or orange all over. All are beautiful. There are a few inedible (only one is poisonous) mushrooms that could possibly be mistaken for chanterelles, but Betsy, an experienced forager, offers to confirm our finds for us.

The matsutake (Armillaria ponderosa) is rarer than the chanterelle. It grows primarily in the Pacific Northwest, though a closely related species blooms in Japan. It is white and unremarkable-looking, similar to the cultivated mushrooms sold at any grocery store. But then Betsy turns it upside down and instructs us to inhale, our noses to its gills. The spicy fragrance is unlike anything I’ve ever smelled. In what will become my favorite mushroom guidebook, Mushrooms Demystified, David Arora describes it as “a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ and dirty socks.” To me, the scent is an earthy-citrusy combination, like fresh grapefruit squeezed over rich, loamy soil.

We spread out and begin walking across the forest, eyes trained on the floor. Betsy has an almost superhuman ability to spy mushrooms from several yards away. But to my eyes, a few dried pine needles and the dim forest light manage to camouflage even the brightest chanterelles. The matsutake are even more difficult to spot because you can rarely glimpse the mushroom itself. Instead, you look for a raised clump of duff and then use a stick to nudge it over, hoping to unearth a white mushroom cap. Betsy advises us to crouch down, to better notice any promising divots.

I find myself enjoying this search even though I’m not picking anything. I notice parts of nature that I would normally overlook—lacy bits of lichen, fluorescent green and robin’s-egg blue, strewn along the ground. And though I’m not seeing either type of edible mushroom that we’re targeting, I do see mushrooms galore. Small purple toadstools poke out of black soil. Glistening smooth caps perched atop slender stems pepper a mossy log, as if slimy mushrooms were cast in the artistic reenactment of an ant colony. Shelf mushrooms jut out from the trunks of live trees.

I bend over to examine yet another mound of duff that is probably just that. A white ridge seems to protrude from the clump of soil. I take my stick and flip over the clump. And there, lying exposed, is a giant white mushroom cap. I gasp.

“Betsy,” I yell, “I think I found one!”

I drop my stick and use my hands to shovel soil away from the stem. Next I grasp the thick stalk and rock the whole mushroom back and forth until it tears away from the ground. It’s magnificent—the top is more than six inches in diameter, and its whole being reeks of that strange, fruity scent. But it’s bigger than the matsutake Scott and Betsy have found so far, most of them just a couple of inches wide. And the cap is less spherical, more convex. Could this really be the same species?

Betsy appears beside me.

“That’s huge! Is it a matsutake?”

“I’m not really sure.”

I’m almost shaking as she takes the giant mushroom, turns it over and smells it. “Mmmm… It’s definitely a matsutake. Good find!”

For the rest of the day, I feel giddy.

Mushroom hunting as recreation has developed a sort of whimsical persona. The species bear common names that are anything but—angel wing, man on horseback, ma’am on motorcycle, shaggy parasol, poor man’s slippery jack, dead man’s foot. When mushrooms pop up in naturally occurring circles, the formations are called “fairy rings.” Certain mushrooms, called candy caps, have a sugary taste when dried. Foragers pick them, dry them, chop them up and bake them in cookies or sprinkle them on ice cream.

I haven’t admitted this to Betsy but the truth is, I don’t like eating regular mushrooms. The texture and the taste are just a little too unusual, although I will choke them down to be polite or sometimes out of laziness. With these wild mushrooms, however, I can’t wait to dig in. Finding them was such a joy that I expect their taste will be, too.

We cook only the chanterelles the first evening. Some people have allergic reactions to wild mushrooms, so Betsy warns us to take precautions. We eat just a small amount of one type of mushroom at a time. And we don’t drink much alcohol with this meal, as the interaction can compound allergies. Betsy tells us to wait a day to see if we have any reaction—intestinal distress or even a rash—before eating more.

We opt for the simplest preparation: sautéed in butter. Instead of chopping the chanterelles, Betsy shows us how to peel them apart like string cheese. They are mild-flavored with a firm, fibrous texture similar to chicken breast. They aren’t bad, exactly, but I don’t enjoy them as much as I’d hoped.

The next day, I discover that the matsutake have a pungent, otherworldly flavor, as their smell would suggest. Unlike the chanterelles, they can’t be gummed and swallowed quickly. You have to really chew them, like calamari, and that just releases more of the strange taste. I get the first slice of sautéed mushroom down but gag on the second. I push my plate away and watch as Scott relishes the rest of what we cooked. I’m jealous of him, and disappointed in myself for not having a more sophisticated palate.

I once wrote an article for the newspaper about the Pacific lamprey, a parasitic fish that hatches in streams, then swims to the ocean and eventually returns to fresh water to spawn. These eel-like animals are one of the oldest species still living on earth—an estimated hundred million years older than the earliest dinosaurs—and they’ve been an important food source to local Indian tribes for thousands of years. But lately, tribal elders have had to coax children to even try a bite. Their palates are accustomed to cheeseburgers and fries, not dried or char-grilled lamprey.

Our palates change over time, depending on the foods that are most available in our society. In his book Putting Meat on the American Table, historian Roger Horowitz traces the change on American dinner tables from cured to fresh pork. Our taste for salted barrel pork—a staple that any reader of Little House on the Prairie will recognize—dissolved in the late nineteenth century as fresh beef appeared in more urban markets. As the cultural preference tilted toward beef, pork producers were forced to reexamine their offerings and switch to products such as fresh chops and loins, which had a flavor and texture more similar to beef. Two hundred years ago, when more of us ate wild game, Americans undoubtedly had a different palate than we do today. Although humans could eat hundreds of animal species, only a few are readily available to us. Just 14 of the world’s 148 large terrestrial mammals have been domesticated. As someone who grew up eating chicken, pork, beef and occasionally turkey, I found even duck meat difficult to eat at first, more flavorful than what I was used to. Not knowing how to describe it, I fell back on that generic, derogatory word: “gamey.” But with time, I learned to love duck meat. Befitting of waterfowl, it tastes to me like slightly fishy-tasting turkey.

I once read an article about picky eaters, which I vaguely remember mentioned that a child’s palate changes so much while growing that she must taste a food at least seventeen times before knowing for sure whether she likes it. Though I’m fully grown, I wonder if I’ve given mushrooms a fair try. If I eat them twenty, thirty, forty times—will I start to appreciate them? On New Year’s Eve, I hatch a resolution: I will eat mushrooms at least once a week this year.

During some of the early meals, I almost resort to holding my nose while I chew. But over time, it gets easier. I find myself tossing mushrooms into my stir-fry or sprinkling them on pizza by choice, rather than a sense of obligation. And by the fall, I am eager to get out and pick mushrooms. I want to feel that thrill of finding a miraculous mushroom again. I also want to bring it home, cook it up and savor it the way it deserves.

The rush of finding a wild mushroom reminds me of what I felt after shooting my pheasant. It also reminds me of a camping trip that Scott and I took earlier that fall. We hiked miles into a wilderness area to fish in a remote pond that we’d spotted on a map. When we got there, the pond was surrounded by wild huckleberry bushes. I never even strung up my fly rod, just squatted down and began picking berries. Fortunately, I had a few large ziplock bags in my backpack. The minuscule fruit was dark purple and tangy sweet, as if a blueberry and a raspberry had a tiny, delicious baby. We froze most of the berries. Each month, we scooped out a small allotment to sprinkle on pancakes as they sizzled, or to cook into a sweet, sticky sauce to pour over ice cream.

Foraging for wild food gives me an almost religious feeling of serendipity: When I stumble upon a hillside of gleaming, ripe huckleberries, or unearth a fragrant mushroom, the universe is confirming that I am in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

CHAPTER 9

GOOD DOG, BAD WOLF

The same fall that Betsy takes us mushroom hunting, I continue to get out and hunt for birds. Of all the things I enjoy about hunting, my favorite is watching the dogs. I jump at any invitation to join an expedition that includes a trained dog. These animals are incredible, first because of their physical abilities: to sniff out a bird and then startle it and hold it still. Next, they astound me with how well they work with humans. They read their owners’ body language and anticipate their slightest movements. I notice their happiness in the field, their satisfaction while retrieving a bird their owner has shot. This makes me rethink my relationship with my own pet dog.

I adopted Sylvia three years ago in April. Like so many modern-day love affairs, ours began online. After browsing Petfinder.com for months, I stumbled across a profile for Missy, a one-year-old female who had been picked up as a stray and was thought to be a flat-coated retriever mix. I’d read that the breed was well mannered, playful and large enough to go running or skiing, but not as unruly as the hundred-pound Great Pyrenees whom Scott already owned when we met. One Saturday, we drove Scott’s dog, Bob, out to meet this mystery gal, and the two ignored each other completely. Even when we took the pooch home with us, and she and Bob rode together in the back of Scott’s car, they avoided all eye contact. The next morning, they finally acknowledged each other by playing wildly in our backyard.

Back then, I’d had no real interest in hunting. But in hindsight, if I had thought to expose her to birds right away, Sylvia probably could have become a fine hunting dog. Instead, we raised her with little access to non-human or canine animals—with one notable exception: fish.

Scott and I started taking Sylvia on fishing trips immediately after we rescued her. She was good company and, unlike Bob, she stayed close enough and obeyed commands well enough that she rarely caused trouble. I can’t imagine exactly what was going through Sylvia’s diminutive head the first time she watched Scott hook a fish, but I know that it was a life-changing event. We were standing on the bank of the Williamson River, next to a deep pool of crystal-clear water. The fish chomped Scott’s fly and leapt into the air. And Sylvia lost her head. She surged into the current, swimming in circles where the fish had breached a few moments earlier. Periodically, she plunged her entire head underwater to glimpse the fish. Sylvia’s ancestors may have been bred to find and retrieve birds, but from that moment on, Sylvia has seemed perfectly happy dedicating her life to fish.

She knows more about fly-fishing than most humans do. When fish are rising to feed off the surface of the water, she often notices before I do. If I’m fishing with a dry fly—an imitation of a floating bug such as a mayfly—she stands aquiver and stares as it drifts downstream. If I’m fishing with a nymph—a weighted, sunken fly—she watches the neon foam strike indicator that I attach to my line. And she goes bonkers when it pops underneath the surface. She can barely control herself when she hears the whir of a reel. And when I get my fly caught on a piece of submerged wood and reel in a stick instead of a fish, Sylvia cavorts around the bank with the “catch” (after I’ve unhooked it and handed it to her) in her mouth, triumphant. On the rare occasion that I do hook a fish, Sylvia watches rapt as I try to reel it in, occasionally becoming so impatient that she tries to swim out and greet it. When I let the fish go, she bounds over to the spot in the water where I last held it and plunges her head in, hoping to catch a whiff. After a few years of fishing, Sylvia knows where to stand to be close to the action when a fish is hooked and landed. When I’m nymphing, she knows at what point in the drift a fish is most likely to strike, and her excitement builds as the fly approaches.

Sylvia loves fly-fishing more than most humans I know do, including me. We once took a long-weekend camping trip in which both Scott and I fished non-stop for three days and caught nothing. By the end of that kind of weekend, I was barely paying attention to my line anymore. The cast was automatic, mere background to my vivid daydreams. But Sylvia ran back and forth along the banks between us, checking our lines and watching, her muscles tense with optimism. She knew that any cast could be the one that resulted in a squirming fish.

Once, Scott and Sylvia were fly-fishing alone along a small, remote stream. Scott flogged the water all day and caught nothing. In late afternoon, they turned to hike back to the car. After a mile or so, Scott noticed that Sylvia had stopped a little way ahead of him. He could only see her tail and back end, as her head was thrust into some tall reeds on the river’s edge. As he tiptoed closer, he saw her whole body. She was standing on point, perfectly still and at peak attention. Scott peered past the reeds and into the water, which dropped off steeply from the bank. There, about six feet below, in a deep, calm pool, was a giant rainbow trout. Just as Scott spotted the fish, Sylvia torpedoed into the water, headfirst, with her mouth opened wide. She popped up, stunned and disoriented, with an empty jaw. When Scott came home, he looked as if he’d discovered time travel. His eyes were wild and he couldn’t wait to tell me, in perfect detail, about what Sylvia had done. He was amazed—first that she had somehow spotted the fish and, second, that she dove after it.

“What would you have done if she came up with that fish in her mouth?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” He shook his head, and I realized that Sylvia’s disappointment was no match for Scott’s. “I would have bonked it on the head, grilled it up and fed it to her. She earned it.”

When Scott pats Sylvia during a post-fishing slumber, he turns to me and says: “I’ll probably have a lot of dogs in my life. But none of them will be as interested in fishing, none will love to do what I love to do, as much as Sylvia.” He’s right; how often does a family pet share our own hobbies?

I love my mutt to an embarrassing degree. Scott and I have coined dozens of nicknames for her (Wiggles, Wigs, Sylvester and Peeps McGoo are just the beginning). And though she can’t speak for herself, all indications are that she loves me back. But her affection for me stems, I think, from my feeding her, walking her and playing ball or Frisbee with her. I am her caregiver. We are companions. Yet I wonder how much deeper our connection would be if we were also hunting partners, if I could draw out her latent instincts and plumb the long-bred abilities she doesn’t know she has.

Wolves and dogs are the same species, and their genomes are almost impossible to distinguish. Even a Chihuahua is just one taxonomical subcategory away from a wolf. This bald, pint-size version of the wolf has simply been through an unnatural breeding process, carefully controlled by humans. This alone is what qualifies it as Canis lupus familiaris instead of C. lupus. And even though we created dogs, we don’t have good records of how we did it. It’s only in the last decade or so that scientists have turned serious about their studies of the history of the dog.

Other than humans, wolves were once the mammal with the most varied geographic distribution on earth. They were also one of our biggest predatory competitors, which is why we managed to wipe them out of so many different regions. But as this widespread annihilation was taking place, we were also taming some members of the same species into our best friends. Evidence suggests that humans domesticated wolves simultaneously in several places around the world. There are various theories about exactly how wolves were tamed. In one particularly odd theory, wolf pups were stolen from their dens at one or two days old, and lactating women nursed them from their own breasts. Regardless of the specifics, each theory rests on some level of consent from the wolves themselves. For example, some scientists believe that Siberian huskies stem from a population of semi-domesticated wolves who flocked to nomadic tribes of people when hunting became difficult during harsh winters. The people tied the dogs up and taught them to pull sleds. In return, they fed the dogs. Then, when the snow melted, the dogs went off and lived in the wild, again hunting on their own, until winter.

Although the “how” of domestication is still a mystery, researchers tend to agree on the “why.” Nearly every theory involves a symbiotic relationship that includes food and hunting. Humans and dogs have been hunting together for as long as forty thousand years, according to some estimates. Many of the dog breeds that we recognize today were developed much more recently to specialize in one category of game or one stage of the hunting process.

Thick-coated dogs such as Labrador retrievers, for example, are naturally equipped to brave icy waters while fetching downed waterfowl. Dogs who pursue upland birds—birds living on dry land, including chukar, grouse and pheasant—are usually either pointers or flushers. Pointers, such as German shorthairs, run way ahead of the hunter to track prey and then freeze, holding a bird in place until the hunter draws near. Flushing dogs, such as cocker spaniels, stay close to the hunters and scare birds into the air as they find them. Both categories of dogs are easily trained to retrieve birds who’ve been shot. Today the vast majority of American dog owners do not hunt. But their four-legged companions still have these hunting abilities coursing through their veins.

Armed with a couple of books, I try to teach Sylvia to retrieve birds. I drag feathered bird wings around our yard, then let her out and encourage her to sniff them out of hiding. But she’s not used to following her nose, and doesn’t notice anything different about the yard.

I tell her to sit and stay while I throw a duck decoy into the water. But after years of dashing madly after balls and Frisbees the moment they leave my hand, she struggles to wait. For a hunter, this is a liability. You don’t necessarily want a dog leaping into the water as soon as you down a duck: Other birds at whom you want to take aim might approach. My next pet, I resolve, will be a bird dog. For now, though, I am happy with my ball-chasing furry friend.

In 2009, wolf hunts open in two Western states for the first time in decades. Personally, I can’t imagine shooting a wolf—it is too closely related to a dog, the animal with whom I have forged my deepest human-animal friendship. But I don’t entirely oppose wolf hunts, either, because they could build tolerance—among conservative ranchers, especially—for a self-sustaining wolf population. As I’ve mentioned, when hunters are allowed to pursue an animal, a constituency develops around that species. It reminds me of controversial, high-priced hunts in Africa and Asia for endangered animals. As a conservationist, it pains me to think of someone pulling the trigger on a rare tiger. But if the astronomical price tag for hunting one tiger raises enough money to protect hundreds of them, isn’t it doing more good than harm?

Wolf reintroduction raises ethical questions that I would not have considered before I started hunting. As an environmentalist, I believe in the principle of reintroduction. We should right the wrong that we committed by removing the species from giant swaths of North America more than sixty years ago. But this reintroduction comes with caveats to which the wolves cannot possibly agree. For example, state and federal management plans call for an individual wolf to be “fatally managed,” or killed, if it preys on multiple livestock animals. Wildlife managers assume that wolves are capable of quickly learning the difference between wild and domestic prey. Scientists who study wolf and dog behavior, on the other hand, aren’t sure that’s a realistic demand. Human activity, particularly ranching, now takes up the vast majority of wolves’ available habitat.

Wolves have no shortage of enemies. Ranchers seem to universally despise the animals for preying on their livestock. And hunters are surprisingly eager to join the wolf hatred, too. To combat all of this, some environmental groups have launched campaigns to discourage fear of this animal that humans have loaded with symbolism for millennia. Non-profits in Montana and New Mexico, for example, actually bring wolves into school classrooms. The message from such groups is that wolves are gentle creatures, not fierce ones, and so we should be kind to them. But wolves are not gentle, they’re wild animals. There is a real danger in demanding that animals be good, kind, friendly—or any other anthropomorphic trait—to deserve respect or protection.

Sadly, wildlife management is a political sport. Interest groups—including sportsmen and environmentalists, who often have opposing aims—wield power over the politicians who allocate funding for state agencies. This means the wildlife managers who set hunting seasons and quotas are beholden to politicians. Worse, they could permit irresponsible levels of hunting in an effort to collect the maximum number of fees, bolstering their short-term budget.

Many hunters, I’ve found, think about individual animals as members of a larger population. As long as the population is healthy and stable, a certain number of individuals can be ethically harvested for food. In some cases, these killings are actually beneficial to the health of a population. Well-managed hunts can cull a population that has outgrown an ecosystem and is causing damage to the land. Hunting discourages animals from becoming tame or moving into developed areas, reducing the number of human-wildlife conflicts. In a recent study, well-regulated hunts were found to help migratory animals adapt more quickly to habitat changes.

Occasionally, we even think of ourselves in such a way that the good of the population overrules the health of one individual. Take clinical medical trials, for example. Doctors willingly, and in some cases knowingly, administer placebos—substances that they know will not slow disease or save lives—to their patients with fatal diseases. But they do this with the hope that the one patient’s experience—even one that fails to slow death—will eventually save more lives.

Before I began to hunt, I thought of animals as individuals, with families and emotions and a whole slew of anthropomorphic traits. This strikes me as the environmentalist, vegetarian, animal lover’s approach: Any death of any individual being is painful and bad. The trouble is, I now think of animals both as members of a population and as individuals. It makes for a lot of hand-wringing. But maybe it’s a necessary paradox; it’s what makes me a responsible hunter.

When summer arrives, we add to our usual camping and fishing trips a new activity: scouting for birds. We look for small ponds and streams where ducks congregate. We peruse rocky river canyons for signs of an upland game bird called a chukar partridge. And then, in the fall, we camp in southeast Oregon and hike through steep canyons in search of these elusive birds. Before this trip, I have never seen a chukar in person, and everything I know about the species I learned in books.

The chukar (Alectoris chukar) is native to Eurasia, and especially common in the western Himalayas. A chukar is about the size of a pigeon and mostly black and white, with a dark stripe around the eye and bright red legs, eyelids and beaks.

These avian homesteaders prefer habitat from which other game birds would flee: steep, rocky cliffs in harsh, arid climates. Because they live in such steep terrain, chukar hunting is grueling. This is especially true without a trained dog to sniff out the birds. Scott and I cover miles of steep ground before I see one lone chukar. It flies out of sight before I can recognize it and shoulder my gun. Because they live in areas with few trees, chukars spend most of their time on the ground. When startled or roused, they run or fly quickly uphill and over the canyon edge.

Despite my lack of traditional success—we come home with an empty cooler—I enjoy each day’s outing. I listen for the birds to call to each other—chukka chukka chukka—as if they’re cackling their name. I look for insects and seeds, including the small kernels of native Oregon bunchgrasses, that the birds might munch on.

I notice how much more satisfying it is to climb a steep canyon in pursuit of an animal than to hike the same feature for the vague sake of recreation or exercise. Scott and I don’t hike much, but we have started cross-country skiing together, which is like hiking on skis. Scott has skied his whole life. I went downhill skiing a couple of times in high school and college, but haven’t cross-country skied before.

On one of our first outings, we drive to the Edison Sno-Park, a network of trails with electricity-related names. We peruse the map and decide to ski to the AC/DC shelter because it has the best name. Most of the route to the hut is uphill, which is difficult on skis but not impossible. Directly under each foot, the base of my skis is etched into a fish-scale pattern. By stomping it into the snow, I can grip the trail. Or I can point the tips of my skis outward and walk straight up, leaving a herringbone pattern in the snow. Or, on steeper terrain, I can turn my skis perpendicular to the hill and sidestep up it. Most of the time, no matter what I choose, I still manage to slip backward, catching myself only with my poles.

Just as I start to get tired, we ski past a sign declaring that the shelter is one and a half miles away. About ten minutes later, we pass a second sign saying the same thing. By the time we reach the third sign, I am imagining myself in a horror movie. It would end with me collapsing, dehydrated and exhausted but still one and a half miles from the AC/DC shelter. I imagine myself as a modern-day Sisyphus and also the boulder, doomed to futilely push myself uphill.

Shortly after the third sign, I slide off the trail and land on my back in a pile of snow, soft enough that it doesn’t hurt. It’s so soft, however, that I can’t stand up—there’s no surface to push off. I thrash and wiggle, trying to find a magical position that somehow gives me leverage. I grunt. I sweat. I swear. I grunt some more. Eventually, I pack down enough snow to stand up. Tears and snot drip off my chin. Sweat glues to my skin all the clothing layers under my waterproof jacket.

Since my first day of skiing, I have struggled to notice when I start to feel warm or chilled. Scott seems to have an internal thermometer with an alarm attached. He stops skiing occasionally and peels off a layer, or yanks a sweater out of his pack and pulls it over his head. “If you’re already hot or cold,” he has warned me, “it’s too late. It takes too much work for your body to warm itself back up, or dry off sweat.” But my climate-controlled life has stripped away any sensitivity I might have had to these dips and rises in body temperature. I notice only when I am hot enough to sweat, or cold enough to shiver.

I stomp up the hill. Scott is out of sight, which is for the best. I whimper as I slip and slide along the path. Why do people do this to themselves? The trail weaves around a tree and there is Scott, waiting for me.

“How’re you doing?” He sounds so cheerful I could throttle him.

“I hate this.” I look away from him, instead focusing on the empty trail in front of me.

“Do you want to stop? Take a break?”

“No. I want to hurry up and get to the damn shelter.” If I say any more, I could start crying again.

He glides—how does he do that?—behind me and says gently, “Hey, are you okay?”

“No. I just want to get there.” I shuffle my skis a few more times and then ask, “How much farther is it?”

“Probably not too far.”

Probably? Tears flood my eyes. Then Scott says: “You can do it, Lily.”

“No,” I mumble, “I can’t.”

He’s still right behind me, and I know that he is about to deliver a pep talk. I can practically feel the obnoxious encouragement on the back of my neck. He’s going to say that yes, I can do it. I’m stronger than I think. We’re almost there. When we get there I’ll be so glad I did this.

Instead, he says: “We can turn back if you want. But either way, it’s more skiing. You’re in Fortitude Valley, Lil.”

For a moment, I forget how miserable I am. I look around, as if he has told me, literally, where we are. But this is the AC/DC trail. I already know that. I’ve seen the map.

“Where is that?” I finally ask. “Fortitude Valley? I don’t know where that is.”

“Yeah you do. Everyone does. Fortitude Valley is…” He waits for the right words, perhaps aware of how short my fuse is. “You don’t choose to come here, but when things get tough, it’s where you are. And you just have to get through it.”

Gray sky. Mounds of tricky, evil snow. Scrawny lodgepole pines judging me as I limp past, sniffling. Behind us, more obnoxiously cheerful skiers who say things like “What a lovely day!” when I step off the trail so they may glide past. Scott is right: This is Fortitude Valley. Or hell. He’s also right that there’s nothing to do but keep going. I resolve to save what little energy I have left for skiing, and not waste it on anger or whining.

And then, just like that, the heavens part and the angels sing. A stout log cabin appears before me, with a few pairs of skis poking out of the snow in front.

“Shelter ahoy!” I pump my fists in the air, poles dangling from my wrists and slapping my sides.

Scott snaps my picture and kisses me. He’s so proud of me that I am ashamed at my grumpy, childish behavior. It shouldn’t be such a big deal to ski to the top of a ridge. All around me children are doing it, for goodness’ sake. We drink water and eat granola bars next to the woodstove, where other skiers have already stoked a hot fire. The downhill is fast and treacherous. But I gladly accept the fear of flying down a slippery hill over the miserable slog of shoving myself up it.

As the winter wears on, we ski almost every day that we don’t have to work. For me, the physical challenge is just one part of the hardship of skiing. The other part is figuring out how to occupy my mind during a seemingly endless trudge.

Early in the day, when I’m feeling energetic, I daydream. Once I get too tired to be anything but practical, I make mental lists of articles I want to write. Next, I compose pneumonic devices to remember my lists. Eventually, exhausted, I resort to the only thing I can think to do: count my steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Around 250, I start getting sloppy. And then something else happens: nothing. If I ski long enough, my mind becomes so exhausted that it almost shuts off. The novelty of not thinking about anything is sort of fun. John Cage, the composer and poet, once wrote: “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” At the tipping point of exhaustion, I veer as close to meditation as I ever have, and it feels like I’ve reached Nirvana.

In the spring, we return to the site of my infamous breakdown. I have knots in my stomach as I click my boots into the bindings. I tell myself that whatever happens, however hard it gets, I will not cry. Fortitude Valley, here I come.

But this time, the trail to the AC/DC shelter is apparently diverted around Fortitude Valley. We arrive—both of us—in good spirits. I am tired and of course I’ve fallen more times than I wanted to count, but I remain positive. I feel as if, in one winter, cross-country skiing has transformed me from a whimpering child into a capable adult. As we sit down on a rustic wooden bench next to the woodstove, a family with two young children—probably eight and ten years old—gets up to leave.

Children who willingly cross-country ski amaze me. There is no grand finale, no reward, no intoxicating sensation of flying like you get downhill skiing. It is hard work one way and hard work on the way back. I watch as the youngest child, a boy, snaps his boots into his ski bindings. He looks so matter-of-fact, so calm. Never mind that he is about to slide down a hill that reduced me—an adult—to tears.

“I think I would be a better person,” I whisper to Scott, “if I’d grown up cross-country skiing.”

He swallows a mouthful of water and laughs. “How so?”

“I don’t know, exactly… I guess I’d be more patient, more able to live in the moment, enjoy the journey. Something like that, anyway.”

Although I’ve always liked the abstract idea of hiking, I never really understood the point of it before. But now, bird hunting, I find myself enjoying these long treks through difficult terrain. Even on days when I don’t see a single chukar, I take pleasure in the hike. My heightened senses occupy my mind, so there’s no need for games or counting. With no trail to follow, I stay focused and scrutinize each step. I look for possible nesting sites or the flash of a red beak. I listen for calls and cackles. I know I am nearing the top of a steep canyon when I smell the citrusy sagebrush that grows above, on flat ground. I feel completely present; taking in the land around me and interpreting it, in real time, with no distractions. I don’t daydream or compose lists or check my BlackBerry.

Perhaps what I needed to become a hiker was a specific goal, a reason to traipse for miles. Hunting and gathering are, after all, the primary reasons that humans developed stamina to travel long distances on foot. Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, believes that the uniquely human capacity for long-distance running (think 26.2-mile marathons or even longer ultra-marathons) is a vestige of our ancient method of “persistence” hunting, or chasing a wild animal to exhaustion and eventually death. Hiking was once an integral part of the human experience of the hunt, just as fetching was key to the dog’s experience of it.

Yet our lives have moved so far away from hunting that we no longer recognize the origins of these daily routines. Even our language is filled with words and phrases derived from hunting. “Buck,” the word for a male deer, for example, is slang for one dollar because in the nineteenth century, Americans could buy one deer carcass for a dollar. A “sitting duck” is the easiest shot a hunter will ever get (so easy it’s considered unsportsmanlike).

When you remove hunting from human life, this is what you get: aimless hiking and “hanging out” with our dogs, who are bred to catch Frisbees or to not shed fur. How bizarre, then, that something as passive as hiking has become the domain of environmentalists. After all, we assume that any solstice-worshipping hippie loves to hike. Hunting, on the other hand, is for rednecks who couldn’t care less about the health of the planet.

The truth, of course, is that many hunters care greatly about the environment. In fact, most of the hunters I know go hunting in search of an outdoor experience first and wild, healthy meat second. Drinking beer in the woods or nabbing a giant set of antlers—these possibilities don’t enter their consciousness.

Until I moved to Oregon, I made no distinction between hunters who pursued animals for different purposes. Now I know: There are hunters and there are trophy hunters. The people who aim to bring home tasty meat don’t usually worry about the size of an animal’s rack. In his cookbook, Roy Wall writes, “The sportsman who bags a noble head, a monarch of a wilderness glade, has a just right to be proud, but in doing so he imposes double duty upon the camp cook, for, in most cases, the finer the head, the tougher the meat.”

Scott and I don’t get cable television at home, but whenever we stay in a hotel, I flip through the cable stations to find a hunting show. In some parts of the country, there are around-the-clock channels devoted to hunting. But most of these shows display little if any footage of the actual pursuit, instead focusing solely on the kill. A typical program tells the story of one hunt in about five minutes. It begins with a quick introduction of the hunter and the guide, then shares a little information about the guns each is carrying. The bulk of the footage is a rapid sequence of spotting the animal, setting up the shot and taking it. The hunter and guide spend a few seconds admiring the animal and remarking on its gargantuan size. Then the show switches to a new hunt. There is no map to situate viewers, no insight into the species’ behavior, no indication that the pursuit took hours or days or weeks. Just wham, bam, boom, cut to commercial.

Serious trophy hunters spend hundreds of thousands of dollars traveling to remote countries and hiring guides to help them stalk the biggest animals. The Boone and Crockett Club, co-founded by Theodore Roosevelt, is still a major force in habitat conservation. It also plays another, more nefarious role in modern big-game hunting: record keeping. The club has a formula for determining the score of any antlered animal killed, based on the width of the horns and the number of tines, or points, jutting out of them. In keeping and promoting these records, the club perpetuates an obsession with gargantuan size that is likely detrimental to wildlife. A study in 2009 found that the horns of Canadian bighorn sheep have shrunk because of hunting. By targeting individuals with the largest horns, trophy hunters are systematically altering the gene pool of the entire species. The lead researcher of this study told National Geographic, “Human-harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild.”

In central Oregon, every outdoors supply store has a “brag board” near the entrance. This is a bulletin board where customers can tack photos of themselves with their prey. I used to scurry past these displays, averting my eyes. It seemed so cruel and twisted for people to pose, grinning, with a dead animal. The creature’s teeth are often stained with the blood that dribbled out of its mouth during its last breath. Its tongue hangs out, looking unnaturally long and seeming to mock the dignity that the animal possessed during life.

In a way, I get it now. I understand how much work goes into tracking and killing wild game. Where I used to see a grisly image of mockery, I now see a memento of a hard-fought victory. Still, some of these pictures tug at my insides.

That fall, after buying my duck stamp and other tags needed to hunt birds, I stand at the brag board of a local outdoors supply store, entranced by one photo of a man straddling a prone bear. There’s something about photos of dead bears, in particular, that startles and saddens me. In life, bears are so elusive. And they seem, to me at least, more dog-like than most wild game. A bear’s forehead slopes to its nose at the same angle as my Sylvia’s. This particular bear is a grizzly. Its paws are the size of dinner plates, with claws like switchblades. No doubt it was a huge, threatening animal during life. But it’s been reduced now to an impotent mound, disarmed and stretched out, with a burly, grinning man standing over it. It’s not even cold and already it looks more rug than bear.

CHAPTER 10

FRIENDS FOR DINNER

In July 2008, after weeks filled with planning, Scott and I take a fishing vacation with four friends in the Alaskan wilderness. On the Fourth, Scott and I land in Anchorage at midnight. Fireworks ignite around the city, though the night sky never gets dark enough to see them very well.

The next morning, armed with a long list, we purchase food for the next eight days. Then we take a cab from the grocery store to a tiny floatplane operation, where we meet our friends. There’s Andy and Jessie, from Missoula. There’s our friend Ryan, who lives in Bend and is a regular fishing buddy of ours. And then there’s Evan, a friend of Andy’s from Minnesota whom we haven’t met before.

Andy was a fishing guide in this area during college, so he knows the river well and has made arrangements to hire the planes and rent the rafts. We load our clothing and fishing gear, along with two white coolers and two inflatable rafts, onto two tiny airplanes. We fly for an hour before landing near the shore of a small lake. We wade to shore, assemble and inflate the rafts and stuff our gear into dry bags.

I’m nervous as the pilots wave and their planes lift off to return to Anchorage, leaving behind a whitecapped wake. We’re on our own in a veritable wilderness, and if anything goes wrong we will have no chance of getting help. This will be the first time I have been in clear danger from predators; grizzly bears are plentiful here, and will fish the same river we do, for the same king salmon. Andy has told us that for the most part, bears try to avoid humans. But any bear, particularly a protective mama with cubs, could become aggressive if startled.

Before we left Anchorage, Scott and I purchased a fifty-dollar can of aerosol bear spray, a spicy concoction that could temporarily disarm an attacking bear if sprayed directly in its face. Andy has packed a 12-gauge shotgun, too, which means that for the first time I (or at least our group) will be armed for self-protection. Andy gives us a gentle reminder that anyone who heads into the woods—even just to go to the bathroom—needs to carry the gun or spray. My pulse quickens when he says that. I’m not sure which I’m more afraid of: the threat of a snarling bear or the idea of using a gun for self-defense. What really makes me nervous, though, is that I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy myself with nothing to do but fish for eight days.

The sun is warm, though, and the mood jovial as we push off from shore. We laugh and whoop, rowing across the lake and into a tiny stream: Talachulitna Creek. The weather quickly turns awful—a cold rain moves in on the second day and follows us for the rest of the trip. Andy says he’s never seen the mosquitoes so thick. We wear head nets all day, every day, and I shudder to think how I would fare without one—bugs buzzing in my ears, up my nose and in my eyes. The river is blown out by all the rain, so the fishing is slow.

And yet, every day is adventure. Each curve of the river brings new scenery and a new stretch of fish habitat to try to solve. Where will we stop for lunch? How will we find enough dry wood to start a fire? I bond with Jessie, and sometimes it only takes one word to make us erupt in laughter. I start to cast like a professional, flinging out more line and heavier flies than I ever have before. We manage to catch rainbow trout, arctic grayling and, on occasion, massive king salmon. We eat fresh salmon for dinner almost every night, and even make grayling sushi. (So much for all the food we’ve packed in coolers.) The biggest surprise of the trip is how much I enjoy it.

Here’s something else that surprises me: We aren’t alone, after all. Several times a day we hear the buzz of airplanes overhead. And the most popular fishing holes usually have a raft of anglers nearby. Some are even flown in by helicopter from a local fishing lodge.

These other anglers tell us stories about a misguided pair of New Yorkers paddling one or two days ahead of us. They have mishaps with grizzly bears. They flip their raft in a rapid. They run out of food. I start to feel as if I’m following a ghost version of me—the person I could have been if I hadn’t moved to Bend and met Scott. The pilot who eventually flies us out of the bush will tell us that he found the New Yorkers while he was picking up another group. They paddled downstream to the take-out days before they were supposed to leave. They were wet, cold, hungry and terrified. They couldn’t wait to go home.

I sympathize with these New Yorkers, and understand how they got in over their heads. I have so much more respect for the power of nature than I did four years ago. Almost every year, someone in Bend drowns in the Deschutes River, usually wearing a bathing suit and floating in an inner tube. Until I spent time boating with Scott, I never understood exactly how forceful rushing water could be. Also every year or so, a deer turns on a dog who chases it and gores a beloved family pet to death. A mountain lion moves near the city limits and feasts on house cats and small dogs. Back when most of my wildlife interactions happened via television, I didn’t appreciate the power of a wild animal leaning into its instincts.

Daylight shines twenty-four hours a day here, and the whole landscape roars with life as if every being, from the mosquito to the grizzly bear, is trying to make up for the lost time of winter. Giant king salmon swim past us upstream, led by their noses hundreds of miles from the ocean to the exact stretch of fresh water where they first hatched from a pink egg. As soon as these behemoth fish leave the sea, they stop eating. Mating is their only goal. As they migrate upstream, their silver skin turns as red as an autumn maple tree in Vermont, with the color peaking just as they spawn.

The salmon are the lifeblood of this river; countless other species depend on their summer pilgrimage. Trout wait for them to enter the river and lay eggs the way impatient schoolchildren wait for their mothers to put dinner on the table. Some of these trout trail just a few inches behind the female salmon, at times slamming into their swollen bellies in hopes of releasing a few delicious eggs.

After a salmon spawns, it rots and dies. This is a gradual process, the opposite of getting thwacked on the head by a fisherman or clawed open by a bear. Instead, a salmon’s flesh fades from scarlet red to translucent. Even as chunks of its body fall off and drift downstream, the fish remains aggressive and vigilant. Half dead, the zombie-fish hovers over its own eggs, ready to muster a vicious snap of the jaws at any greedy leech or trout that tries to gobble its young.

For the last few months, Scott and I have been talking about starting a family. As I watch these salmon, I marvel at their drive to procreate. It elevates these otherwise normal fish into something verging on supernatural. It makes me wonder: How would parenthood change me? Would I become something unrecognizable, some snarling mother-beast, a translucent ghost of my former self?

Some of my friends have had children, but not my closest ones—nobody with whom I could sit down and talk about these fears honestly. Nathan is an obvious choice, but he’s so far away and we talk on the phone so infrequently. Besides, I still haven’t met his new daughter, or seen Nathan in person in his new role as a parent.

When I think about having children, all of my fears center on what would happen to me—to my marriage, to my career, to my life. This underlines what I see as the uncomfortable paradox of parenting: Deciding to have a child is, at its core, a selfish decision. But raising that child is a never-ending act of selflessness. Scott and I talk circles around this, until I meekly declare: I’m not ready. Scott is patient and understanding. Yet even after the subject is dropped, I can’t help but fixate on the questions he is too polite to ask: What am I waiting for? What could possibly make me ready?

The month after we arrive home, Republican presidential candidate John McCain names Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin quickly rouses just about every controversy imaginable, including some centered on her family’s hunting traditions. She is lauded by some for her ability “to field dress a moose,” but criticized by others for her remorseless attitude about killing animals. Hunting is back in the spotlight.

Until I moved to Oregon, the only time I heard about the sport was during presidential campaigns. Every four years, it seems, candidates don crisp vests, visit shooting ranges and bow before the almighty NRA to show their support for the Second Amendment. But what of wildlife management? Or habitat conservation? I’m not voting for Sarah Palin but I am frustrated by the lack of civility and deep consideration that accompanies our national debate about hunting. It seems we Americans can’t move past two polarizing issues—Guns! Killing animals!—to dissect the meatier and, dare I say, more relevant issues begging to be discussed. The reasons why a person hunts, the ethical guidelines she chooses to obey, even the technology she uses or refuses to use—say a lot about who she is. With rare exceptions, media coverage addresses hunting in a yes-or-no manner. Does the candidate hunt? Yes or no. Next question. We have missed a tremendous opportunity to learn more about who these candidates are, why they believe what they do and whether their actions live up to their beliefs.

In the fall, the generosity of other hunters continues to amaze me. Andy and Jessie invite me to go bird hunting. Andy and his dad, Hank, offer advice. The hunting and fishing writer for my newspaper, Gary Lewis, gives me books on hunting. Others offer to loan me guns or other equipment, too. Psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm argues that hunting has long been connected to our social tendency to work together and share rewards. “Luck in hunting was not equally divided among all hunters; hence the practical outcome was that those who had luck today would share their food with those who would be lucky tomorrow,” he writes. “Assuming hunting behavior led to genetic changes, the conclusion would be that modern man has an innate impulse for cooperation and sharing, rather than for killing and cruelty.” Hunting and sharing continue to go together today through groups like Sportsmen Against Hunger, a nationwide food bank that accepts donated game and distributes free meals to the needy.

Still, I don’t want to become a barnacle on these people who have helped me so much. Besides, I figure there’s no better way to test my hunting skills than to go it alone. So in October, Scott and I take a weeklong camping and bird-hunting trip. (Well, I hunt; he opts for the more modern, gun-free hike. Over the last two years, Scott has grown increasingly interested in my hunting adventures, but he still isn’t ready to pick up a gun.)

We set up camp and then start scouting the area for places to hunt. I notice a cluster of three small ponds on the map, so we drive there in hopes of finding some ducks. There are generally two ways to hunt for ducks. One is to spread decoys on a pond or lake, hide in a nearby blind and occasionally toot on a duck call to dupe birds flying overhead into landing on the water. The second is to try to sneak up and flush ducks that are already sitting on a small pond or stream. I’m going to try the second method.

I get out of the car, hike toward the first slough and then squint into the sun. I can’t quite tell if anything is on the water. Hopeful, I creep closer—heel, toe, heel, toe. A row of pine trees shields me from the view of any animal that might be on the water. When I reach the last tree, there are still ten yards between the pond and me. I don’t own any camouflage, but this morning I made sure to pull on neutral green and beige clothing, to better blend in with my surroundings. Birds have keen eyesight, and wild birds in particular tend to avoid blocks of solid color, the telltale sign of something man-made.

I crouch down and take one long step from behind the tree trunk. I freeze, watching the surface of the pond. No new movement, just the same windblown wrinkles. Another step, then another pause. Another step. I continue this until I get just a few feet from the water and notice a wave ripple out from a spot to my left. Something splashes, and the tall grass at the edge of the pond flickers. A duck thrashes into the air. Yes! I stand up straight and shoulder my gun. I switch off the safety, line up my sights and pull the trigger. Bang!

But the duck flies on, its wings not missing a beat. I pump the next shell into the chamber and line up my sights again. This time, the duck is farther away. Bang!

Again, the bird keeps flying. I reach into my pocket for another shell, but it’s empty. I left the rest of my ammunition in the car. As I lower my gun, the duck circles the pond and flies directly over me, then rises higher into the air until it disappears.

Disappointed, I head back to the car to fill my pockets with shotgun shells. Then I hike to the second pond from the road but find no birds. I scoot under a large willow, so a bird flying overhead doesn’t see me. I am ready. I wait. And wait. Then wait some more. I daydream a little. But mostly, I fret about what I would do if a duck flew overhead, spotted the water and opted to descend.

When I am actively pursuing an animal, I don’t have time to think about these qualms. I focus solely on the chase and assume permission to take the life of my quarry. The kill is the goal. There is no time for doubts. Instead, it’s during times like this, sitting quietly with no animal in sight, that these ethical questions bubble up.

The question hunters most often ask themselves and one another is: Is this shot sporting? Simply put, a sporting shot is one that gives the prey a reasonable chance at survival. There are no carved-in-stone definitions of what’s reasonable—a hunter must analyze each situation and sort out the ethics for herself. But there are some widely accepted rules, such as: It’s fair to shoot a duck in flight but not one sitting on the water. Though it’s legal in most states, baiting deer, or setting out piles of corn and salt licks to draw in herds, is believed to give the hunter an unfair advantage. In addition, many hunters develop personal codes of ethics such as I will shoot bucks but not does. (Depending on the individual, this vow could stem from a wish to minimize one’s impact on the deer population—or could reflect a machismo attitude like the one taught to young boys: Never hit a girl.)

Sportsmen’s groups have their own written credos for “fair-chase” hunting. The Boone and Crockett Club’s definition is considered the national standard for big-game hunting: “The ethical, sportsmanlike, and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.” In 2005, the group adopted a statement condemning so-called canned hunts, in which large animals are bred in captivity and then “released” in a fenced area for high-paying clients to shoot. One short-lived but highly publicized ranch tried allowing clients to operate a gun over the Internet and, with the click of a mouse, take the life of a captive hog. To me, the excitement of hunting lies in gleaning enough knowledge—about the prey and about the landscape—to find the animal in its own habitat. Baiting animals or shooting them within an enclosure not only raises ethical concerns, but negates the main challenge of hunting.

My own definition of fair chase is to interfere with an ecosystem as little as possible while participating as a predator. I didn’t settle quickly on this general rule. Rather, it’s the result of many months of consideration and research. I’ve had long talks with other hunters and with Scott. I’ve read books on ethics, as well as short stories and essays about hunting. Like so much related to hunting, it is subject to change depending on unique circumstances or on some new piece of insight. It remains impressively, frustratingly difficult to make generalizations about an activity that has so many variables.

When I first moved to Oregon, for example, I was wowed by the bow hunters I met. It seemed the ultimate act of sportsmanship to creep within thirty yards of an animal (the range of most bows) and then kill it with a well-placed arrow. But the more I talked to bow hunters, the more horror stories I heard about animals being maimed instead of killed. I know it is possible to make a clean kill with a bow and arrow because I’ve met people who have done it. But others have had to chase down the wounded animal for twelve hours, hitting it with three arrows before it finally dropped dead. My newspaper has published photos of deer that appeared in backyards and parks with arrows sticking out of their necks. It takes a lot of practice to be able to shoot a rifle or a shotgun consistently. It takes much more experience to make a fatal shot with an arrow.

Today, however, as I sit under a shrub and ponder the ethics of hunting, there is only one question dogging me. It is perhaps the least likely one, considering that I’ve been hunting for two years already. It is certainly the biggest, most overriding question: Is it wrong to kill animals?

As strange as it sounds, hunting doesn’t have to involve the death of an animal. There are, it turns out, some non-lethal forms. I met my first “catch-and-release” hunter—a woman—earlier that fall, when presidential campaigns were in full throttle. I was profiling a rural voting precinct, so I went door to door to gauge the local political climate. It’s the kind of story I love to write because it’s an excuse to knock on random doors and—more often than not—get invited into people’s homes. There is no job that gets you inside more living rooms than being a newspaper reporter. If you’re as nosy as I am, this alone is enough of a reason to go into journalism. You get to see what kind of sweatpants and slippers a couple change into when they get home from work. Meet their pets and their children. See their wallpaper. Smell what they’re cooking for dinner.

Alas, this particular woman was standing outside when I pulled up, so we did all our talking in her front yard as the sun dipped below the mountains behind her farmhouse. She was in her early fifties, with short brown hair and an athletic build. She explained that she’s a staunch Republican and fears Barack Obama would take away her guns if he were elected. Then I asked if she hunts.

“I do.” She smiled. “I’m a bird hunter, but mostly I do catch-and-release.”

“What?”

She laughed. “I love that reaction—I get it all the time.” She went on to explain that she trains pointing dogs, and when she takes her dogs out in the field, her only goal is for them to find a bird and hold it on point. She commands them to release the bird, the bird flies away and she rewards her dogs with treats.

Turns out she’s not the only person to enjoy all aspects of the hunt up to the kill. In 2010, the Whitetail Pro Series began hosting deer-hunting tournaments in which contestants stalk deer, zero in on them using digital scopes equipped with memory cards and then fire blank shells. Hunters earn scores based on the size and number of deer that they would have killed humanely had their guns been loaded with traditional ammunition.

And in England, since fox hunting with dogs was outlawed in 2004, dedicated hunters on horseback have eliminated the fox altogether and taken to pursuing a designated human. When they catch up to their quarry they don’t harm him or her but take what satisfaction they’ve gained from the chase and call it a day.

These so-called humane methods of hunting offer new potential for the sport by eliminating all of its most contentious aspects: human danger, impact on wildlife populations and, of course, the ugly reality of death. But this represents a tiny fraction of the hunting that occurs on the planet. And because it avoids all of the slippery ethical questions that plague fatal hunters, including me, isn’t it, in a way, missing a main point? Spanish writer, philosopher and hunter José Ortega y Gasset rebuked an early-twentieth-century British version known as photographic hunting, in which hunters captured prey and photographed it before releasing it unharmed. “One can refuse to hunt,” he writes, “but if one hunts one has to accept certain ultimate requirements… Without these ingredients the spirit of the hunt disappears. The animal’s behavior is wholly inspired by the conviction that his life is at stake, and if it turns out that this is a complete fiction, that it is only a matter of taking his picture, the hunt becomes a farce and its specific tension evaporates.”

My discomfort with catch-and-release hunting begins to bleed into my feelings about catch-and-release fishing. Fishing is more complicated, though. Unlike hunters, anglers can’t always target individuals, and often must reel in a fish and identify its species or measure its length before determining whether it’s even legal to kill. In other words, every sport fisherman must practice some catch-and-release. And as Scott points out, when anglers release their catch, it allows more people to participate in the sport. Still, I find myself feeling guilty for trying to trick fish into biting my fly when I know I’m only going to release them. It feels like teasing or bullying. Perhaps cooking the fish and eating it—putting it to use—would be more respectful. I worry that, as Ortega y Gasset argued, there is something farcical about engaging in a life-or-death struggle minus the death.

Of course, whether or not we hunt, we all kill animals on a regular basis. Our entire society is built upon the sanctity of human life at the expense of animal life. Geese are killed to prevent collisions with the airplanes that transport us and our goods. We perform medical research on animals, to enhance and prolong our own lives. Each day in the United States, six thousand acres of open space, including working farms and forestland, are developed. Much of our sugarcane is harvested from fields that were shorn from life-teeming tropical rain forests. The roads we drive on, the manicured lawns we play on, the stores we shop in—all of it used to be wildlife habitat. Power plants, oil and gas wells and even wind farms deal enormous blows to animal populations.

In Bend, the local park district decides to euthanize 109 resident geese. Instead of migrating between seasonal habitats, these birds have made themselves at home in Bend, year-round. And they’ve reproduced, despite the park district’s multi-year efforts at birth control, hazing by dogs and even relocation to a bird sanctuary more than a hundred miles away. Fields of feces create a nuisance and a health hazard. And the aggressive geese displace other native birds. So district officials do the right thing by having the birds killed humanely, then donating the meat to local food banks, which struggle to feed the needy during a long, deep recession.

But the decision sparks furious dissent. Mourners hold an earnest memorial for the geese in one of their favorite, goose-shit-ridden parks. Angry protesters show up at the soup kitchen after the birds have been served and threaten the manager. I’m baffled by these responses. Bend is not a town where it’s common to see public protests of any kind. Where do these activists think meat comes from?

Few of us bother to question our habit of eating animals, even as we question the killing of animals for other, less frequent purposes. Anthrozoologist Hal Herzog writes that Americans “kill 200 food animals for every animal used in a scientific experiment, 2,000 for each unwanted dog euthanized in an animal shelter and 40,000 for every baby harp seal bludgeoned to death on a Canadian ice floe.” Animal rights protesters target fur-coat-wearing fashionistas but let slide the thousands of grocery stores that crowd live lobsters into miserable, algae-covered tanks. In the United States, vegetarianism is, by all accounts, more popular than ever before. Still, the lifestyle is rare. While the exact number of vegetarians is difficult to discern, most surveys and polls produce estimates of seven to eleven million. That means we have about as many vegetarians as residents of the state of North Carolina. This is a tiny minority, a blip in the demographic chart. There are roughly two million more hunters than vegetarians in the country. Not to mention, one survey found that 60 percent of the people who identified themselves as vegetarians admitted they had consumed meat in the last twenty-four hours.

Animals kill other animals, of course, and we don’t judge them for it, we simply call them carnivores. Most vegetarians I know continue to feed meat to their pet dogs. Some wild animals kill with no intention of eating their victims. Wolves and elk, for example, are both known to slay members of their own species while jockeying for status during mating season.

Some animal rights activists argue that because humans no longer need meat to survive, we should all become vegetarians. It is an understandable, even noble desire to avoid unnecessary death or suffering. Yet even a vegan diet kills animals. “The grain that the vegan eats,” Michael Pollan writes, “is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate… If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops.” Cattle, elk, sheep and antelope, for example, can chew grass and turn it directly into protein. So in mountainous, rocky regions that are better suited for grazing than farming, raising animals for meat is often the most efficient way to reap food from the land. In other words, if our concern is, as Pinchot put it, the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time, then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical decision.

Arguments for or against meat eating almost always involve some definition of otherness, the drawing of a line that separates “us” from “them.” The precise geography of this boundary is determined by the individual eater. To some pescivores, for example, cows and pigs are too intelligent, too fuzzy or too reminiscent of humans to eat. Fish, on the other hand, are fair game.

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer draws a comparison between the arguments about meat eating and abortion. In both cases, he writes, “it is impossible to definitively know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression. It’s a slippery, frustrating and resonant subject. Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by. Or worse, finding no position worth defending or living by.” One person’s definition of an ethical meal can—and does—bow and sway throughout one’s lifetime. Perhaps that’s why, in the United States, vegetarians are outnumbered, three to one, by ex-vegetarians.

Philosophers pose stark hypothetical questions to help each of us understand where, exactly, to draw the ethical boundaries of our own eating habits. On one end of the spectrum, philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan argue that “speciesism,” or the exploitation and oppression of non-human animals, is equivalent to sexism, racism and the exploitation and oppression of humans. If we justify our treatment of animals—namely, eating them—by pointing to their inability to speak and their incapacity to think rationally, then why not, they ask, eat brain-damaged humans who are also unable to speak or think rationally?

But philosopher Cora Diamond counters that the rights of a person or animal are not the real issue. Her problem with the Singer-Regan argument for not eating animals is that it implies a vegetarian would have no qualms about eating the cow that has been struck by lightning. She writes, “There is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process (of turning a living cow into food) along.” Diamond concludes that Singer and Regan are ignoring a critical difference between human beings and other animals. It is something else that makes so many of us willing to eat cows but not people (even people who die in car accidents), something that extends beyond eating. For example, a formal funeral and a published obituary are appropriate for a human baby who dies at two weeks old, but not for a dog—not even one that has been loved by a family for many years. Or, from another angle, just because an animal is capable of suffering doesn’t mean that we should do everything we possibly can to avoid its suffering. “That this is a being which I ought not to make suffer, or whose suffering I should try to prevent,” Diamond writes, “constitutes a special relationship to it.”

As a newspaper reporter, I am acutely aware that we measure tragedy, at least in part, by its relative closeness. The summer that I worked at the Hartford Courant, I wrote about a group of local firefighters who flew to Oregon to help fight a raging wildfire. The fire had ravaged thousands of acres, which seemed like a shame. It wasn’t until I moved to Oregon that I understood the serious threat of such a fire. A rampant wildfire isn’t just a shame, it is terrifying. The first time I interviewed a family who had to be evacuated from their home because of a wildfire, I saw tears well up in a young mother’s eyes and I understood what the fire really was: a tragedy. This shift was all because of closeness. A special relationship. That same reasoning explains why I can eat steaks from a cow and feel nothing, then fall to pieces when it’s time to euthanize a beloved pet dog. I never met the cow. But I loved that dog like a member of my family.

It also explains the ire over the deaths of 109 geese. Bend residents feel too close to these animals—why, a goose strutted past me in the park just the other day—to approve of their being cooked and eaten. But what does it say about us that we’re only comfortable with our meat being raised out of sight and out of mind? Thinking about it too hard points out our hypocrisy. “No other people in history,” Pollan writes, “has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat.”

This makes hunting an especially complex endeavor: The chase fosters a special relationship, a direct connection between predator and prey. Yet that closeness does not infringe upon the predator’s willingness to eat the prey. Instead, killing and eating the prey becomes an expression of that relationship’s specialness.

Hunting regularly reminds me of an enormous category of animal-human relationship that I otherwise ignore in my day-to-day life. My relationships with animals tend to fall under two broad headlines: Friends (my pet dogs) and Enemies (vermin mice).

But there exists a vast world between the two. The black bear who picked huckleberries from the same shrub just hours before I did. The chicken who lays eggs for my breakfast. The squirrel who lives in the tree in my backyard. The cow who produced milk for my cheddar cheese. The family of rabbits displaced by the construction of a new house on my block. The shrimp who wiggled into a net and landed in my stir-fry. The fish who also wiggled into that net and was thrown back, dead. These animals’ lives are intertwined with mine, whether or not I acknowledge them.

Most animal species on earth probably fit somewhere in this middle ground, and yet I have no words to express how I feel about them, how I treat them, what role they play in my everyday life. I have no category for them. Every once in a while, a pretty hummingbird who sips from my feeder slips into the Friend category. The squirrel who breaks the feeder scoots onto the Enemy side. The rest of the time, they don’t exist.

The problem with this binary formula is that, for more than twenty years, it has tricked me into thinking that I face an equally stark choice in my own treatment of animals. As a meat eater, I could:

1. Eat friends for dinner, or

2. Convince myself that dinner was an enemy deserving of death.

What reasonable person would choose the first? And after meeting an animal—almost any animal!—and looking into its eyes, how could anyone believe the second? For most of my life, I did the only logical thing: I chose instead not to think about my meat as animals at all. But to hunt is to confront this overlooked category of animals on earth. It is to stand up and admit: This is how the world works.

In one scene in his book, Foer witnesses the slaughter of a pig. The pig looks at him during its last seconds of life, and Foer is moved by this. “The pig wasn’t a receptacle of my forgetting,” he writes. “The animal was a receptacle of my concern. I felt—I feel—relief in that. My relief doesn’t matter to the pig. But it matters to me.” Indeed, our respect for animals is, in some ways, all we can offer them. Animals die whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we eat them or not, whether we participate in their deaths willfully or indirectly.

To me, hunting my own meat feels like saying grace before a meal and really, for the first time in my life, meaning it. I grew up in a household that said grace before supper: God is great, God is good. And we thank Him for our food. As a kid, I thought it was a little silly. It was the only time we ever mentioned God. And the imperfect rhyme bothered me. It is only since I started killing my dinner—watched it switch, in an instant, from living to dead—that I have felt truly grateful for a meal.

CHAPTER 11

YEAR OF DEATH

In October I grow nervous because back in early summer, I bought an elk tag. This means I have the right to kill one male elk in one particular area about a hundred miles south of our home. I don’t feel ready to put myself in a situation where it’s even possible to shoot something as big as an elk. The guilt might be too much to bear, not to mention—oh God—the guts.

“Elk guts,” one hunter tells me, “are the real test.”

I look for an excuse to call off the four-day hunt, and soon find one in our dog Bob.

Every evening, Scott and I come home from work and take our dogs on a walk. One day we are only a block from the house when Bob starts hopping on three legs. The next day, I take a long lunch break and drive Bob to the veterinarian. He is diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone tumor, in his right hind leg. The vet says this disease usually causes a swift but painful death. She prescribes a mild opiate and reassures me that “you’ll know” when Bob is in too much pain to go on. I drive Bob back home and call Scott at work to tearfully deliver the news.

Bob’s decline is steady. As October wears on, our walks get shorter, and then, to save Bob’s strength, we start dividing them up. I take Sylvia on an energetic jog around the neighborhood. Scott takes Bob on a slow, elderly stroll, letting him savor the smells that have provided the high point of each day since Scott adopted him nine years earlier. Elk-hunting season arrives and we stay home to care for Bob.

One Monday in mid-November, I arrive at work and open my inbox. The first email informs me that one of my co-workers, Jim Witty, died of a sudden, massive heart attack earlier that morning. Jim was the outdoors writer, and just fifty years old. He was beloved by the paper’s readers, some of whom will later tell me that although they never met Jim they felt he was their hiking buddy. Scott and I had just bumped into Jim three days earlier at a pizza parlor, with his wife and two friends.

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, we learn that our sister-in-law’s father, also named Jim—who helps run the non-profit where Scott works—has been hospitalized. The whole family was on the Oregon coast when he started feeling ill. His wife drove him back to Bend. A few miles from home, he fell unconscious, so she drove straight to the hospital.

“It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it,” Scott tells me.

On Thanksgiving Day, Jim’s children and wife gather around his body as a flight deck of life-support machines are switched off, one by one. He was an attorney in Bend whose primary client was the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. He was also a U.S. Marines veteran, so his funeral is elaborate, with American Indian blessings and a three-volley salute.

On our drive home from the funeral, Scott and I talk about the spiritual ceremonies we just witnessed.

“It really makes you stop and think…,” Scott starts.

“I know.”

“… about what we’ll leave behind when we die.”

“I know.”

“I need to figure out what I believe in.”

“Wait… what are you talking about?”

“I don’t necessarily mean religion, but…” He trails off and pauses before adding, “What would my funeral look like? I wasn’t in the military. I don’t go to church. I’m not Native American. So what will you do at my funeral, just throw me in the hole?”

I can’t help it. I let out a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’re right—you are.” I shake my head and try to turn serious. “It’s just, I thought we were talking about something else.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking, when you said ‘what we leave behind,’ that you were talking about kids. That, you know, we need to hurry up and have some… or there won’t be anyone at our funerals.”

Scott laughs.

“Good point,” he says.

On December 11, I come home from work to find Bob lying on his stomach, unable to stand. We’ve already arranged for the vet to come to our house the following afternoon, a Friday, to euthanize him. Now it’s clear that’s not soon enough. I call Scott in tears.

“It’s Bob,” I say between sobs. “You need to come home.”

He carries Bob into the backyard, which is where he appeared to be heading when he fell. We stroke his soft fur and then I go inside and call the vet.

While we wait for her to arrive, we pet Bob and feed him pieces of sausage that we had in our refrigerator. We tell him what a good dog he is. That we will always love him. That we were so lucky to have him.

Later that night, I tell Scott that it feels like this recent string of deaths is consuming our lives. I have no idea that it’s just beginning.

For Christmas, Scott and I fly to Washington, DC. We gather with my mother’s extended family at my parents’ weekend home near the Chesapeake Bay. The celebration is hectic and crowded, full of small talk with some family members and long, involved conversations with others.

My cousin Donna and her husband, Seth, are spending the night here with their daughter, Audrey, who was born a year ago in August. I haven’t seen Donna since before Audrey’s birth, and I’m curious to see her as a mother. For several years now, my life with Scott has paralleled Donna’s with Seth. We married within a week of each other. We both recently bought houses. Audrey represents this huge step that they have taken and we have not, a step that still makes me nervous.

When the other family members leave and my parents go to bed, Scott and I stay up talking in the living room with Donna, Seth and my sister, Gretchen.

I can’t wait to get into bed with Scott, and have some time away from the rest of my family. I lift the covers and crawl in, stretching out alongside him and letting out a big sigh.

And then I hear a sharp shriek.

Scott and I look at each other.

“Did someone just scream?” I whisper.

Scott nods, his brow furrowed.

We sit up and hear it again. This time, it’s louder and unmistakable—pure agony. It’s Donna.

We leap out of bed and fling open the door.

Donna is running into the dining room with Audrey limp in her arms.

“Call 911!” she screams, then bends down and places her ear to Audrey’s chest. My parents and sister appear, stunned, in the doorway on the other side of the room. My father has the cordless phone in his hand. He has already dialed. “We need an ambulance.”

By now, Donna—who is an EMT by profession—is performing CPR, rapidly pressing her palm into Audrey’s tiny chest and then stopping to breathe into her pink mouth. Seth sits on the floor with Audrey’s feet in his lap, rubbing her legs.

My father gives our address to the dispatcher, then Audrey’s age. Donna lifts her mouth off Audrey’s and says, through tears, “I can’t do this.”

“Yes you can,” my mom says. “You’re doing it, Donna. Keep going, you’re doing a good job.”

Donna doesn’t miss a compression or a breath, even though it’s clear her heart is breaking. We can hear it in her wailing, see it in her tears. While all of this is going on, I’m standing helpless on the side. My body is in a state of hypervigilance; I shiver a little, acutely aware of how the scene looks, how my own saliva tastes, how my parents’ dining room smells. Scott returns to our bedroom and yanks on his clothes and shoes. I follow and pull on a pair of boots over my pajamas. We walk outside, to the end of the driveway. The neighborhood is dark and the streets are wet. In the distance, we hear sirens.

I run back in to tell everyone that we can hear the ambulance—it’s coming. Then I run back out to wait with Scott. We don’t say anything, just stand nervously. The sirens are loud and clear but there is still no vehicle in sight. Minutes pass before lights finally crest the hill in front of us.

We wave our arms and a fire engine pulls up and parks on the street, next to the driveway.

“Hurry! She’s in here!”

Two paramedics stride in and seize Audrey in their blue-gloved hands. I watch from the front hallway as they run her outside, her body jiggling in their arms. An ambulance pulls into the driveway. We all get dressed and drive in two cars to the hospital. Two people—police officers, paramedics, I can’t remember—stay behind because they are required to investigate the house.

I park the car and walk into the hospital with Scott. In the emergency room, Donna and Seth stand outside a room where doctors and nurses are circled around Audrey. Donna pleads with the doctor to try using defibrillator paddles, to restart Audrey’s heart. I pace through the white halls of the hospital, feeling like a ghost, until my dad sees me. He ushers Gretchen, Scott and me away, into a private waiting room.

I sit and stare at the lotus pattern of the upholstered chair in front of me, trying to memorize every curve, every color. My mind is racing and I have no idea how to slow it down, how to calm my thoughts. I grip Scott’s hand. At first it feels like something to do, although I quickly grow afraid that if I loosen it, Audrey will die.

My parents come in to give occasional updates, but there is no good news. Audrey is not responding to any medical treatments.

A short, middle-aged woman comes in and tells us she’s a volunteer trauma counselor. She stands and stares at us, probably wishing, as we all do, that she knew what to say. Then she leaves.

Eventually someone—my mom? my dad?—comes in and, crying, breaks the news. Audrey has been declared dead. Donna and Seth are holding her, saying good-bye.

Later they both enter the room, red swollen eyes, blank stares of grief. They look like zombies. And in a way, they are. Audrey’s death has robbed them of their identities as parents, their dreams for their daughter, all those birthdays yet to come, the dress-up games, the dances, the wedding, the grandchildren. So much more than one life has been lost.

Scott, Gretchen and I drive back to the house to gather everyone’s belongings. My parents drive Donna and Seth to our family home in Takoma Park, the house I grew up in. For days, we hole up there, trying to comfort one another, trying to figure out what just happened. How could this blue-eyed, curly-haired toddler—beaming with the promise of a full life—just die for no reason? We will never get an answer. A months-long autopsy and extensive genetic tests will yield no explanations. Because Audrey was over a year old, her death will not be ruled sudden infant death syndrome. Instead, it will fall under an equally vague but lesser-known category: sudden unexplained death in childhood.

I have never heard my parents’ house so quiet before. The silence is punctuated by faint pulsations of crying, from behind a closed door. Or the gurgling of an empty stomach. Nobody sleeps. We sit or pace, our eyes glassy, our faces pale.

In January, I work nights and weekends to finish a series of articles about a young woman I met in the fall. Summer Stiers is thirty-one years old but has gray hair and walks with a cane. She was healthy most of her life until, at age eighteen, she began having regular seizures. In her twenties, her health deteriorated further. She suffered intestinal bleeding, muscle atrophy and brittle bones. Her kidneys failed and she relied on nightly dialysis treatments to stay alive. Doctors believe she is dying of an unknown genetic illness, and they are studying her in hopes of someday helping any others who turn up with her rare, unnamed disorder. I enjoy spending time with Summer—who somehow remains upbeat and grateful for what she still has—but she is also a reminder that death lurks around the corner.

I find myself obsessing over the animals I’ve killed while hunting. Was that shot I took at the goose last fall truly sporting? How young was the pheasant I killed during that women’s workshop? Had it lived long enough to enjoy any of its life? I worry that I have caused surviving animals to feel grief and pain similar to what I have endured during the past few months, and the guilt is almost unbearable.

For the first week of February, Scott and I go on a backcountry ski trip with friends. It should be relaxing, a chance to get away from work and the trauma of Audrey’s death. But I see danger everywhere I look. When we ski, I worry about avalanches. When we get back to the remote cabin where we’re staying, I fear Scott could die in his sleep.

On February 10, Scott and I sit down on the couch after a long day of work. The phone rings, and Scott walks into the dining room and answers it.

“Hi, Mel,” he says.

It’s my dad. I glance at the clock—a little after nine, past midnight for my parents on the East Coast. Shit. This isn’t a good phone call. Next, I hear Scott say, “She is, just a second. Hey Lil?” I immediately think of my dad’s father, who is eighty-eight and getting weaker by the day.

I take a deep breath and pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Lily, it’s Dad.” I have never heard his voice sound so sad. Whatever he’s calling about is even worse than I’d thought.

“What’s wrong?” My heart races and I sweat, just like the night Audrey died.

“I have terrible news. Nathan killed himself tonight.”

The past tense is what hits me first. Killed. He’s gone, it’s already too late. Later, my father will tell me that I shrieked. That the sound made him feel like he’d punched me in the gut. But in the moment, I don’t even realize that I’m making noise. If he had punched me, I wouldn’t have noticed. If I’d been run over by a truck, I wouldn’t have noticed.

In the exact moment that those horrible words slip out of my father’s mouth, I feel every ounce of pain and sorrow that will take turns pummeling me over the next hours, days, months, years. There will be times when a single memory or a sudden pang of guilt hurts so deeply that I fall to the floor in sobs. But there will never be another moment when all of it hits me at once: The gaping wound left by my only brother, my companion since birth. Co-holder of the memories that my parents sometimes fudge or forget. The one who introduced me to Top 40 music and later encouraged me to reject it, explaining that it was so much cooler to find my own taste than to accept what’s popular. The person who convinced me to eat pig tail—it tasted like an especially fatty hot dog—during one of my visits to Brazil.

The details of Nathan’s death are relayed to our family secondhand and through a translator. During an argument with his girlfriend, he grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through a net that stretched above the railing of his balcony. Then he plunged seventeen stories to his death.

I spend the rest of the night on my living room rug. I panic when I try to remember my brother—anything, any scene with the two of us, any lesson he taught me—and I can’t. Nothing. Scott rubs my back and tells me that the memories will come back when I’m not in shock anymore. Every once in a while, I call my sister and we cry together, she in Los Angeles, me in Bend. Even her sniffling comforts me. When we hang up, I curl up on the floor and convulse in sobs. My stomach twists and churns. I picture him jumping. Even in my own head, I can’t stop him; he leaps again and again. I imagine what he must have thought as he fell. I hope—as I always will—that his last feelings were not remorse or panic but liberation and calm. I hope that somehow he found peace. How could he have lost control of himself so completely? Nathan always had a fiery temper, but I never imagined it could kill him. How did I not think to call him? The last time I saw Nathan was when Scott and I visited him before we were married. Between then and now, a few simple words could have made all the difference: Are you okay? I love you. I want you to live. The distance that grew between us these last few years becomes a talisman of self-torture.

The next day, Scott and I walk Sylvia along the Deschutes River near our house. It’s sunny and unseasonably warm. Hordes of geese and ducks bob along the river. We stop midway across a footbridge. Scott peers into the water to look for fish. I watch the birds, which sit on the surface but are as blurred through my tears as fish under water. I am reminded of the birds I have killed, the rabbit I have killed, the fish I have killed, and another wave of sadness batters me.

Nathan’s daughter, Sofia, was born on the same day I shot my first pheasant, and at the time I was thrilled to have both occasions coincide. Now the pheasant’s death and my brother’s will be forever linked, and I couldn’t be more ashamed of the ecstasy I felt over killing that bird.

I’ve long thought of death as something that happens during old age. But the truth is, of course, that children like Audrey die. Young adults like Nathan die. Middle-aged people like my co-worker Jim die. People die at all ages, of all sorts of causes, many of which are “natural.”

The same truth holds for other animals. By hunting, I have cut short the lives of my prey. Though I don’t know their ages, all of my birds and rabbits appeared to be in the prime of life when I killed them. Again I ask myself: Was the killing worth it? Were these deaths really justified for a few special meals? I feel like a monster.

That night we take a red-eye to Washington, DC. When we land, it takes all the strength I can summon to put one foot in front of the other and walk off the plane. I know as soon as I see my parents that Nathan’s death will become even more real. I’m not sure I can bear it. Yet somehow, I do.

Over the next few days, my parents scramble to plan a funeral. Those questions that Scott raised during our ride home from Jim’s funeral swirl through my mind. Our immediate family has no religion to pave the way. We celebrated almost every holiday when I was growing up, the fortunate result of my Catholic-raised mother and Jewish-raised father. My parents had left behind their respective religions by the time they married, so our celebrations were unburdened by Church or Synagogue or even much of an explanation. On Easter we hunted eggs; on Sukkot we built an outdoor fort; during Chanukah we ate latkes; on Christmas we praised the miracle of Santa. This is not to say that we weren’t spiritual in our own ways. Nathan explored Judaism during high school and college, then devoured books about Sufism as an adult. But he never, as far as we know, reached any confident conclusions. His beliefs, what ceremonies he would have wanted—these details are all left for us to guess. Friends and family descend on our house, bringing food and kind words, sharing our tears. They weave a sort of human cocoon around us, one that I am reluctant to leave.

Two weeks later, Scott and I return to Bend. We get home just in time to attend the funeral of Scott’s favorite uncle, who died ten days after Nathan, ending a long battle with multiple myeloma.

Another cousin goes into labor four months early and her baby boy dies just after his birth.

Summer Stiers dies.

When I call my father to wish him a happy Father’s Day, he tells me that one of my uncles has died of Alzheimer’s disease.

Raymond, our neighbor, falls from a chair and dies of a head injury.

I struggle with anxiety. At times I am overwhelmed by fear, terrified that I could lose anything and anyone at any moment. This horror creeps into my life in strange ways: I buy travel insurance whenever I fly, and develop an intense fear of heights. Perhaps because I read so much fiction and watch so many movies, I have a ridiculous tendency to see my own life as the plot of a novel. So much of life is determined by luck, I know this. And yet I am quick to spot literary devices such as foreshadowing and symbolism in the random everyday. Maybe these deaths are trying to tell me something about what to do, or what will happen. I worry that somehow I have caused all of this death and despair, that these people would still be alive and well if they hadn’t worked with me or become friends with me or been related to me. Should I just bid my friends and family adieu and lock myself in my house until the dying stops?

“It’s not you,” Scott tells me. “It’s life. People die.”

Working at the newspaper each day is a struggle. My cubicle is near the police scanner, and when news of a fatal car accident buzzes through the air, it stings me in a way that it never used to. My imagination is lean and agile from the interval training of these past few months. It strides easily to the conclusion that the driver—the one found dead on arrival—is Scott. I stare at my cell phone and steel myself for an ominous ring.

Reporters deal with tragedy on a regular basis, and we develop coping mechanisms to separate our own lives from those we write about. That’s not to say that certain stories don’t move us. Just that sometimes we have to deal with three or four tragedies in one day of work. We find ways to laugh through them, to detach from them and get through the business of writing. But grief has sloughed off my calluses.

For fleeting moments, I feel angry at my brother, which experts say is a common response to suicide. How could he do this to all of us? To his daughter, especially. And to my parents. Almost immediately, pity displaces my anger. Even battered by grief, our lives go on. Nathan, on the other hand, has lost everything. We remain close with Luciana, and when she emails us photos of Sofia, opening each file feels like I’m being stabbed in the chest. Sofia looks so grown-up, less like a baby and more like a real person. Yet Nathan will never get to see her like this. Her first joke, her first day of school, her first bike ride—he is missing everything. As are Donna and Seth. Now that Audrey is gone, they face a future unlike anything they have imagined since her birth.

In the coming year, once joyous holidays will become overwrought with sadness. This is particularly true of Christmas, which will roust all the trauma of Audrey’s death. Anxiety and depression loom over all of us. I mourn not only these lost family members, but also the family that we were before the deaths. I will never again see Audrey or Nathan. Nor will I ever see that earlier, happier version of my parents or my cousins. Whenever I stop and really think about that, well, it still sucks the breath from my lungs. And for some reason, I hope it always will.

Meanwhile, friends of mine begin to bear children. Two of my closest girlfriends in Bend tell me, within weeks of my brother’s death, they are pregnant. I spend the summer knitting baby gifts and planning showers. All of these deaths and births start to feel like the circle of life is pulling tighter and tighter around me.

What is the universe trying to tell me? Here I go again.

I question the decision that Scott and I have made to start a family of our own. The way I imagine myself as mother is nothing like it was a few months ago, before the dying began. I am so much more fearful now, more aware of how ephemeral everything important really is. Where I once pictured baby clothes, giggly baths and finger painting, I now see miscarriages, birth defects and spinal cord injuries. If Scott and I do have children, how could I bear the constant anxiety that something bad could happen to them?

Life is full of risks that could bring death: Driving down a highway with thousands of other drivers, any one of whom could be drunk, exhausted, distracted or enraged. Flying on a plane when a storm hits or an engine fails. Crossing the street while a bus runs a red light. Riding an elevator that was overlooked during its last inspection. Eating tainted food. And that’s not to mention internal dangers. Aneurysm. Cancer. Sudden cardiac arrest.

Intellectually, I have always known this. But now I know it viscerally. I can close my eyes and see Donna performing CPR on Audrey’s perfectly plump little body. I can hear the agonizing scream she let out when she found her baby. I can hear the tone in my father’s voice when he said, “I have terrible news.” I can feel my pulse quicken as I brace for his next words. These events, these sensations, they have changed me to my core.

Fatal hunting accidents are extremely rare when compared with, say, car accidents. But compared with other, more popular pastimes such as playing video games, hunting is downright perilous. I don’t usually consider myself a physical risk taker. I have no interest in skydiving or bungee jumping. Looking back on it, though, I appreciate the danger involved in hunting. It has been meditative to me, spending so many hours so aware of life’s high stakes.

Human life used to be full of risks like these. Not too many generations ago, in places like Oregon, the majority of residents killed animals for food on a regular basis. Wild predators, weather events and even minor infections posed serious threats. Today we have complex safety laws to prevent deaths that just a couple of generations ago were commonplace. Science has provided all kinds of treatments and prevention, even extreme interventions that can keep a body pumped full of blood and air when there’s no brain left to dictate how.

We may live longer than any generation in human history, but eventually we all die. Death is an essential part of life. Yet we acknowledge it so seldom. Most of the time, we don’t even call death by its real name. We prefer euphemisms—passed on, crossed over, gone to a better place or, simply, gone.

The last few years of hunting have forced me to take a rare, honest look at mortality. Hunting has everything to do with death. You can’t kill an animal—watch its eyes flicker for the very last time—and not think long and hard about the finality of it. Nothing could have prepared me for these losses, but I feel grateful that I have, even in some small way, spent the last couple of years facing death. Of course, each kill has been the relatively easy, bearable loss of a wild animal. But deep down I have known that the next death in my life could be of someone I love.

I obsess over the guns I keep locked in an upstairs closet. Gunshot is the most common method of suicide in the United States. In fact, gun-inflicted suicides outnumber gun-related homicides and accidental deaths combined. My brother did not shoot himself. If he had, I would probably get my guns melted down and molded into some peaceful symbol. My heart aches for every victim of gunfire, and I worry that as a gun owner, I am somehow complicit in this violence.

Despite all of this, I am shocked to find myself wanting a child more than ever before. My fears about parenting have shifted suddenly: I no longer worry about what a child would do to my career or my social life; instead, I obsess over what could happen to the child. In a strange way, this comforts me. This more selfless fear is more crippling and yet it feels more appropriate, more parental. As my cousins and parents fall into a void of grief, the depth of which terrifies me, I realize all that I could miss out on if I succumb to my fears. Maybe all of this loss will make me a better parent in some ways, too. I won’t take things for granted. I will appreciate the good days and happy moments because I will know how fleeting they are. Here’s the thing: If anxiety is one side of a coin, then the flip side—the brighter side—is appreciating each moment. Because if the next breath I draw could be my last, then it had better be a deep one.

All of these deaths have focused me. I waste less time browsing the Internet. I watch fewer bad movies. I shrug off minor annoyances and feel silly to think that just one year ago, I would have wasted time being upset. I work hard at my job, but I no longer fret about the size of my newspaper or the title on my business card. When we go camping and fly-fishing on weekends, I find myself better able to let go of work and other stress and simply enjoy the moment. I examine the glistening fly as it drifts down the stream in front of me. I revel in the sunlight and the cool water swirling around my legs. I look at Scott, standing downstream from me, and I smile. I am here, right now, paying attention.

These losses have left me lean and urgent, the way elk in Yellowstone must feel since their predator, the wolf, returned. This is why it’s important to be reminded of death: so that you never forget that life is temporary and every day matters.

Some days, grief knocks the wind out of me. But just as often, I am bowled over by love. At night, I lie down in our bed and nestle my face into Scott’s warm neck. Something—life?—grabs me by the shoulders, looks me in the eyes and tells me: Cherish this. You only have this. You only have now. I inhale my favorite scent in the world—his. And I feel truly, completely lucky.

CHAPTER 12

KILLING BAMBI, REVIVING ARTEMIS

A few years ago, I spent a day on the banks of a roaring Deschutes River waterfall with a Warm Springs Indian named Roland. He worked as a “creeler” at the time, counting the salmon and steelhead caught by tribal members at this ancient fishing site. He was short and round, with a wide grin framing a chipped front tooth. I was interviewing him about his job and we got off track, talking about his own passion for fishing. He mentioned that in his culture, it’s a tradition to cease fishing for months or even years when a close friend or family member dies. He didn’t explain the custom fully at the time, but I think about it now because suddenly it makes sense to me. There’s the obvious reason: that in mourning we lose our desire even for things that once made us happy. But I suspect another reason, too. Perhaps it’s as simple as needing a break from death, even the death of fish. One reason that hunting is so uncomfortable to non-hunters in the first place is because of its connection to death. After my brother’s death, unable to bear another modicum of guilt or sadness, I stop hunting.

This hiatus does not, however, mean that I manage to avoid killing anything. In the fall of 2009, I take a leave of absence from the newspaper and move across the country to Ann Arbor for a nine-month journalism fellowship. Scott stays in Bend but flies to Michigan every month or so to visit.

One afternoon in September, I am pushing a rickety electric mower across the lawn of my rented house when I feel a thump against my shin. I look down. Something small and gray convulses at my feet. I gasp, let go of the mower and jump back, but this little animal flops and I accidentally step on it. It pops straight up and lands on its side, unable to run forward like a normal… whatever it is. I must have cut off one of its legs. It lurches, as if compensating for its lost limb—limbs? I shriek and run toward the house.

From the porch, I glance back, bracing for another pained hop, or at least a twitch. Instead, I see nothing. The grass is still. I take a deep breath and creep back to the lawn mower. The animal lies dead, a few feet away.

I decide to finish mowing. The death was unfortunate, I tell myself, but half the lawn remains unmowed and I have nobody to do it for me. Lawn maintenance is written into my lease. So I resume, slowly pushing the grumbling mower and glancing back every few feet at the dead critter. Should I move it? Put it in a bag and throw it in the garbage? Leave it for some hungry scavenger? As I turn the mower and head back toward the scene of the death, I notice a patch of fur on the ground, a few feet from the dead animal. Suddenly, another creature pops out of the fluff and clumsily hops away.

I flinch but mow on, my eyes glued to the tiny (live) animal. It’s still unsteady as it crosses the lawn and ducks under a spruce. Its ears aren’t long yet, but they stand up. Though there’s no ball of fluff on its rump, I know exactly what it is: a baby cottontail. It’s also the spitting image of the thing I just killed. When I cross the lawn again, I give the patch of bunny-bearing fur a wide berth, but two more hop out of the fuzz-covered hole. They scamper toward the street. I blink back tears but keep mowing, eager to finish the job so I can spend the rest of the day indoors.

As I put away the lawn mower, every pinecone I step on makes me jump. I eye every squirrel and sparrow with paranoia. In my own yard, I am terrified of all these tiny creatures squatting around me, and angry, too, as if they’ve framed me for a crime I never intended to commit. I’m equally afraid that I will accidentally kill something else. I waffle between feeling like an invader who has no business being here and wondering: Can’t a person be left alone in her own yard?

In the safety of my locked house, I calm myself down. It doesn’t take me long to conclude that I should go back outside and pick up the dead rabbit. Running in here to avoid it doesn’t change the fact that I killed an animal. The least I can do is bury it out of respect.

I unlock my door and tiptoe outside. But the bunny is gone. Less than half an hour has passed since I went inside, and it’s nowhere to be seen. I walk all over the lawn to make sure, focusing my search around the fluff-covered burrow. No rabbit. I know what probably happened: A neighbor’s cat got it, or a bird swooped down and carried it away in its talons. Nature is everywhere, even in this suburban neighborhood. Still, an unrealistic worry creeps into my brain and won’t let go: Maybe the grief-stricken mother dragged the baby back into her burrow, to mourn over the body. I start to think of the bunny as Audrey, and Donna as the mother. I am a monster, a murderer, a destroyer of life and the happiness of all the bunnies who loved this one. Tears well up in my eyes and I run back inside.

For the rest of the day, I am haunted not only by guilt but also by my own distress over this death. Why did the death of this rabbit bother me so much? The first time I killed a rabbit, during that hunting workshop with the beagles, I was thrilled about it. What’s the difference? Yes, that was an adult and this was a baby, but there must be a more significant distinction, too.

I have felt nervous and ambivalent approaching every hunt I’ve ever gone on. In retrospect, these feelings were part of my mental preparation. Each hunt has precipitated a new reckoning of all the thoughts involved in my initial decision three years ago to try hunting.

In fact, every one of my hunting experiences could be broken down into a series of questions that I ask myself. It starts with: Do I want to hunt? Then, do I want to hunt for this species? At this time? In this place? Using this weapon? With these hunters? Other, subtler questions make up each of these: Am I ready to bear the guilt that may follow this killing? Will this experience be one that I can retell and feel proud of? Eventually, this flow chart culminates in one particular shot at one individual animal. And so by the time I pull the trigger, I have decided that I do want to kill this animal in this place at this moment. The kill is undeniably purposeful.

With this baby rabbit, however, I asked myself no such questions. I had no time to prepare for the emotions, to weigh the magnitude of that life against my own intentions. After several years of narrowing so much purpose onto each life I take, I am even more horrified by this thoughtless, careless death than I would have been before I started hunting.

Those of us who hunt, who kill animals on purpose, open ourselves up to a lot of criticism, including from other hunters. Since I started hunting, I have joined in the condemnation of so-called road hunters, who lean out their windows hoping to shoot their prey without getting out of their trucks. Hunters who hike miles away from roads and backpack into wilderness areas criticize these hunters as being lazy. But their laziness pales in comparison with the hundreds of millions who buy their meat already killed, butchered and shrink-wrapped, right? Well, not necessarily.

It’s a big deal to kill an animal, and an even bigger deal to do so on purpose. As hunters, we carry a grave responsibility. The questions we ask ourselves—Is it sporting? Did I give fair chase?—matter. Not everyone believes hunting is justified, and that’s okay. But each hunter must justify it to herself. And these questions matter even more when you consider that not everyone can hunt.

There is not nearly enough habitat or wildlife left in the United States to sustain three hundred million hunters. Unlike gun ownership, the Constitution—no matter how you interpret it—does not guarantee our right to hunt. Several states, however, have amended their own constitutions to protect citizens’ right to hunt. Though I have become a staunch defender of hunting, I don’t think of it as an inalienable right, nor do I think it should be considered one. Hunting is an immense privilege. And one of its greatest values is that it requires near-constant reassessment of the situation and surroundings. Just because you can take a shot at an animal, for example, doesn’t mean you should. Likewise, responsible agencies should continuously, realistically assess state wildlife populations, habitat health and hunting quotas. It’s not a stretch to imagine that wildlife habitat in a particular area—or even an entire state—could become so degraded that hunting there is no longer feasible or responsible.

Even though not all Americans can hunt, there are ways for non-hunters to support responsible hunting. The owners of large acreage could allow ethical hunters to hunt on their property as the law permits. And imagine if environmentalists partnered with hunters to turn conservation-minded sportsmen’s groups into juggernauts more powerful than the National Rifle Association. Perhaps most important, greater acceptance of hunting could go a long way toward promoting sound environmental policies. Hunters and non-hunters alike share ownership of local wildlife, which are property of the state. Non-hunters can help by supporting sound wildlife management policies. Agencies that regulate hunting should be held to high scientific standards and should be adequately financed. These goals require all citizens—not just hunters—to pay close attention and vote responsibly.

Even during my hiatus, I can’t stop thinking about these issues facing the future of American hunting. After all that I’ve gained from my hunting experiences, I feel a strange responsibility to pick up my gun and hunt again. It’s as if, by taking a break from hunting, I am turning my back on the very tradition I once vowed to help resuscitate. Feeling too guilty to keep hunting, I am startled by this new guilt caused by not hunting.

Interestingly, many experts believe that women are the key to reviving hunting and fishing in the United States. The idea is that if the mother of a household hunts, her children are more likely to embrace the sport. Most states now offer Becoming an Outdoors Woman workshops, like the pheasant hunt I joined, to introduce women to hunting and fishing. The effort seems to be working. One in ten American hunters is female—our gender’s highest participation rate in history—and we are the only demographic of hunters currently on the rise.

Today, with reliable firearms and other improved technology, there is no physical reason why women can’t hunt as capably as men. I know a woman who shot a six-point buck when she was almost eight months pregnant. In fact, female newcomers might be exactly what the sport needs for one obscure reason: Many female hunters learn the sport as adults. Making a conscientious decision to hunt—rather than doing it because your parents want you to—requires serious ethical deliberation that is likely to creep into other aspects of hunting, too.

My friend Jessie, for example, never considered hunting until, in her twenties, she fell in love with a hunter. At first, this still wasn’t enough to convince Jessie to pick up a gun. But she enjoyed cooking and eating the wild game that Andy brought home. Soon she was hiking behind Andy and his parents as they hunted.

“Eventually, I thought that if I was going to eat it, I should be okay with killing it,” she told me. “And I wanted to see what goes into the death of animal… There is no way to really understand it until you do it yourself.”

Jessie had contemplated the philosophy and psychology of hunting before she ever loaded a gun. All of this consideration made her more likely to become a committed hunter, continuing the tradition well into the future. It also made her more likely to recognize the far-reaching implications of hunting, and to do her part by joining sportsmen’s organizations and closely following the politics of wildlife management. In short, she is exactly the kind of new hunter that is needed to keep the tradition alive.

In a sense, hunting is a final frontier of feminism. As women make up a growing percentage of American hunters, we quietly lay claim to a part of humanity that has been dominated by men. Women born to hunters or in love with hunters weren’t always allowed to participate. Tina, a hunter in her early sixties who lives in La Pine, grew up with two brothers. Her father took the boys hunting and sometimes let Tina tag along but didn’t let her hold the gun or take a shot. One day, one of the boys killed a deer. The father instructed the children in how to dress the deer, but both boys were too scared to take the knife to the hide. Eventually, Tina grew frustrated of waiting.

“I said, ‘Give me that, I’ll do it,’ and I grabbed the knife,” she told me. “And then I cleaned the whole deer.”

It’s strange to think that for millennia, men have done almost all the hunting while women focused on other roles such as gathering and child rearing. Of course there are exceptions—Artemis the huntress, for example, is a feminist symbol from ancient Greece. On a whim, I pick up a book of Greek mythology at a library in Ann Arbor. Almost immediately, I am captivated by the stories about strong, mysterious Artemis.

For this goddess, the Greeks spared no meaning. She represented Nature, Wilderness, the Hunt, the Moon, Virginity and Fertility. To some, she embodied Death and Vengeance. She was as complicated as her broad assignments would suggest, a goddess of contradictions. Armed with a silver bow and a quiver of arrows, she inflicted illness and death on those she also protected. She had great respect for animals and also hunted them, leading a posse of nymphs through the forest in pursuit of game. She wore a short tunic like men did at the time, instead of the long gowns worn by women, to allow freer movement while hunting. She loved wild things but she held captive a group of stags who pulled her golden chariot. She was usually depicted with one of these deer or with one of her many hunting dogs.

Combing through the stories of Artemis, it’s clear that different hunts meant very different things to her, and to the Greek people who worshipped her. She could be vengeful. Some versions of mythology claim that Artemis killed Orion—the only hunter whose skills matched her own—as punishment for boasting that he would track down and kill every wild beast alive.

Artemis was virginal and fiercely protective of her purity. A hunter named Actaeon once happened upon her and her nymphs bathing nude in a secluded pond. Stunned by their beauty, he hid and watched them. But Artemis saw him and showed no mercy: She turned him into a buck and then spurred his own dogs to chase it. They tore the stag apart before finally recognizing him.

The goddess could also be kind. As she was a master archer, death by her arrow was considered a gift, a blessing. Everyone must die somehow, after all, and this death was swift and painless. She also healed and protected. As the goddess of childbirth, she represented the entire life cycle. But rather than create life of her own by bearing children, she asked her father, Zeus, for the gift of eternal virginity.

Reading this makes me stop and think, again, about my ongoing hesitance over whether to have children. It also makes me more aggressive in my Artemis research. Yet I find nothing to explain the goddess’s reasoning for her request. Would gaining a child have meant losing something even more precious to her? Was she, too, afraid of all the heartache lurking in the depths of parenthood? Did she know something that I don’t?

When I stop my own navel-gazing and consider Artemis as a public icon, I am stunned that one deity could embody all of these diametrical forces. She was light and dark, life and death. She was not a Disney princess, all good or all bad. She was—all the mythology notwithstanding—realistic. No character in today’s culture would be asked to represent such a complex collection of properties. We much prefer to compartmentalize our symbols. This is particularly true in our portrayal of animals.

Take, again, the movie Bambi, for example, which reinforces the myth that hunting and eating prey is equivalent to killing and eating one’s friends—Bambi, Faline or Thumper—for dinner. Hunting has taught me to rethink this. I know that the truth is murkier and more complicated. Yet since this string of deaths began last fall, I have found myself trying to believe again in Disney’s version of pain-free nature. After so much loss in such a short period of time, I’ve wanted to separate myself as much as possible from any death or suffering. I haven’t wanted Artemis, I’ve wanted Bambi.

Gradually, in the months after my brother’s death, I begin to feel less raw. And I haven’t forgotten my epiphanies about the values of hunting. Hunting has changed the way I think about the food I eat and my pet dog, not to mention the animals that live out of sight but all around me. It has given me a deeper connection to the fast-growing community where I live. It has changed the way I follow politics. Still, I have only brushed the surface. I have not yet wrung all the meaning I can out of this new adventure.

Autumn is under way, and my temporary home in Michigan offers a new landscape and a new species to pursue. It’s time to reload my gun and hunt again. This time, I will try my hand at deer.

CHAPTER 13

DEER DIARY

In Michigan, some people talk about deer the way New Yorkers talk about rats. They are varmints and they are everywhere. Munching azaleas in the backyard. Sprawled out, bleeding, on the side of the highway. Bounding through the woods past my favorite jogging trail. Despite their ubiquity, shooting a deer will be the ultimate test of my decision to hunt; even a small buck weighs more than I do. I wonder, yet again, if I will be able to look into its eyes and pull the trigger. I wonder if I will be able to gut it without vomiting and then wanting nothing to do with its meat.

As hunting season approaches, I start researching rifles. I brought my shotguns with me to Michigan, just in case I decided to do some bird hunting. But for big-game hunting, a rifle offers longer range and more accuracy, which adds up to a more humane kill. I do some research online, talk to as many hunters as I can and spend hours in front of the gun counter at a large outdoors store. Eventually, I settle on buying a Weatherby 7mm-08. It’s a generous caliber for the small white-tailed deer that populate Michigan. But, in an effort to limit my accumulation of guns, I want something big enough to shoot larger mule deer and possibly even elk back in Oregon.

I ask locals for instructions and then drive nearly an hour to a shooting range where a volunteer teaches me how to load and shoot the gun for the first time. I go back and practice a few more times before opening day.

Even in liberal Ann Arbor, it’s impossible to ignore deer-hunting season. That’s not to say that everyone here hunts. Far from it. But everyone I meet here knows someone who hunts. And nobody is shocked by the practice. Unlike Oregon, where the population doubled between 1965 and 2010, Michigan residents have been leaving in droves, due to a weak economy and the decline of the auto industry. That means most Michiganders who remain have lived in the state for many years, so local traditions such as hunting don’t shock them. Small towns including Dexter, just ten miles outside of Ann Arbor, still post “buck poles” each fall. These large wooden beams are erected in a prominent spot in town, where successful hunters hang their gutted stags for all to see and admire.

In Oregon, as in many other parts of the country, the buck pole would attract more protesters than admirers. Not here. When Scott and I visit one during opening weekend of deer season, we are the only people laughing nervously as we step between two rows of hanging bucks, swinging gently in the breeze. Nearby, a stockpot of venison stew has been set atop a grill, and we smell the rich meat but are informed, apologetically, that it won’t be ready to eat for a couple of hours.

“That’s okay,” I tell Scott as we walk back to our car. “I’m not really in the mood for venison.”

But a couple of weeks into deer season, I find myself holding a rifle and sitting perfectly still on the ground beneath a maple tree, watching for deer. My mentor at the university, Charles Eisendrath, also owns a cherry farm in northern Michigan, and has generously offered to let me hunt on his property. Scott is here, too, to help if I shoot something.

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are sometimes called Virginia deer or simply whitetails. They are one of three closely related deer species native to the United States. Deer live just about everywhere, from cities to suburbs to rugged wilderness areas. They are particularly attracted to farms because they love many of the same foods we do: wheat, oats, corn and soybeans, not to mention fruits, vegetables and even the grasses we grow to feed livestock. If large numbers of deer are allowed to browse these crops freely, they cause astronomical amounts of damage. With most U.S. farms operating on slim profit margins, farmers can’t afford to let deer (or, for that matter, geese or rabbits) gobble their crops unchecked. And neither can we, the mouths who rely on these farms for our food. To discourage unwanted grazing, some farmers employ hazing techniques including noise machines, mechanical scarecrows and explosives. But the most common deterrent is hunting. Every state in the Union offers some form of special hunting tags to reduce crop damage. “Everyone in North America who lives each day on agricultural foods,” writes cultural anthropologist Richard Nelson, “belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting… In this sense, the blood of deer runs through our veins as surely as we take bread and wine at our table.”

Instead of hunting amid rows of cultivated cherry trees, however, I’m sitting in a sixty-acre stretch of forest that separates the orchard from a large lake. I don’t have a problem with hunting deer on farmland—that’s what Charles is doing, just a few hundred yards away—but one of my goals is to learn to track deer.

Almost every American has seen a deer. But going out and finding one is a different story altogether. It feels daunting at first, like finding a needle in a haystack. Except this needle can move where it likes, so I should be able to learn its preferences and predict its location.

Deer favor the margins between two types of habitat—areas where thick trees edge up to fertile clearings, farmland or prairie. Like cattle and many other mammals, deer are ruminants, which means they have four stomach chambers. A doe eats by chewing up plants and swallowing them into her first stomach. This chamber gradually softens the food. Once that first stomach is full, and before the food moves to the second chamber, the animal beds down somewhere and regurgitates its semi-digested cud, re-chews it and swallows it again. When Nelson sneaks close enough to a doe to watch her ruminate, he writes that it “looked as if mice were running up and down inside her esophagus.” In short, deer spend their days alternately eating and then lying down, hidden in dense shrubs or trees, to digest. Deer tend to spend the middle of the day bedded down, and they are most active at dusk and dawn.

The trick to deer hunting is finding out where the animals eat and where they bed down to sleep or ruminate. Deer become attached to certain places, and they tend to travel between them along well-worn routes. A common strategy is to plant oneself along such a path and wait for an animal to arrive.

“You’re looking for a deer superhighway,” Charles says as he points out a couple of spots that have proved promising in previous years.

I have a buck tag, which means I may shoot a deer with visible antlers. This is the deer tag that anyone can buy. But Charles, as a farm owner, also has a handful of doe tags. Doe hunting is more closely regulated to protect deer populations, so doe tags are much harder to come by. (Only a handful of bucks are needed to inseminate dozens and dozens of does, ensuring plenty of fawns next spring.) Charles gives me one of these tags, which I tuck in my backpack next to the buck tag.

“The does are fatter, and have better-tasting meat,” he adds.

At first, I make up my mind that I will only shoot a buck. I feel a little guilty about the other advantages afforded me by hunting on this private land, next to a farm—namely, no competition from other hunters and all of Charles’s knowledge of the place. A doe tag—which, combined with my buck tag, enables me to shoot any deer I see—feels too lenient, almost decadent. But then a couple of days go by and we don’t see a single deer.

Each morning, before sunrise, we creep out to one of the supposedly high-traffic areas that Charles has pointed out. We hide and wait for the sun to come up, hoping that dawn will bring deer rush hour. When I get too cold, or tired of sitting, we walk around as quietly as possible, looking for prints or scat or some other sign that deer are in the vicinity.

“If a doe walked right in front of us, right now,” Scott whispers to me on the third day of hunting, “would you shoot it?”

I don’t hesitate: “Oh yeah. Definitely.”

Deer have acute senses of sound and sight, but they’re even more attuned to smells. To get anywhere near a wild deer, you have to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing, as deer can detect ribbons of human scent a mile away. Hunters gain an advantage when deer season coincides with the rut, or mating season. This is when hormones cause otherwise wary bucks to let down their guard.

Unfortunately, our mid-November outing is a week or two before the rut picks up. It’s also unseasonably warm and dry, which makes it pleasant to sit still in the woods, but the worst possible weather for tracking big game. In cold weather, animals must eat more to stay warm. When it’s mild, they can bed down and postpone their meals until darkness falls and the threat of predation drops. Also, dry leaves and twigs make it almost impossible to sneak up on a species armed with superhuman hearing.

As Scott and I creep around in the woods, all of these challenges overwhelm me. When I accidentally snapped that twig, was it as loud as I think it was? Did the wind just change direction? If I turn north and there is a deer in that gully, will it be able to smell me? Stay down, a buck in that thicket might be able to see me if I stand upright on this ridge.

I begin to understand why hunting is often compared to war. Aside from the obvious commonality of a pursuit to kill, there is the need for a physical strategy. Sometimes when I hear myself speak, I sound like I’m commanding a battalion. Sitting on a small ridge overlooking a promising-looking thicket of shrubs, for example, I decide that I need to inform Scott of my new strategy. But I don’t want any deer that might be hidden below to see me, so I army-crawl to Scott, trying to keep my knees from rustling the dried leaves too loudly.

“New plan,” I whisper. “I’m going to go up this hill, past the orchard and then come back down over there.” I point across the thicket to another treed hill. “You stay here. Then, when I’m in position—I won’t motion to you, that might give me away—walk slowly through the valley toward me.”

“Why?”

“If something comes out of those shrubs, I’ll at least be able to see it. And then we’ll know that’s where they are.”

“Got it.”

For days, we walk from one of Charles’s hot spots to the next. Then we sit as still as possible in these strategic locations, and wait. This is how I always pictured deer hunting, and it’s why I expected the experience would confirm my preference for bird hunting. Sitting perfectly still in the woods always seemed, well, boring. But I quickly discover that it’s not. In fact, it’s amazing what I get to see. Songbirds skitter right up to me, unaware that I’m here. Squirrels dart across downed logs, performing their pre-winter chores, I suppose. This is life in the forest, and for the first time I have a front-row seat. As with skiing or hiking, it is a satisfying mental exercise to keep my mind present, to stay engaged in the subtle entertainment that unfolds before me.

On our last evening, after three days without seeing a single deer, I hear something crunch the dried leaves. Crunch. Crunch. I suck in my breath. Through sweaty palms, I tighten my grip on my rifle and peer through the scope. The forest is quiet again. Perhaps the deer saw me move a little? Then crunch, crunch, crunch. It resumes walking.

This time, it’s a deer, I’m certain. I sit as still as I possibly can, but my heart thumps louder than a bass drum. Will the deer hear my thundering heart and be scared away? Every muscle in my body is flexed. The stepping sounds are coming from below the hill where I sit, on the other side of some thin, bare maple trees. I refocus my scope to get a better view. Deer are masters of disguise; their gray-brown fur blends into just about any backdrop. I scan the area slowly, but see nothing. Just a fat gray squirrel hopping through the leaves. Crunch. It hops again. Crunch. It takes me a moment to realize that the crunching is synchronized with the squirrel’s movements.

Shit. It’s not a deer at all, just a stupid gray squirrel.

Darkness falls and soon I can only see a few feet in front of me. Still, I am hesitant to leave my perch. Scott, who was sitting against a tree trunk about ten yards to my left, stands up. He’s a human cacophony: crushing leaves, shattering branches and crackling layers of clothing. I glare at him and he shrugs. Then he tiptoes toward me, still making a racket.

“Lil, it’s dark.”

“I know.” I sigh and stand up. I almost fall over, my legs are so stiff; my butt is completely numb. As we walk back to the farmhouse, I lament the outcome of my first-ever deer-hunting trip.

“Didn’t that sound like a deer walking across those dead leaves?”

“Yeah, it really did.”

“Never in my life have I been so amped up about a stupid squirrel.”

He slips his arm around my shoulders.

“Well,” he says, “now you know how Sylvia feels.”

Two days later, back in Oregon for Thanksgiving, we are on the way home from my in-laws’ house when Scott hits a deer with my ten-year-old Toyota. We gasp as a trio of deer bounds across the highway, one after another. Scott slams on the brakes and slows the car to about twenty miles per hour by the time we intersect their path, but he can’t quite avoid the third deer. Our right-front bumper hits its hind leg. The deer keeps running, no doubt from a surge of adrenaline, and we keep driving. The car is fine but we both fall silent, worrying about the doe. It reminds me of my rabbit-assassination-by-lawn-mower. Yes, I just spent four days attempting to kill a deer. But this isn’t how I wanted to do it.

The next fall, I am back in Oregon and more determined than ever to bag a deer. In Oregon, there is one brief statewide deer season followed by a series of controlled hunts, in which a limited number of tags are awarded by lottery for a particular part of the state. This system allows biologists to more closely manage deer populations because they can survey deer numbers and even size, then adjust as needed the number of tags awarded the following year. But it makes things much more complicated for hunters.

As the deadline for lottery entries approaches, I cave and spend fifteen dollars on a statistical guide to the lottery system. It explains how hunters have fared in each unit during past years: in drawing a tag and in “filling” the tag (killing an animal). I manage to emerge from this long lottery process with buck deer and bull elk tags for the same unit, about a hundred miles south of Bend. It doesn’t have a spectacular reputation. When I unfold a map of the unit, I notice immediately that a cobweb of small dirt roads stretches over the entire region. Deer and elk live here, but there’s no remote wilderness area where I can eke out an advantage over other hunters by my sheer willingness to hike.

I read everything I can find about deer hunting. I interview every hunter I can think of. When Scott and I go fishing during the summer, I practice looking for deer tracks. When I find some—cloven hoofprints—I realize that I don’t know if the cleft comes to a sharp point at the front of the hoof or the back. This seems important, so I find a pasture of grazing cows and, assuming they are closely related enough to be indicative, inspect their hooves. The notch is at the front.

As the season approaches, I also prepare by worrying. I’m not too nervous about failing to locate a deer—that feels mostly out of my control. But I am scared of what to do if I somehow manage to find and shoot one. Gutting a deer sounds like a monumental task. Also called field dressing, the process involves removing the organs to prevent bacterial contamination of the meat, or muscle. It helps cool the meat more quickly, to keep it from spoiling. And gutting it enables a hunter to cut the animal in quarters and transport it out of the woods. While doing all of this, however, you need to make sure the meat isn’t contaminated by urine or feces. Deer urine contains strong-smelling hormones that can alter the taste of the meat, and the feces and other intestinal contents contain loads of bacteria.

Field dressing is a process that begins with this vile instruction: Make a deep incision all the way around the anus and tie it closed with a piece of string. I shudder whenever I read this and skip ahead to the easier-sounding steps, like slicing open the abdominal cavity. Another list-topping fear: What if I shoot a deer in the evening, and have to track it, gut it and pack it out in the dark? It’s legal to be on USDA Forest Service property after sundown, but I can’t fathom having to hike across uneven, trail-less land in the dark, not to mention trying to spot droplets of blood to find an animal I’ve wounded but not yet killed. Or carrying fifty pounds of venison on my back.

For several weeks before deer season opens, we head south and camp in my unit each weekend. We drive all over, pulling off small logging roads to hike up hills, my eyes trained on the ground for deer tracks or poop (for which hunters use another pleasant euphemism: sign). Fresh deer tracks are still sharp around the edges, not yet disturbed by wind or rain or dew. The print is darker than the surrounding ground because the damp under-layer of dirt hasn’t dried yet. Very fresh deer scat looks like a glistening pile of dark-roasted coffee beans. As it ages, it looks more like a pile of chewed-up bits of grass and leaves.

One day, as we drive down a paved forest road in the pouring rain, we see a pair of deer jog up an open hill. Scott slows the car and I peek at them through my binoculars. One is a doe, the other a buck, his antlers still covered in their spring velvet.

Male deer shed and regrow a new pair of antlers every year. Hunters tend to think that the more tines or points on the antlers, the older the deer is. But diet and genetics also play a big role in antler size and formation. In January or February, a buck will rub his antlers against a tree until they fall off, one at a time. I imagine that they start to feel like loose teeth, and their release brings relief even though it sometimes draws a little blood. In late spring, the antlers sprout up again, this time coated in velvet. As fall approaches, bucks rub against trees to remove the velvet in long, bloody strips. During the late autumn rut, when they compete to mate with does, bucks spar with one another, antler-to-antler, until one surrenders. Occasionally one buck will gore the other. Rarely, two bucks lock antlers during a fight. If they can’t separate, they will both starve or die of exhaustion or be killed by a predator.

The day before deer season opens, Scott and I work all day, then pack up the car and drive two hours south. We pull into a small campground just before midnight and don headlamps to set up our tent. I set the folding travel alarm clock for four thirty, then change my mind and reset it for five. I’ve had a long week at work. No sooner do I close my eyes than the alarm is beeping next to me. Several snooze rounds later, I switch on my headlamp and start pulling on layers, still inside my sleeping bag. We were planning on boiling water and brewing coffee but it’s too cold to stand around waiting for the stove to heat up, so instead we jump in the car and drive to a spot that we visited while scouting.

It’s almost six when we pull off a dirt road. I take my gun out of its case and load it with one bullet, then slip a few more in my pockets. In a hurry to get in place before the sun rises, we make our way noisily to a wide, rotting stump. It’s still plenty dark, so our headlamps bob as we pick our way there. I chose this landmark because it will shield our silhouettes while offering a 180-degree view. As we hike, I wonder if deer can see our lights. I shrug off my backpack and sit down against the stump. Scott sits against another downed tree about ten yards behind me. I try to stay as still and quiet as possible.

Daylight builds and soon I can actually see the landscape around me. At one point, a chipmunk races along a downed log and nearly bounces off my back. I take it as a compliment: I’m sitting perfectly still, as far as this animal can tell. No sign of any deer, though.

By midmorning, I am frozen stiff and I motion to Scott that it’s time to get up and leave. We hike back to the car and drive back to our tent for a nap and some long-awaited coffee. That afternoon, it gets warm—over seventy degrees—and Scott fishes a nearby creek while I re-read a book called Deer Hunting, by master hunter Gary Lewis. The chapter I’ve opened is all about the importance of stealth. He recommends taking one step and then waiting, listening. Humans are the only animals who stride with such regular cadence, he writes, so walking to one’s normal beat is an alarm to the sensitive ears of wild deer. I feel guilty when I think back to our groggy, clumsy hike this morning.

We head back up to the chosen stump a little later, this time parking farther down the butte and hiking—more slowly and quietly this time—up the ridge. We sit next to another tree stump in a slightly wider clearing. Scott reads and I scan the clearing, peering into dark spots for the flick of a tail, the crook of an antler. This time, I’m sure we’ll see a deer. I wonder, too, if I really want to shoot it. How guilty will I feel? Do I really want to deal with the guts and skin and—shudder—tying off the anus? After another two hours of backbreakingly still and silent sitting, however, I have my answer: a resounding yes. It’s still opening day of deer season and I already feel that I’ve put in too much effort to go home empty-handed.

When it’s dark, we switch our headlamps on and tiptoe back to the car. We return to camp, heat up a quick dinner of leftover meat loaf and go to bed at eight thirty. Two men driving a sedan with New Jersey plates pull into the campsite next to ours and proceed to chop wood for an hour and a half, carrying flashlights past our tent as they drag logs back to their chopping block.

The next morning, the alarm buzzes at four thirty. I’m already awake but wishing I were asleep. I hit the snooze button a couple of times and stay nestled in my sleeping bag. Plink, plink. It starts to drizzle on the tent. We wake up and drive back to what we’ve started to call our “parking spot.” Again wearing headlamps, we tiptoe up the butte and out to the same giant stump where we watched the sun set yesterday. Nada. A few hours later, we tiptoe back out to the logging road and start heading down to our car. As we creep—heel, toe, heel, toe—we notice several fresh-looking hoofprints underfoot.

“Were they sneaking past us on the road?” I whisper.

“Looks like it,” Scott says.

We head back to camp, where we fry up some potatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, cocktail weenies and eggs together in a skillet. As we cook, we remark how strange it is that we haven’t heard any shots. I admit to Scott that yesterday evening, sitting quietly in the clearing, I actually wondered if I had the dates wrong. But I didn’t.

“Maybe we’re just in a really bad place,” Scott suggests.

“Or maybe”—I fumble for a more optimistic angle—“it’s so warm that other hunters aren’t having any luck, either.”

We drive to the closest town, Chiloquin, to fill up our tank, and I ask the gas attendant if many people have brought deer through town.

“I’ve only seen one,” he says. “Everyone else has bad reports. Two weeks ago, when it was colder, they were down here. But once it got warm again, they went back up.”

I nod. When I recount this conversation to Scott, back in the car, he’s full of questions: Where did the successful hunter bag his deer? Where is this “up” place that the deer go when it’s warm? We’re on top of a butte and we’re not even seeing any hunters, much less any deer. I have no answers.

Later that afternoon, we head back to our spot, this time hiking up to a little opening that overlooks the road. Again, we notice fresh tracks on our approach, which I take to be a good omen. The sun is behind me and I see a long shadow of myself carrying a gun. It’s startling how the gun changes my appearance. I look dangerous, which I guess is how the animals see me.

Scott reads a book under a thick stand of fir. I sit out, more exposed, for a better view. I can’t stop fidgeting. My stomach grumbles. My back is sore. Where are the deer? I get up and hike slowly around the top of the butte until sundown, again seeing no sign of deer.

The next morning, we awake to howling wind, gushing rain, thunder and lightning. According to my readings, the deer will be bedded down somewhere, not moving around, in a storm this severe. I switch off the alarm and we fall back asleep.

That afternoon, the sky brightens and we hike through thickets of trees to a small clearing. Scott sits against a tree trunk, behind and below me.

I’ve been sitting for what feels like hours, daydreaming and trying not to fidget. My gun is in my lap. Staring into this clearing is becoming meditative. I start to notice everything about it. I recognize which chipmunks are running along certain routes, and what they sound like when they stop and pick up a nut or seed. I peer across the clearing and imagine that dozens of deer are waiting in the shadows, watching me. That crook, could it be part of an antler? I check through my binoculars. Nope, just a branch.

And then, like magic, a doe appears in the clearing in front of me. I mean, appears. I don’t hear her arrive or watch her step into the light. It’s as if a special-effects engineer just beamed her into view. Right as I see her, she notices me. We stare at each other for what feels like several minutes, her giant funnel ears scooped toward me. (The species that inhabits this part of Oregon, mule deer, or Odocoileus hemionus, are named for their giant ears.) I try to stay as still as possible, hoping that my impossibly loud heart won’t scare her away. I narrow my eyes, trying to will a pair of antlers onto her head as magically as she popped into my clearing.

But she doesn’t have antlers. And she has had enough. She bounces away, flicking her hooves backward with each graceful leap. I take a deep breath. Even if she had been a he, antlers and all, there’s no way I could have raised my gun to my shoulder fast enough to shoot before she bounded away. Lesson learned: Don’t hold your gun in your lap; hold it where you can use it.

Later, Scott tells me that the doe was looking straight at him. It reminds me of that Disney World ride where the ghosts all seem to be making eye contact with you, no matter who else is in the haunted house.

At the end of the day, we head back to camp, pack up and head home. Scott needs to check in at his office. I need to restock our cooler.

Two days later, we return to what we’ve dubbed Deer Camp. We awaken at five (deer hunting is turning out to be more of a marathon than a sprint, so why wear ourselves out with masochistic wake-up calls?) and drive back up what Scott has started calling “Buck Butte.” He’s an optimist.

We settle under some trees facing the small dirt road that we hiked. It’s a little warmer this morning, above freezing, and foggy. Once the sun is up, I creep around to the various clearings that I’ve identified on this butte, looking for deer. Then Scott and I hike up behind where we sat. We notice a thin game trail that might be fun to investigate later. By now, I’m ready for breakfast. We go back to camp, eat and then decide to explore the low-lying area around the butte. All day today, we have heard gunshots all around us. Unlike experienced hunters, I can’t hear the difference between a shotgun and a rifle. Duck-hunting season has opened, and we’re not far from a popular bird-hunting area, so it’s possible that some of the shots are being fired at birds. Still, I can’t help but worry that others are bagging deer left and right.

We hike a long loop, locating another promising game trail. This time, we follow it. I enjoy the new scenery and feel excited that this could be where the deer are. Where my deer is. We see fresh deer and elk scat, which is embarrassingly exciting. I’m so thrilled by this poop that I feel like a proud new parent. We also notice strange marks in the duff, as if a buck (or a bull elk) has pawed at the ground or dragged a hoof. Pine needles are bunched up and the bare ground is revealed underneath. Later, I learn that sometimes when a buck is startled, it paws at the ground.

That evening, during our headlamp-lit hike back to the car, I put on a cheerful face.

“I know this sounds crazy because I haven’t even seen a deer, but I feel like I’m getting better at this,” I tell Scott. “I can focus longer. I’m quieter. I’m more prepared to switch off the safety and take a shot if I do see a deer… I think.”

On the drive back to our camp, I pray the only way I know how: by wishing on a star. Please, please let me shoot a buck tomorrow, I think as I look at the dappled sky. Then I add: Safely. Humanely.

The next morning, it’s dumping rain when the alarm sounds. I switch it off and roll over. We sleep in and finally emerge from the tent at nine thirty in the morning. In hunting time, this is already afternoon. We drink our coffee and eat our breakfast in the car, trying to stay dry. We drive southeast and discover that in the farthest corner of my hunting unit, it’s not raining. We are not too far from where we saw the velvety buck while we were scouting, either.

This is classic mule deer country. It’s open, especially since a wildfire burned the area years ago, with rocky outcroppings and steep canyons. We park and hike to the top of a steep rock formation. The hiking is tough. We thrash through snowbrush and at one point I even tumble backward off a rocky ledge. I’m not hurt, but I also can’t imagine sneaking up on anything here. Too bad, because there are signs of deer everywhere. We walk past bedded-down shrubs that actually reek of wild animal. We step over piles of poop so fresh that they still gleam with moisture. There are sharp tracks and well-worn game trails beaucoup.

Next we hike through a low-lying draw that we spotted from a perch on a tall outcropping. Again, deer sign is everywhere here. We creep along, stopping frequently while I peer through my binoculars to scan the low-lying vegetation. Again, we can’t help but sound loud and clumsy. Again, the deer stay hidden. Again, gunshots are firing all around us. After a few more hours, we head west to our old familiar area and find that the rain is gone and only a thick mist lingers.

We head back to what we’ve dubbed the low country, surrounding our butte, and hike out to the game trail. We follow it to a clearing that looks like the intersection of eight or ten different trails. An interchange on the deer superhighway, perhaps?

I sit as still as possible between two snug snowbrushes. As water drips from trees, the forest sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies: snapping, crackling, popping. It keeps my attention piqued, no time for daydreaming today. Was that a dollop of water dripping from a ponderosa branch onto a manzanita leaf? Or was it a doe stepping carelessly on a pinecone? Was that a chipmunk scurrying across dry bark or was it the creak of a giant buck’s knee? I am so alert that I notice out of the corner of my eye when a pale yellow currant leaf drops to the forest floor. I watch a black ant scale the branch of a snowbrush next to me. This scene is still and almost silent, yet I feel as if I am surrounded by garish displays of life and movement.

Again, darkness falls without so much as a teasing flash of deer. I click on my headlamp and start the long, cold trudge back to the car. My whole body feels heavy and sore. I am pissed off. Frustrated. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. How could I have ever been duped into thinking I’d get lucky enough to shoot a buck?

Sunday morning we wake up early and hike back up Buck Butte, to the end of an overgrown logging road and down a brushy slope to a small clearing. We sneak behind a log and wait for the sun to come up. The stars are incredible. But we’re both sleepy. Scott starts to snore and I don’t even bother poking him. What’s the point? I’m too uncomfortable to stay still, too fidgety to keep quiet. I wonder if I’m getting louder—worse at this—or if I’m just more attuned to how much noise every little movement makes.

Once the sun is up, we tiptoe across the clearing to a steep patch of trees where I heard—or thought I heard—something big lumber through the dark. As we pick our way downhill through the fallen branches, we see piles of giant poop pellets. Some of the piles are very fresh. My stomach flutters. There is at least one big buck traveling through here on a regular basis.

Later in the day, we come up with a new plan. We start at the base of the butte and creep up the side of a clearing, quickly and, for once, quietly. Then we cut across the clearing and tuck ourselves behind an old snag. We find some gelatinous, neon-orange mushrooms sprouting from a stump, and Scott finds a piece of wood that looks like the face of an owl. As the sun sets, still seeing and hearing nothing, I creep along the side of the slope until I reach another small drainage. I hide there with a good view down the clearing. The wind direction is perfect—anything walking up or down the hillside wouldn’t catch a whiff of me. But again, I see no deer. I leave frustrated and discouraged. The animals are only moving at night, it seems. Almost a week has passed since I saw that doe. This is getting pathetic.

The next day I hide among the snowbrush at the edge of a small, flat clearing at the bottom of Buck Butte. I keep hearing buck-like sounds that quicken my pulse but turn out to be squirrels or, in one case, a black woodpecker with a white head and red patch. Later, I consult a guidebook and discover that this was a rare white-headed woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus). Instead of waiting for the sun to go down, I scribble notes in my journal, right here, right now. I’m sure it’s a dead giveaway to the deer, but fuck it. After today, there are two days left in deer season. It’s time to look for silver linings.

So I didn’t get my deer. All is not lost. For one thing, I have enjoyed spending so much time with Scott. It’s surprisingly romantic, being alone with him in the woods, seeing him embrace this new activity, this new goal.

Two, everywhere I go now, I see game trails and deer beds and all kinds of animal scat—coyote, deer, elk, rabbit. One night I even dreamed of deer poop. These woods feel alive in a new way to me. As with fly-fishing, I feel like I am learning a foreign language.

At dark, Scott and I head back to the car and then camp. We drink whiskey and reheat leftover meat loaf in a skillet. We build a campfire and sit close to it, poking the wood and talking about our families and the family we hope to have of our own someday. Nothing promotes deep, philosophical conversations like an open fire does. Even though this hunt has been frustratingly death-free, it’s impossible not to think about the circle of life. Dead deer or not, it’s what hunting is.

That night, I am drunk and my stomach is so upset that I barely sleep. I curl into the fetal position and hatch a strategy for tomorrow. When the alarm buzzes at five, I am already awake and grateful to get out of the tent.

We spend the morning exploring the top of Buck Butte, again seeing no deer. In the afternoon, we walk along a small stream and hunt not for deer but for mushrooms. Success! We collect a box of white chanterelles, savoring the instant gratification that deer hunting has so cruelly withheld. As it gets dark, we drive to a highway diner for supper, with plans to go to bed early and give it our all tomorrow, the last day of deer season.

But this day comes and goes like most of the others did: without a deer in sight.

It reminds me of a moral that anglers often repeat: There’s a reason it’s called fishing instead of catching. I know this. Big-game hunting is very new to me, and I must be patient. But after two fruitless deer seasons—first in Michigan, now in Oregon—my patience is waning.

CHAPTER 14

BIG GAME

I return to work for a week before elk season opens. Everyone in the newsroom asks about my deer hunt and I relay the disappointing news. Or, rather, non-news. I try to get myself excited about elk season but I can’t muster much enthusiasm. If I couldn’t track down a buck deer, what hope do I have of finding a bull elk? Biologists estimate that the average American elk hunter kills an elk only once every eight years.

Elk (Cervus canadensis) are closely related to deer, and the two species’ habitats overlap, but they behave quite differently. To hunters, these behavioral differences matter. Deer prefer to nibble on shrubs and young trees, whereas elk, like cattle, favor grass. And while deer usually travel alone or in small groups, elk live in herds—sometimes called gangs—that range from just a few animals to hundreds. Biologists predict that this behavior stems from a time when elk lived on flat, open plains.

Deer hunters can succeed by locating prime deer habitat and then waiting, hidden, for an animal or two to show up. But because elk live in larger groups—and because there are fewer elk than deer—hunters usually have to cover a lot more ground to find them.

“I expect to see a deer every day that I spend deer hunting,” Andy tells me, “but it’s a good day of elk hunting if I just find fresh tracks or scat.”

This further deflates my hopes as I recall my less-than-fruitful deer season.

To make matters worse, elk season in Oregon is shorter than deer season. I actually have two tags for my wildlife unit, but each tag is only good for a span of about four days. During each season, I am only permitted to kill a male elk, or bull. As with deer, hunting for female elk is tightly regulated for the protection of the overall population. As a result, there are as many as seven females (called cows) for every male, further diminishing my chances.

At the start of the first elk season, we drive down to my unit and wake up at four thirty in the morning. We have almost three hours before sunrise. I pull on layer after layer to withstand the cold. Scott tries to encourage me as we drive toward Buck Butte.

“Maybe we’ve had it all wrong, and it’s really called Bull Butte.”

Only a couple of weeks have passed since deer season, but winter has made significant headway. We are soon greeted by a thin layer of snow. This is a welcome development. Snow will dampen our footsteps as we creep through the woods. And it will highlight any recent hoofprints that we stumble across, too.

A large brown animal darts across the logging road ahead of us, flashing in our sights only when it’s in the headlights, then vanishing into the dark.

“Oh my God, an elk!” Scott is genuinely amazed. He turns to me. “I didn’t think we’d see one.”

“Me neither.”

He rolls the car to a halt. I peer into the dense woods through my window on the passenger’s side, where the elk disappeared. All I see is blackness.

I jump out and tie some fluorescent orange flagging on one of the branches nearby. If we don’t see anything promising this morning, we could come back here and try to follow the tracks in the snow.

I get back in the car.

“Well,” I say, “this is already more successful than deer season.”

We roll over the snow-covered dirt road, the tires barely making a sound. All those days of deer hunting come back to me, and a familiar combination of frustration and disappointment edges into my stomach. I take a deep breath and remind myself that this is a new day, in pursuit of a new animal. Anything can happen. This time, at least the weather is cooperating.

The road barely climbs the butte when we decide to park and travel the rest of the way on foot, to avoid getting stuck in the slush or mud. The sky is dusty black, with no stars, as we pull on all of our layers. I hoist my backpack—stuffed with a raincoat, snacks and a water bottle, not to mention rope, canvas bags and knives, just in case—onto my shoulders. I pick up my rifle and load it.

We hike quietly. The snow offers another perk—it illuminates the forest. We pick our way up a steep slope, hugging the edge of a thicket. Afraid that the sun will rise pretty soon, I motion to Scott that we should settle down here just in case an animal travels along the swath of thinned trees that stretches before us. We both sit against tree trunks, facing north. We listen. We wait. I peer into the darkness, trying to make sense of the shadows and blotches. I notice some noise uphill from us, which of course I imagine is a herd of elk traversing the butte. Daylight takes its sweet time. When the sun does come up, we stay put for a while longer. The air is still and foggy. I’m starting to get cold and that promising window of dawn, when elk, like deer, are supposedly most mobile, has almost passed. It’s time to get moving.

I start uphill and Scott follows me. Not far from where we were sitting, we see black dirt kicked up in the snow. These are hoofprints, the mere sight of which feels as if I just lifted a clump of duff and uncovered a mushroom: Yes! It’s a game trail, and not the subtle, summery kind we were finding two weeks ago. Many hooves have trodden along this path, and recently.

I can’t tell which way the animals were headed, so we follow the tracks downhill for a while, then turn around and walk uphill. Through the trees ahead, I see a flat clearing that I recognize as an old, overgrown logging road. Trees and shrubs have reclaimed too much of it for a vehicle to drive on, but it would make a convenient path for large animals. As I get closer, I see what I think are more prints on the road, so I tell Scott to lag back a little farther while I go check it out. He stops behind a boulder and watches me walk ahead.

Just as I reach the road, I look to my right and see what looks like an elk walking toward me. I crouch down behind a scrawny snowbrush shrub, my hands shaking with excitement. Ever-so-slowly, I raise my binoculars to my face to get a better look at the animal.

Sure enough, it’s a cow elk, probably seventy-five yards away from me. She’s alert, with her head raised and ears pointed forward. She slows, then stops and stares in my direction. I freeze, knowing that because elk are social, there could be others here, too. If she spooks, she will alarm the rest of the herd and they will all clear out. After what feels like minutes, but is probably just seconds, she turns and trots away. She is leery but not panicked. If she had identified me as human—by smell, for example—she would have sprinted away. Instead, she turns to face downhill. She looks back at me again, hesitating. Then she jogs into the trees and out of sight.

I twist my torso around, look at Scott and raise my finger to my lips. He nods and takes a step back, tucking himself behind the boulder. I turn again to the little road that stretches in front of me. I sit down on the ground, to give my legs a break, and take a deep breath.

There’s a good chance that other elk, possibly even a bull, are in the vicinity. If so, it seems most likely that they’re downhill, where the cow ran. From where I sit now, a thicket of small trees blocks my view. I need to find a way to peek down there. But if I walk down the open road, the elk below might see me. I clutch my gun with both hands and look uphill, thinking. I need to hatch a plan. Perhaps I could creep through the trees on the other side of the road. Branches and shadows would hide me while I peeped downhill, past the road, in the direction the cow headed.

Then I look back down the road and gasp. A bull elk—I can see his antlers with my naked eyes—is walking toward me, following in the footsteps of the cow. Is this a mirage? Am I so desperate that I’m imagining wildlife now? I shoulder my rifle and peer through the magnifying scope. Adrenaline gushes back into my veins. He is about seventy-five yards away, and looks more relaxed than the cow did, plodding rhythmically toward me with his head hanging low.

I remind myself: Stay still. He could notice me at any moment and disappear faster than I could blink. How has he come this close without seeing me? Now he’s fifty yards away.

And then, without warning, time slows down. What starts as just the idea of calm, the abstract goal of it, somehow builds, like a fluorescent bulb that warms up and then illuminates everything around it. I watch through my scope as he continues to walk toward me, never missing a step. I try to sit deep in the ground, place my feet flat and anchor my elbows on my bent knees, so my rifle is as still as possible. I rest my thumb on the safety, just in case I get a clear shot.

This doesn’t seem likely, though. The elk is facing me head-on, and the heart shot—the only fatal place I know to aim—would require him to turn broadside. But he is still walking toward me. The least I can do is be ready, just in case.

Now the elk is impossibly close, maybe twenty-five yards away, and still plodding. Wait, now he slows down. Does he see me? No, he’s turning to face downhill. Maybe he’s looking for the cow.

I center what I think is his heart in my crosshairs.

If I am ever going to get a shot, this is it.

I slide the safety forward and pull the trigger.

He charges forward at the bang of my gun, downhill and out of sight. I turn to Scott and give him a thumbs-up. I can hear the elk—my elk—thrashing through the trees and brush. He stumbles. A pause. Is that it? No. A loud, terrible wheezing sound, almost like a donkey braying, emerges from the woods. Later, Scott tells me that it reminded him of the sounds his grandfather made as he was dying of lung cancer and emphysema.

I look back at Scott and motion for him to come toward me. He walks up and together we wait.

Even when hit in the heart, an animal rarely drops dead immediately. Instead, a surge of adrenaline propels the animal to run; the body gives itself what could be its last shot at life. Every hunter I’ve known has advised waiting at least ten minutes—some say thirty minutes or even more—before tracking it. The idea is that an animal who knows it is being chased will produce even more adrenaline and keep running instead of lying down to die.

While we wait, I alternate between feeling triumphant—It was a good shot, I tell Scott, I’m sure I got it—and wondering if maybe I somehow missed. And anyway, do I really want the elk to be dead?

I can’t help but think of Nathan, wondering if my killing of this elk will bring even a fraction of the sadness and suffering to the herd that my brother’s death caused in my family. I wince at the thought. Then, as always happens during intense moments since Nathan’s death, I wonder what he would say if I could call and regale him with the latest stunner in the story of my life.

Desperate for something to do while the minutes tick by, I tie some flagging around my snowbrush shrub. If we get turned around while tracking the animal, the flagging will remind us where I sat when I fired the shot.

When twenty minutes is up, I bound over to where the elk last stood. I bend down and examine the melting snow for blood. There’s nothing, just some strands of light fur scattered around. Dread creeps in. What if I missed the elk altogether, or just nicked some fur off his back? Maybe that wheezing sound wasn’t the elk’s final breaths at all, but some sort of able-bodied warning to the others. What if I did hit the elk but it wasn’t fatal and we end up tracking him for hours, only to have to shoot him again to put him out of his misery? Or worse, what if he’s wounded but we never find him? Together Scott and I follow the elk’s tracks downhill. The vegetation is dense and I focus on the ground, examining the snow and dirt for hoofprints and, hopefully, drops of blood.

Scott interrupts my thoughts. “There he is.”

“Where?”

“By that tree.”

It takes me a second to see the elk, even after Scott points to him. He lies on his back, as if he slipped down the hill until a stout tree stopped him. He’s just a dozen or so yards from where I shot him. Branches are entangled in his legs. His eyes are open. He looks enormous.

I approach him slowly, with my gun loaded and pointed at him. I’ve been warned that a wounded animal lying still might not be dead. One book advises to take a branch and poke the animal’s eye; only an animal who’s truly dead will remain still. But I can’t bring myself to poke him—it feels disrespectful. And he could be alive.

“He’s dead,” Scott says. “Really dead.”

Nervously, I lower my gun and slide my hand onto the elk’s fur, which is thick, coarse and slightly oily. I’m still dizzy from the adrenaline, and amazed that all of this is really happening. Already, my feelings are not as pure as what I’ve come to expect when bird hunting. Guilt has a bigger, prompter presence this time around. So does awe. What have I just done?

I wrap my hand around one of his antlers. I count the points—four on each side, which indicates that he is fully grown but still young, maybe two and a half years old. Soft ears, filled with wild tufts of blond fur, flop beside each antler. Again, I am shocked by his size. He is more horse than deer. His long, slender legs are covered in short, dark fur. His furry face falls somewhere between the narrow deer and the bulbous moose, an endearing, unfamiliar middle form.

I’m disappointed in myself that in all my research, I never thought to memorize a hunting prayer. Almost every hunting culture has some traditional words that a hunter recites over her prey. I stroke the long, dark mane that covers his neck and I fumble for something to say to this majestic animal. When nothing else comes to mind, I lean in and whisper, “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

I shove my fluttering flock of emotions—awe, remorse, guilt, giddiness, gratitude—down into my gut before one flies loose and destroys my composure. Big-game hunting is an exercise in compartmentalization. I will release these feelings later, one at a time, and roll over each one in my mind, to savor it and try to understand it. Right now, there is work to be done. I’m nervous about accomplishing all of it here, in the middle of nowhere, with no seasoned adviser. What if I can’t gut and quarter this animal? What if we can’t get it back to our car?

Scott takes my picture with the bull, then we try to drag him a few feet, away from the tree and into a more open patch of ground. I grab hold of his antlers while Scott grabs the hind legs. We both heave with all our might but the beast moves maybe an inch. We try a few more times before giving in. The best we can do is to rotate him so that his belly faces downhill. Using some rope from my backpack, we tie his antlers to one tree and a hind leg to another, to prevent him from sliding downhill while I’m below. I get out my elk tag and cut notches in the date and month, then tie it securely around one of the antlers. Scott snaps another photo.

These photos will never be posted on a brag board, or even on my Facebook page. I remember too well the discomfort of looking at similar pictures without any context, and I don’t want to put others through that. Nor do I want to demean my own elk, even in the eyes of non-hunters. I will share the snapshots with a few friends who hunt, and some understanding family members. Mostly, the photos are for me, a physical reminder of an experience so intense and so unique that I will sometimes reminisce about it in disbelief, as if it had been a dream.

I stand downhill from the elk, near his belly. I get out my knives and a pair of latex gloves. I have never watched a large animal being field dressed in person. I’ve watched YouTube videos and studied diagrams in books. I have one book in my pack—Making the Most of Your Deer—that explains how to field dress a closely related species.

“Do you want me to get out the book?” Scott asks, watching me hesitate.

“No, I think I know what to do… First I’m going to cut open the abdomen.”

“Don’t you have to tie off the anus and penis first?”

I hesitate. I think I can slice open the abdomen—or most of it—before resorting to my most dreaded step in field dressing.

“I’ll work my way up to it,” I say.

I squat down and feel around for the animal’s sternum, then drag my knife along it, lightly. I go back and trace the same path, again and again, until the skin suddenly bursts open to reveal wet, pink viscera. I move the knife down and extend the cut, first a light trace through the outer layer of skin, then another layer, then another, then zip—the incision glides open. On the next stretch of cutting, I poke the knife in too far; the skin unzips and the tip of my knife punctures something below. A bilious bubble oozes out of it.

“Uh-oh, I think I nicked the intestines.”

“Does it smell bad?”

“Um, I think so.” I can smell something, and it’s not pleasant. But it’s not overwhelmingly awful, which is how I’ve heard hunters describe the scent of a pierced intestine.

I lean back and wipe my hair from my eyes.

“Oh no.” I jump up. “I think I just got blood on my face. Do I have blood on my face?”

Scott inspects my forehead.

“I don’t see any.”

“Oh, thank God.” In half an hour I will be drenched in blood and laughing at my earlier squeamishness.

I lengthen the incision until it stretches the whole length of the abdomen. I have literally reached the genitals; now I have no choice but to deal with them. I cut off two eighteen-inch lengths of nylon cord. Then I grab the penis in one hand, pull it away from the elk’s body, and tie one length of cord around it, tight, into a bow.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I say cheerfully.

“For you,” Scott says, looking away.

The anus is worse, but not by much. I’m used to cutting the elk by now. I make a deep incision all the way around, then reach in and pull the whole organ out. I tie the second cord around it, pull it tight and knot it again.

Then I walk back around the hind legs and return to the abdomen. I extend the incision as far as I can at both ends of the animal. The belly is split wide open now, exposing the giant, four-lobed stomach—it looks like an exercise ball, fully inflated despite my having nicked it with my knife earlier. Below, there’s a never-ending pile of dark, coiled intestines. The problem is, all of these organs are still firmly inside the elk. I stand up and turn to Scott.

“I thought once I got him open, all of this stuff was supposed to just fall out.”

He gets the book out of my pack and starts flipping through it for advice.

“Okay, it says you might have to reach up in there and disconnect any tissue that’s holding everything in place.”

The anus? The penis? That, it turns out, was the easy stuff. I spend the next hour with my right arm fully submerged in the elk carcass, breaking strands of… what? I guess the term is “connective tissue.” I have to take breaks every few minutes to step away from the elk and cool off my arm, breathe some fresh air. Heat wafts out of his body. So does the wet, metallic smell of blood.

“This is a well-made elk,” I say, plunging my arm in yet again.

After a while, though, I start to get comfortable with it. I know when I’m feeling an organ—maybe a kidney? the liver?—and when I’m touching a string that needs to be ripped. I think back to field dressing my first pheasant, and how simple that was by comparison. Three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined reaching my whole arm, up to my shoulder, into the cavity of an elk. Yet here I am doing it, without much of a fuss.

With each torn piece of tissue, the intestines and stomach bulge farther out of the abdominal cavity. Eventually, they sag downhill in a pile that looks larger than the body they fell from. Next, I pull out the wide, floppy mass of a diaphragm. A gush of blood follows.

I shove the offal a little farther downhill. We will leave it here, and assume that coyotes, vultures and other animals will feast on it. Andy has told me that when he or a family member shoots a deer on public land near his parents’ house, they hear coyotes later that night, yipping with pleasure at their discovery of the gut pile. We humans are, after all, just one fraction of the food chain.

I reach up into the elk’s body cavity again, this time with a knife, to sever the windpipe and pull out the heart and lungs. I can barely reach that far up in the animal. I manage to cut the windpipe, but I can’t get my hand in far enough to grip it and pull it out. I ask Scott to do it, then explain what he should feel for, what he should grab.

He kneels on the ground below the elk and reaches up, into it.

“Whoa.” He retracts his arm. “I just felt the heart.”

“That’s okay. Keep reaching past it.”

“No, it’s like it had this energy. I mean, it’s this elk’s heart.”

Scott’s words hang in the air for a moment, yet another reminder of what I have done by taking this animal’s life. The heart, the motor of life for this giant animal. Perhaps it does have an energy of its own.

Scott reaches back in, up to his shoulder, and pulls. Out come the final organs.

Next we cut the elk in pieces, to transport it back to our car. We saw off the bottom half of each leg. Then we sever the front half of the animal from the back, just above the pelvis. This is our first glimpse of how thick the muscle is—several inches of meat surround the spine—and of how much food we will reap from this animal. Not that we are in the mood for eating.

“I think I’m a vegetarian now,” Scott will tell me as we pack the animal out of the woods.

Along the spine, we separate the animal again—two hindquarters, one half of a rib cage attached to one shoulder and foreleg, then another half of the rib cage attached to its own shoulder and foreleg. The head and neck are a fifth piece, just as heavy.

Together, we hoist one piece of the animal into the air and then Scott holds it in place while I open a canvas drawstring bag that I purchased at an outdoors store before deer season. Scott lowers it in. We repeat this for each quarter, and each time the process grows more difficult.

“How are we going to get these pieces out of here?” I ask Scott. “We’re exhausted and we haven’t even started yet.”

“We’ll just do it,” he says, shrugging.

We strap one of the canvas-covered quarters onto Scott’s backpack, and then I struggle to help lift it onto his shoulders. Our hike back to the car isn’t long by elk-hunting standards—a mile and a half, perhaps—but it’s over steep terrain, littered with trees, rocks and downed wood. I worry that Scott will injure himself, hiking with so much weight on his back.

I take a second quarter and wrap it in a tarp, then sling a nylon strap around it. I will try dragging it, like a makeshift sled. The trek is difficult. My tarp doesn’t slide particularly well over the uneven ground. I have to crouch down and shove it over bumps and logs. Other times I stand downhill and heave like I’m in a tug-of-war match. Both of us have to take breaks every few minutes, to catch our breath and regain some muscle strength. It takes us two hours to reach the car.

On the next trip, I drag the elk head using the same tarp-and-strap setup. Scott hoists another quarter onto his backpack. During our breaks, we talk about how physically demanding big-game hunting is.

“I never thought of hunting as an extreme sport before,” Scott says.

We get back to the elk for the third and final excursion. We place the last quarter—the largest one, a front shoulder with leg and ribs attached—on the tarp, and each of us holds one strand of the nylon strap. The sun is setting, and there is no way we’ll get back to the car before dark. We both pull on our headlamps before we begin the haul.

“Just one more trip through Fortitude Valley,” Scott grunts.

I smile. And then I stop. Stunned. Make no mistake, we are standing deep in Fortitude Valley. I am drenched in blood and sweat. My legs and arms are so fatigued that they are sore to the touch. I’m so thirsty that my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. We drank the last swig of water from our packs hours ago.

Yes, I’m in Fortitude Valley and yet, somehow, I’m loving it. Even though I’m still reeling from the gutting process, I’m already looking forward to all of the meat we will reap from this elk. I’m proud of myself and proud of Scott. I had doubts the whole way, but in the end I did it. We did it. It’s pitch black outside when we get back to the car. Grunting, we heave three of the quarters into the Rocket Box on top of our Subaru. We set the last quarter and the head in the back of the station wagon and close the door. Eleven hours have passed since I pulled the trigger.

That night, I toss and turn, replaying the day that just happened. I worry that the meat hasn’t cooled properly and we’ll find it spoiled the next morning. This becomes the latest worst-case scenario to avoid.

We awaken early and drive home, where Andy and Jessie (who have returned to Bend following graduate school) come over to help us butcher. Most books and experienced hunters recommend hanging the quarters for a week or more. The idea is that this gives some of the connective tissues time to break down and tenderize the meat. But the weather has warmed up, and we don’t have a place to hang the meat at a safe temperature. Tough meat seems a small price to pay to keep this animal from going to waste.

We carry the four quarters into the backyard and hang them, using nylon ratchet straps, from a pergola that stands over our grill. Andy is gentle in his critique of my field-dressing and quartering methods. He says that we got all the meat, which is the most important thing. But we could have separated the quarters more easily by knowing which joints to break. We should have skinned the elk in the field, to make it lighter. We could have left ribs and more of each leg behind, to pack it out more easily. Instead, we skin each quarter as it hangs. With one hand, I stretch the hide down and away from the leg. With the other, I use the knife to sever any thin, stringy connections. The inside of the skin is gelatinous and slippery-smooth. I shake salt over the inside of each piece of hide, then roll it for later tanning.

Next, we take down the skinned quarters and set them on tables we improvised by laying sheets of plywood across sawhorses. Andy hands me a sharp knife and explains that my next job is to separate the muscles. The highlight of my entire education was the dissection unit in seventh-grade biology, so butchering is right up my alley. It’s fascinating to take apart an animal and see the glorious intricacies of life’s own design. Scott and I focus on this part of the butchering while Andy oversees us and slices the detached muscles into steaks or stew meat or roasts. Jessie packages the cuts using a vacuum sealer. Into buckets go the scraps, which we’ll grind into burger meat the next day.

As the sun goes down, I finish one hindquarter and move on to the right front, which is where the bullet entered the elk. The trauma has changed the physical makeup of the meat: Clotted blood forms a dark, gelatinous coating over it. I have to discard layers of it to unearth any normal-textured meat that remains.

Jessie, who has shot and butchered two deer of her own, will later tell me that she views this as a critical part of hunting. Seeing the bullet trauma up close helps her understand the consequences of pulling the trigger. Earlier, as the butchering lagged on, I found myself forgetting, for long stretches, that we were picking apart a real life. The elk had started to look like meat—regular old sides of beef that hang in butcher shops or fancy steak houses. But now, as I poke the formations of congealed blood, this trauma brings me back to the stark truth of what I have done, of the cost of all this meat.

As we butcher, Andy grills one of the fillets so we can try it. It’s delicious and as tender as store-bought filet mignon. Elk meat tastes a lot like grass-fed beef, or a strong-tasting version of regular grain-fed beef. It’s much leaner than beef, so burgers don’t hold together well on the grill. Soon I will find myself adding a spoonful of olive oil to recipes such as meat loaf.

The day after the butchering is done, I buy a chest freezer. We tuck it in a corner of our basement and fill it with the wrapped meat of my elk. Because I didn’t take the animal to a professional butcher, it was never weighed and I don’t know exactly how much meat we got out of it—but it’s in the hundreds of pounds, for sure.

Food isn’t the only thing this elk has given us. I freeze three pieces of hide, and try my hand at tanning the fourth, for a furry wall hanging or, at the very least, some fly-tying materials for Scott. I scrape the flesh off the inside, then stretch it and dry it in the basement. In the summer, I will soften it with a store-bought tanning kit.

Elk have two rounded molars in their upper jaw that are sometimes called ivories. Old-timers carry these teeth around in their pockets for good luck. So I carefully cut these teeth out of the gums, then dry them and brush off the remaining tissue. These tokens of my hunt are too precious to carry around in a pocket, so I tuck them in my jewelry box.

I take the head to a taxidermist, for what’s known as a European mount—no fur or glass eyes, just a cleaned white skull and antlers. On the way to pick it up, I worry that it will look creepy: the hollowed-out areas where eyeballs used to sit, the broken edges where nose cartilage once met bone. But when I see it, I get to relive the satisfaction and thrill of the kill all over again. We hang it carefully over our mantel. To me, it looks elegant. It is art by nature’s incomparable design, a token of a rite of passage that still feels so mystical that without such physical reminders, I might doubt it ever happened. When I look at it, I am reminded of all the feelings summoned during the hunt: intense pride, satisfaction, exhaustion, awe, gratitude and, yes, guilt.

Guilt is an unavoidable part of hunting. Nearly every hunter I’ve ever met has admitted to feeling guilty about killing animals. Since I shot the elk, this guilt has also started to feel appropriate, even necessary.

What got me interested in hunting in the first place was the archetype of a hunter who respects her prey. But at times, I fell into my old habit of wondering if that “respect” wasn’t just a convenient form of self-deceit, like claiming that a prenuptial agreement is a symbol of love.

The idea of respecting something and also eating it is a tricky one indeed, and it has confounded humans for a long time. In his paean to deer, Heart and Blood, Richard Nelson describes his love for the species and acknowledges that as a hunter, his actions might seem to conflict with this love. Then he adds: “If this seems contradictory, then the whole living process is a contradiction. We love apart from ourselves that which we also kill to sustain us: great trees become our houses and furniture, flowering plants become our vegetables and fruit, fellow creatures become our food and clothing.”

A local Indian woman once explained to me how her tribe, the Umatilla, reconciles this apparent paradox. They view eating an animal not as a heartless act of cruelty, but as a display of gratitude and respect. They believe that many animals already inhabited the earth when man first arrived. The Creator called all of these creatures together and told them to prepare for a new being, man. The other animals would have to take care of man, who would first appear as an infant, the Creator said. Salmon was the first animal to step forward and offer to help nourish man. Deer was the second. It’s no surprise, then, that salmon and deer are such important animals. If one year went by and no humans ate salmon or deer, the animals would be deeply offended. Both would feel as if they had lost their great importance.

Regardless of what you think of this creation story, the last part rings true. The more we eat something, the more it becomes an integral part of our culture and the more we will fight to keep it around. One can’t imagine humans letting cattle go extinct. Or potatoes.

According to Erich Fromm, hunters have always had respect—perhaps even love—for their prey. There is, he writes, “no evidence for the assumption that primitive hunters were motivated by sadistic or destructive impulses. On the contrary, there is some evidence to show that they had an affectionate feeling for the killed animals and possibly a feeling of guilt for the kill. Among Paleolithic hunters, the bear was often addressed as ‘grandfather’ or was looked upon as the mythical ancestor of man.”

In addition to the guilt over killing such a large, beautiful animal, as time goes on I begin to feel guilty about how quickly I encountered it and what a close, easy shot I had. My elk-hunting experience was, as a friend points out, “the aesthetic ideal.” It was on public land, in a place I had come to know and love during deer season. It was also very, very lucky. Faced with waiting another year to bag a large animal, I had started making backup plans. I contacted landowners who had crop-protection preference tags that extended the season and briefly considered hiring a guide to show me the ropes in an area that was unknown to me but familiar to him. I am grateful that I didn’t have to fall back on these other options.

Most of all, though—more than the meat or the ivories or the mount or the photos—I came away from the elk hunt relishing my memory of the experience. It marks the beginning of something that I hope will be part of the rest of my life. The elk has lifted me over some imaginary threshold, though I still consider myself a novice hunter. Perhaps I always will. The more I learn about hunting, the more I realize I still don’t know. I understand why some hunters become obsessed; there is so much to learn from each individual animal. Every fall, a hunter gets to see a new group of deer behaving slightly differently from the previous ones. She gets to see if the ground where she found last year’s buck is still attractive to a new generation of animals. Just as Heraclitus said that no man steps into the same river twice, it is also true that no hunter visits the same land twice.

It’s a pleasant surprise how many friends are eager to try the elk meat. We invite friends and family over for elk chili with adobo. We give away packages of meat to friends, who report back with recipes and stories of how their own special meals were received.

Twice a week, Scott and I eat elk for supper. With so much in our own freezer, I try to avoid buying meat. Every month or so I buy a whole chicken, which I roast and then stretch into other meals such as enchiladas, stir-fry and chicken soup. The rest of our dinners are meatless. I notice that our weekly grocery bills are more than twenty dollars lower than usual.

That winter, Scott and I face another circle-of-life moment as we talk, yet again, about starting a family. The subject arises as it always does: suddenly. Only this time, there is no long discussion, no back-and-forth hypothetical debate. After years of talking about it, we simply decide to ditch the birth control and see what happens.

At times, I struggle to shoo away nagging questions. (Will I be able to get pregnant? What if we have a baby who has major health problems? What if she or he dies suddenly, like Audrey? Or like Nathan?) In May, I discover that I am pregnant and due in January.

I had expected pregnancy to be riddled with fear and anxiety. But the instant I see those two pink lines, my only feelings are shock and joy. Scott takes pictures of the three of us—him, me, Sylvia—to remember the moment. Weeks tick by and my heart remains wide open. Yes, my future could hold unfathomable sadness. I could lose this baby—to miscarriage, stillbirth or death—at any moment. I do think about this. But somehow, for some reason, I don’t dwell on it. I vow to deal with life as it unfolds. Each day, hope surprises me by trumping fear.

My overarching wish for this child is that he or she will grow up strong, curious and brave. Tucked underneath is the smaller hope that someday we will hunt together, absorbing the world around us side by side. Hunting has allowed me to explore some of my greatest questions and fears. Ultimately, it helped lead me to the decision to bear this child.

Hunting can be fun and it is certainly physically challenging, but I no longer consider it a sport. It is life and death. It is a forced reckoning of the questions that hide in the corners of every day: What is this place where I live and what did it used to be? How do I fit into the natural order of things? What am I capable of? What is the right thing to do? Hunting is history. It is human.

There are so many things that we stand to lose, as a society, if hunters go extinct. Of course there’s the money from hunting and fishing licenses. If environmentalists won’t or can’t hunt or fish, then it’s time to revamp our conservation funding model, which is still based almost entirely on license fees. Hikers and bird-watchers are literally not paying their share.

Hunting license fees pay for the majority of wildlife conservation programs in the United States, including those that protect non-hunted animals. Hunters who pursue migratory waterfowl in any state, for example, must pay for a federal license each year—called a “duck stamp”—to fund wetland conservation. In 2010, my stamp cost $15.00, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that $14.70 of that went to purchase or lease wetlands for the National Wildlife Refuge System. That same year, I paid $58.00 for a general Oregon fishing and hunting license and an additional $20.00 for the right to hunt upland birds and waterfowl.

Hikers and bird-watchers, who did not pay these taxes, benefited from the ones I did. My license fees helped pay for biologists to study animals and restore important habitat. Some of my money even helped non-hunted animals like songbirds and pygmy rabbits (tiny rabbits that burrow in sagebrush country). As hunting and fishing have declined nationwide, conservation projects have multiplied and become more expensive. To fill the funding gap, states have jacked up the costs of hunting and fishing licenses. In 1982, for example, 16.7 million Americans spent a collective $259 million on hunting licenses and fees. Averaged out, that’s about $15.50 apiece. In 2003, 14.7 million hunters spent a total of $679.8 million, or about $46.12 each. Costs more than tripled in twenty-one years, much faster than the rate of inflation.

Even with all of these official costs aside, hunting is not a cheap hobby. At almost every turn, I have discovered another piece of equipment I needed to buy. A chest strap to keep my binoculars handy but also out of the way. A vest to carry ammunition and birds. Warmer, sturdier pants. Waterproof boots. A gun case. A lock for my gun case. Once, I added up the costs associated with shooting one duck—hunting licenses, gas and ammunition—and discovered that its meat cost me more than twenty dollars a pound.

It’s no surprise, then, that the wealth of the average hunter is also on the rise. Private land that was once open to hunting has been cordoned off as public opinion has turned against the sport. The rising price of agricultural land means that hunters whose extended family members once owned farms and ranches are now looking to hunt on public land. (If they’re not retiring altogether.) Public lands face more and more hunting restrictions. As wealthy hunters turn to pricey private reserves, the sport faces a possible future as a pastime of only the very rich. This has long been the case in land-poor Europe, and it’s one of the key differences that set our culture apart.

As American hunting declines, the social losses far eclipse the financial ones. At its best, hunting balances short-term use with long-term preservation, and therefore provides us with a model for how to approach environmental protection. Our lives have become more computerized and climate-controlled, yet we must not forget that we are still animals, still dependent on clean water, fresh air and a functioning ecosystem. Hunting and angling teach us to understand the earth in a way that more passive activities such as hiking and nature-watching cannot. We must not lose our fluency with the natural world—because if we do, we will lose our greatest reason for protecting it.

But how we hunt matters. Too many hunters rely on vehicles and high-powered firearms to compensate for a lack of hard-earned knowledge and familiarity with the land. Hunting is difficult work. We must be in shape and willing to hike away from roads to find wildlife. We must take the long view and come down on the right side of important wildlife issues: That means agreeing to a ban on lead ammunition, no longer baiting wildlife, and acknowledging that predators play an important role in any functioning ecosystem. Nationally, hunters are more likely to vote for property rights than for habitat protection, even as rampant development displaces game species faster than any non-human predator. Clearly, forging a connection to a place is not the same as protecting that place. If it were, all hunters would already be the staunch environmentalists that they ought to be.

It is hard for me to picture a time when I won’t want to hunt anymore. Yet I promise myself that if I ever get to the point where I kill an animal and don’t feel in awe of it, I don’t feel twinges of guilt upon reflection or I don’t feel grateful for its life, then I will stop. Perhaps the biggest threat to hunting is not gun control advocates or even environmental destruction but those hunters who refuse to give the practice the respect it deserves, who treat it as no more sacred than NASCAR or Monday Night Football. Hunters who show more respect for guns, the tools they use, than the lives they take.

Hunters can and should be powerful advocates for the species they pursue. A family’s favorite hunting spot, year after year, should become an irreplaceable heirloom that they fight to protect. Good hunters should be intimately familiar with their prey. They should know what the animal eats, how it responds to different weather, what constitutes a particularly small or large specimen.

Ernest Hemingway used to worry that if American men stopped hunting, they would cease to be men. It’s a chauvinistic attitude, but I agree with a version of it. So much of American history—of human history, really—can be boiled down to the battle between man and nature.

In 1960, when our nation first considered designating wilderness areas, Wallace Stegner wrote a letter in support of the idea of wilderness, which, he argued, is itself an American resource: “We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.” The same argument should be extended to hunting. It connects us to our past because we engage in the same pursuit our ancestors did for thousands of years. After a few seasons of hunting, I can’t help but feel new respect for what my ancestors went through. Their survival depended on their hunting abilities, and they hunted without the help of optical scopes, waterproof fabrics—many of them without guns. To paraphrase Hemingway: If humans stop hunting, we could lose some of our humanity.

My baby, this new life, is a constant reminder that amazing things can happen any day. Some of these wonders are tragic, like the death of my brother. Some are joyous, like welcoming a new family member into the world. And some, like shooting the elk, are a little bit of both.

Guilt resurfaces with each elk dinner. Also with each meal, my relationship with the animal extends and deepens. I didn’t spend much time tracking him, or observing him in the wild. But now we share a new ritual. I walk downstairs to our dirt-floored basement, open the freezer and sift through packages of his meat. I select one and carry it upstairs to the kitchen. While it defrosts on the counter, I flip through cookbooks or browse websites for recipes. Most are simple—grilled steaks or burgers, spaghetti with meatballs, stir-fry. Every couple of weeks, I transform some of the elk into a special meal, such as a classic bourguignonne recipe capped with buttery, homemade crust and baked for a decadent potpie.

Scott and I sit down at the built-in dining nook in our kitchen, with the rich smell of elk meat wafting from our plates. Unlike most of the meat that I’ve eaten in my thirty-one years, I am fully conscious of what this meal is and what it once was. That fatal shot created between us a bond that will last longer than the animal’s earthly life. Its flesh nourishes me, and the new life growing inside me. In return, I bear a responsibility to the species this meat belonged to, and to the land that nurtured it.

Before we lift our forks, we raise our glasses and make a simple toast, loaded with thanks: To our elk.

And then we eat.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These pages reflect the efforts of many people, because this is my first book and because I had to learn to hunt before I could write it. Jessie Fischer, Andy Fischer, Charles Eisendrath, Gary Lewis, Russ Seaton, Del Jeske, E. V. Smith, Jack Jones, Marc Thalacker, Hank Fischer, Carol Fischer, Kit Fischer, James Johnston and many others welcomed me into the world of hunters and made me proud to call myself one.

My talented friends—Jill McGivering, Jessie Fischer, Andy Fischer, Kayley Mendenhall, Betsy Querna Cliff, Patrick Cliff and Lauren Dake—improved the early drafts. Shana Drehs helped hone my original proposal and nudge it toward publication.

I had great luck in finding two publishing professionals who understood my vision of the book and shepherded it into existence. My agent, Daniel Greenberg, has been a wise and levelheaded adviser. And my editor, Emily Griffin, gave each draft the kind of sharp, thorough read that I’d heard no longer existed. I shudder to imagine what this book would have been without her. Also at Grand Central Publishing, I give thanks to production editors Leah Tracosas and Tareth Mitch, copyeditor Laura Jorstad and publicist extraordinaire Erica Gelbard.

The Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources planted the seeds for this project in my head. Many of the thoughts around which I built these chapters arose in casual conversations, so I’m grateful to Frank Edward Allen, Jack Ward Thomas, Andy Buchsbaum, Roland Kalama and Nina Raff for saying just the right things to spur my curiosity and imagination. Adam Short, Susan Parrish, Barbara Smuts, Sarah Buss, Sally Schmall, Gregory McClarren and Durlin Hickok recommended books and articles that were pivotal to my research. The Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan and my home newspaper, The Bulletin, supported this project from the start.

It would have been understandable for my parents, Mel and Dee Raff, and my sister, Gretchen Raff—peaceful city folk, all three—to retch when I told them I was learning to hunt, loving it and finally writing a book extolling it. Instead, they were a source of enthusiasm and encouragement. Scott McCaulou was at my side every step: talking through sticky ethical quandaries, proposing new titles, packing out the heaviest elk quarters and all the while insisting he was comfortable walking beside me while I carried a loaded gun. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner—in fishing, hunting, writing and life.

This is my own story in my own words, but many other lives are intertwined with mine. To all the people woven throughout this book: Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lily Raff McCaulou was born and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland. She graduated from Wesleyan University and worked in the independent film industry in New York City before becoming a journalist. She writes an award-winning newspaper column in Bend, Oregon. This is her first book.

NOTES

Chapter 1: Going West

[Lava Butte] erupted seven thousand years ago and covered nine square miles with black, porous rock: “Lava Butte Vicinity, Oregon,” last modified April 15, 2008, http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/LavaButte/Locale/framework.html.

NASA actually trained astronauts for the moon landing on these desolate lava beds: Judy Jewell and W. C. McRae, Moon Handbooks: Oregon (Jackson, TN: Avalon Travel, 2010), 497.

Most come from California: The 2006 American Community Survey found that in 2005, 56,379 people migrated from California to Oregon, the sixth-largest interstate flow in the United States that year. The report is available at www.census.gov/acs/www, accessed July 24, 2011.

David James Duncan, The River Why (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1983).

Chapter 2: Pulling the Trigger

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 10 percent of the city’s twelve thousand residents worked full-time at the town’s two lumber mills: Population figures (11,936 in 1960 and 13,710 in 1970) provided by the City of Bend. Historic mill employment estimate (twelve hundred full-time employees at peak) from the Deschutes County Historical Society.

Larix occidentalis: Latin name and details provided by the USDA Forest Service, available at www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/larocc/all.html, accessed July 24, 2011.

Bambi DVD. Directed by David Hand et al., 1942 (Los Angeles, CA: Walt Disney Video, 2005).

William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).

As I drive back to Bend, where hunting season is about as noticeable as National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week: www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/nlppw.htm.

Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 5.

In 1887, more than a decade before taking over the Oval Office: Ibid., 202.

By the time he left office in 1909, Roosevelt had created: Ibid., 19, 818–30.

“the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time”: Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, 1910), 48.

Roosevelt was condemned by some: Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior, 702.

In 1950, two-thirds of Americans lived in cities or suburbs: From “Urban and Rural Population: 1900 to 1990,” prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau (October 1995), available at www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt, accessed July 29, 2011.

Now more than four out of five Americans are packed into 366 metropolitan areas: From census data cited in A. G. Sulzberger, “Rural Legislators’ Power Ebbs as Populations Shift,” New York Times, June 2, 2011.

Our image of environmentalism began to shift in the 1960s: Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 177–82.

Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 172.

Felix Salten, Bambi: A Life in the Woods (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929).

the name “Bambi” has become “virtually synonymous with ‘deer’ ”: Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66.

The age of the average hunter is rising, too… Surveys have found that just one in four children raised by hunting parents will learn to hunt: Data from the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife Associated Recreation, available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov, and from a telephone interview with Steven Williams, president of the Wildlife Management Institute, in September 2007, partially reported in Lily Raff, “Recent Surveys Show a Steady Decline in the Number of People Who Hunt and Fish. So, Are Hunters and Anglers… Endangered Species?” The (Bend) Bulletin, September 9, 2007, F1.

nationwide, hunting has been on a steady decline: Since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses in the 1950s, license sales peaked in 1982, when about 16.7 million Americans paid for the right to hunt. In 2006, about 12.5 million people hunted, a 25 percent drop in hunters even as the national population grew more than 30 percent. Sales figures for 1982 found in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, published December 2, 2004. Figure for 2006 from the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. Both reports available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2007), 281.

Chapter 3: Gun-Shy

The Last Shot, DVD, directed by Alan Madison (Chatham, NY: Alan Madison Productions, 2001).

Cheney was carrying a diminutive 28-gauge shotgun during his quail-hunting accident. But if he had instead used a burly 10-gauge (typically reserved for downing geese), his friend probably would not have survived: Extrapolated from Paul Farhi, “Grace Under Fire: Since Dick Cheney Shot Him, Harry Whittington’s Aim Has Been to Move On,” Washington Post, October 14, 2010.

“Yet cars kill way more people every year than guns do”: This quotation is backed up by 2009 U.S. data, which shows that motor vehicles caused 35,900 deaths and firearms caused 13,872 (excluding suicides). Injury Facts (Itasca, IL: National Safety Council, 2011), 94, 143.

In 2009, for example, 138 children ages eighteen and younger: Numbers of children, ages zero to nineteen, killed by accidental gunshot (138), accidental drowning (1,056) and automobile accidents (6,683) from ibid., 32.

the astonishing number of guns that we, as a nation, own—roughly 250 million: A 1994 survey published in 1997 by the National Institute of Justice as Guns in America: A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms estimated that Americans owned 192 million firearms. Other organizations, including the National Rifle Association and the American Firearms Institute, estimate that we own 250 to 280 million guns as a nation.

Nearly three out of five gun-caused deaths: Gun-related suicides, murders and accidental deaths from National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 143.

The lifetime odds that you will be murdered by firearm: Odds of dying from murder by firearm (1 in 306), accidental gunshot (1 in 6,309), cancer (1 in 7), heart disease (1 in 6) and any cause (1 in 1) from National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 37.

Forty percent of U.S. households contain at least one gun. One in four adults owns one or more guns. Yet only 11 percent of firearm-owning households say they hunt. The rest keep their weapons primarily for self-defense: From National Institute of Justice, Guns in America: A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (1997).

Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino (Los Angeles: A Band Apart, 1994).

Chapter 4: Pull

Trapshooting was first developed in England in the 1700s: D. H. Eaton, Trapshooting: The Patriotic Sport (Cincinnati: Sportsmen’s Review Publishing, 1921), 1–4.

Today trapshooters take aim at standardized four-and five-sixteenth-inch disks: General information from the Trapshooting Hall of Fame in Vandalia, OH: www.traphof.org.

Chapter 5: Guts

This image was appropriated back in 1949, when a Pablo Picasso lithograph of a dove was selected as the emblem for that year’s World Peace Council meeting in Paris: Ina Cole, “Pablo Picasso: The Development of a Peace Symbol,” Art Times May–June 2010, www.arttimesjournal.com/art/reviews/May_June_10_Ina_Cole/Pablo_Picasso_Ina_Cole.html, accessed July 21, 2011.

Mourning dove Latin name, migration pattern, diet, habitat and fertility information as well as mortality statistics from D. B. Marshall, M. G. Hunter and A. L. Contreras, eds., Birds of Oregon: A General Reference (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 304–5.

threatened or endangered species… fall under the purview of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration: “Summary of the Endangered Species Act,” last modified March 2, 2011, www.epa.gov/lawsregs/laws/esa.html.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses: Sales figures from 1982 found in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, published December 2, 2004. Figure from 2006 found in 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. Both reports available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.

Doves are adaptable eaters, munching on a wide variety of seeds, grasses and forbs: Marshall, Hunter and Contreras, Birds of Oregon, 304–5.

A flock of doves is sometimes called a dule or a dole: “Animal Congregations, or What Do You Call a Group of…?” last modified September 29, 2006, www.npwrc.usgs.gov/about/faqs/animals/names.htm.

More than 96 percent of Americans: Vegetarian estimates derived from a series of surveys by the Vegetarian Resource Group, found at www.vrg.org/nutshell/faq.htm#poll; population from U.S. Census Bureau.

As a nation, we raise and slaughter nearly ten billion land animals: Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales and Cees de Haan, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Rome, November 29, 2006).

That portions out to about two-thirds of a pound of meat per person per day, or 241 pounds a year… It’s also more than twice the international average: “Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade,” prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC, April 2011).

The average American today eats eighty pounds more meat per year than in 1942: Per-capita meat consumption in 1942 was 161 pounds, according to Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 16.

Add up the weight of all land animals on the planet… and domestic livestock accounts for one out of every five pounds: Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxiii.

Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface is now used to raise meat, either for grazing or growing grain for feed: Ibid.

three species go extinct from our planet every hour on average: Ahmed Djoghlaf, “Statement from Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity” (speech, New York City, May 22, 2007).

The meat industry is… responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than transportation: Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi.

The production of merely 3.8 ounces of beef… releases about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a midsize sedan emits by driving eighteen miles: Calculated from a 2007 study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan, cited in Mark Bittman, “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler,” New York Times, January 27, 2008.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 143.

Chapter 6: First Kill

Ring-necked pheasant Latin name, origins and population decline information from Harry Nehls, Familiar Birds of the Northwest (Portland, OR: Portland Audubon Society, 1981), 60. And from Marshall, Hunter and Contreras, Birds of Oregon, 174–75.

Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 353.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 776.

Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days segment of A Prairie Home Companion, American Public Media, March 22, 2008.

Ironically, this has coincided with a sharp rise in meat consumption: Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 16.

there are now at least 4,385 [farmers’ markets] in the United States. But only about 3 percent of farmers’ market vendors sell meat: National Farmers Market Survey, published in May 2006 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Marketing Service, 2, 27.

hunters play an important role in population control: From multiple sources including telephone interview with Steven Williams, president of the Wildlife Management Institute, in September 2007, and Frank Miniter, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), 105–16.

Interview with Greg Cazemier in Bend, OR, September 9, 2010.

Mule deer study results from Richard Cockle, “Study Shows Surprising Rate of Mule Deer Poaching,” The Oregonian, November 15, 2010.

Chapter 7: Off the Mark

Eastern cottontail Latin name, habitat description, diet and hunting regulations provided by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Species information may be found at www.dfw.state.or.us/species/docs/rabbit.pdf.

Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 23.

Roy Wall, Fish and Game Cookery (New York: M. S. Mill, 1945), 126.

NRA background information from Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004), 75–83.

On its website, the NRA proudly calls itself the “largest pro-hunting organization in the world.”: www.nra.org.

a semi-automatic Glock 19 pistol—which can shoot more than one round per second: William Hermann, “Gabrielle Giffords Shooting: Pistol Used Is a Mainstay for Law Officers,” Arizona Republic, January 10, 2011.

The NRA has about 4.3 million members: From www.nraila.org/Issues/Faq, accessed July 29, 2011.

Nationwide, three thousand tons of lead are shot into the environment by hunters every year, another eighty thousand tons are released at shooting ranges and four thousand tons are lost in ponds and streams as fishing lures and sinkers: From “Petition to the Environmental Protection Agency to Ban Lead Shot, Bullets, and Fishing Sinkers Under the Toxic Substances Control Act,” submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity, American Bird Conservancy, Association of Avian Veterinarians, Project Gutpile and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on August 3, 2010, available at www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2010/lead-08-03-2010.html, accessed July 29, 2011.

California condor information from the American Bird Conservancy, available at www.abcbirds.org, and from Katharine Mieszkowski, “Condors vs. the NRA,” Salon.com (September 22, 2007), available at www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/22/condors, accessed July 29, 2011.

the president announces that one of the organization’s top priorities is to oppose Endangered Species Act protection for gray wolves: M. David Allen, “Standing Up for Elk Country,” Bugle 28, no. 2 (March–April 2011), 9.

But elk numbers didn’t drop nearly as much as some biologists had feared. In fact, they noticed changes that helped the entire ecosystem: Sandi Doughton, “Can Wolves Restore an Ecosystem?” Seattle Times, January 26, 2009.

At the same time that he denounces wolves, the group’s president pledges that the organization will “become more engaged in the core issues of our time that threaten our hunting heritage and that of our children”: Allen, “Standing Up for Elk Country,” 9.

the National Wildlife Federation, which was founded by a hunter back in 1936: Available at www.nwf.org/About/History-and-Heritage.aspx, accessed July 24, 2011.

Chapter 8: Wild Tastes

I took creative license with several details of the goose’s life. Facts including Latin name, population statistics, social and mating habits, size and migratory pattern from Marshall, Hunter and Contreras, Birds of Oregon, 76–78.

I took creative license with precise details of the chicken’s life, but based it on factual accounts of factory farms, beak cutting, commercial habits for light and feeding, injury rate, crating technique, slaughter method and life span from multiple sources including Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Foer, Eating Animals; the Farm Sanctuary (www.farmsanctuary.org), and Karl Weber, ed., Food, Inc: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer—and What You Can Do About It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 62.

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Walker and Co., 2009), 4.

Today more than nine out of ten land animals killed for food in the United States are broilers. Fast-food chain KFC alone buys nearly one billion per year: Weber, Food, Inc., 62.

more than 250 million chicks are destroyed each year, most of them layers who… turned out to be males: Foer, Eating Animals, 48.

Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 333.

A 2009 study found that more than 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is thrown away instead of eaten: Kevin D. Hall, J. Guo, M. Dore, C. C. Chow, “The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 11 (2009), e7940.

Only a few known species of mushrooms are, if ingested, capable of killing an otherwise healthy adult. Most poisonous mushrooms cause run-of-the-mill food-poisoning symptoms: diarrhea and vomiting: David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1986), 893–96.

The capped mushrooms that we’re used to—the kind you could slice and sprinkle on a pizza—are actually reproductive structures: Fungus life cycle and mushroom species information, including Latin names, from ibid., 4–6, 662, 191.

“a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’and dirty socks.”: Ibid., 191.

Lily Raff, “A Taste of Tradition,” The (Bend) Bulletin, August 17, 2008, F1.

Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 44–70.

Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 183.

Chapter 9: Good Dog, Bad Wolf

Wolves and dogs are the same species, and their genomes are almost impossible to distinguish: Barbara Smuts, “Behavior of Domestic Dogs,” The Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, ed. Michael D. Breed and Janice Moore (New York: Elsevier Academic Press, 2010), 562–67.

Other than humans, wolves were once the mammal with the most varied geographic distribution on earth: From http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/NorthAmerica/Facts/fact-graywolf.cfm, accessed July 29, 2011.

In one particularly odd theory, wolf pups were stolen from their dens at one or two days old, and lactating women nursed them from their own breasts: Mark Derr, Dog’s Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21.

each theory rests on some level of consent from the wolves themselves: Smuts, “Behavior of Domestic Dogs,” 562–64.

some scientists believe that Siberian huskies stem from a population of semi-domesticated wolves who flocked to nomadic tribes of people when hunting became difficult during harsh winters: Ray Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution (New York: Scribner, 2001).

Humans and dogs have been hunting together for as long as forty thousand years, according to some estimates: From Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, 105.

Modern breed descriptions from the American Kennel Club, available at www.akc.org/breeds/index.cfm.

In 2009, wolf hunts open in two Western states: Montana and Idaho opened wolf hunts in September 2009, following the Obama administration’s decision four months earlier to remove gray wolves from the list of endangered species. Sources include Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (http://fwp.mt.gov) and Idaho Fish and Game (http://fishandgame.idaho.gov).

Non-profits in Montana and New Mexico, for example, actually bring wolves into school classrooms: Sources include www.wildspiritwolfsanctuary.org/ed_presentations.php and www.wildsentry.org.

In a recent study, well-regulated hunts were found to help migratory animals adapt more quickly to habitat changes: Todd Brinkman, Terry Chapin, Gary Kofinas and David K. Person, “Linking Hunter Knowledge with Forest Change to Understand Changing Deer Harvest Opportunities in Intensively Logged Landscapes,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 1 (2009).

Chukar information, including Latin name, habitat, physical description and diet, from Marshall, Hunter and Contreras, Birds of Oregon, 171–73.

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 93.

Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, believes that the uniquely human capacity for long-distance running… is a vestige of our ancient method of “persistence” hunting, or chasing a wild animal to exhaustion and eventually death: Charles Bethea, “Fair Chase,” Outside, May 2011.

“Buck,” the word for a male deer, for example, is slang for one dollar: Richard Nelson, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America (New York: Random House, 1997), 101.

Wall, Fish and Game Cookery, 90.

A study in 2009 found that the horns of Canadian bighorn sheep have shrunk because of hunting: Chris Darimont, “Human Predators Outpace Other Agents of Trait Change in the Wild,” Proceedings of National Academy of Science, January 12, 2009.

Chris Darimont quoted in Anne Minard, “Hunters Speeding Up Evolution of Trophy Prey,” National Geographic News, January 12, 2009.

Chapter 10: Friends for Dinner

Salmon life cycle information from Jason Cooper, Life Cycle of a Pacific Salmon (Vero Beach, FL: Rourke Publishing, 2003).

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 135.

Full Boone & Crockett definition of fair chase, as well as 2005 statement against canned hunts, available at www.boone-crockett.org.

One short-lived but highly publicized ranch tried allowing clients to operate a gun over the Internet and, with the click of a mouse, take the life of a captive hog.: Zachary M. Seward, “Internet Hunting Has Got to Stop—If It Ever Starts,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2007, A1.

In 2010, the Whitetail Pro Series began hosting deer-hunting tournaments in which contestants stalk deer, zero in on them using digital scopes equipped with memory cards and then fire blank shells: James Card, “A Kind of Hunt That Even Deer Can Get Behind,” New York Times, October 16, 2010.

And in England, since fox hunting with dogs was outlawed in 2004, dedicated hunters on horseback have eliminated the fox altogether and taken to pursuing a designated human: Frances Stead Stellers, “Coakham Hunt’s Greatest Game Pits Bloodhounds Against Man,” Washington Post, January 12, 2011.

José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting (Belgrade, MT: Wilderness Adventures Press, 1995), 103–4.

Each day in the United States, six thousand acres of open space, including working farms and forestland, are developed: Statistics provided by the USDA Forest Service, available at www.fs.fed.us/projects/four-threats/facts/open-space.shtml.

Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, 176.

While the exact number of vegetarians is difficult to discern, most surveys and polls produce estimates of seven to eleven million. That means we have about as many vegetarians as residents of the state of North Carolina: Vegetarian estimates derived from a series of surveys by the Vegetarian Resource Group, found at www.vrg.org/nutshell/faq.htm#poll; population from U.S. Census Bureau.

one survey found that 60 percent of the people who identified themselves as vegetarians admitted they had consumed meat in the last twenty-four hours: Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, 195.

Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 326.

Foer, Eating Animals, 13–14.

in the United States, vegetarians are outnumbered, three to one, by ex-vegetarians: Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, 200.

Peter Singer and Tom Regan, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (London: Prentice Hall, 1989).

Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 322.

Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 333.

Foer, Eating Animals, 198.

Chapter 11: Year of Death

Gunshot is the most common method of suicide in the United States. In fact, gun-inflicted suicides outnumber gun-related homicides and accidental deaths combined: National Safety Council Injury Facts 2011 Edition (Itasca, IL: National Safety Council, 2011), 164–65, 47.

Chapter 12: Killing Bambi, Reviving Artemis

Lily Raff, “Tribes and the River,” The (Bend) Bulletin, January 25, 2005, A1.

Several states… have amended their own constitutions to protect citizens’ right to hunt: By the end of 2010, thirteen states had amended their constitutions to guarantee the right to hunt, according to the National Conference of State Legislators in a report by Douglas Shinkle prepared November 2010, www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=21237, accessed July 29, 2011.

One in ten American hunters is female—our gender’s highest participation rate in history—and we are the only demographic of hunters currently on the rise: From the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.

Interview with Jessie Fischer in Bend, Oregon, March 2011.

Description of Artemis paraphrased from Robert Graves, Greek Myths (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 33–34.

Some versions of mythology claim that Artemis killed Orion: Cartmill, A View to a Death, 33.

Chapter 13: Deer Diary

White-tailed deer information including Latin name, related species, habitat, diet and population control, and mating habits from Nelson, Heart and Blood.

“Everyone in North America who lives each day on agricultural foods…”: Ibid., 310–11.

“looked as if mice were running up and down inside her esophagus…”: Ibid., 67.

Gary Lewis, Deer Hunting: Tactics for Today’s Big Game Hunter (Bend, OR: Gary Lewis Outdoors, 2003).

Chapter 14: Big Game

General information about elk gleaned from multiple sources including Jay Houston, Ultimate Elk Hunting: Strategies, Techniques & Methods (Minneapolis: Creative Publishing International, 2008), and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Nelson, Heart and Blood, 71.

A local Indian woman once explained: Interview with a source who wishes to remain anonymous, in Richland, Washington, May 2006.

Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 133.

the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that $14.70 of that went to purchase or lease wetlands for the National Wildlife Refuge System: According to the service, “The 98 cents of every dollar generated [from duck stamps goes to] purchase or lease wetland habitat for the National Wildlife Refuge System.” Information about the federal duck stamp program is available at www.fws.gov/duckstamps/Info/Stamps/stampinfo.htm.

My license fees helped pay for biologists to study animals and restore important habitat. Some of my money even goes to help non-hunted animals like songbirds and pygmy rabbits: From “ODFW 2009–2011 Fee Increase Fact Sheet,” prepared by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, available at www.dfw.state.or.us/agency/budget/docs/2009/budget_fact_sheet.pdf, accessed July 29, 2011; and from “On the Ground: The Oregon Conservation Strategy at Work,” prepared by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in November 2006, available at www.dfw.state.or.us/conservationstrategy/news/2006/Nov2006.asp, accessed July 29, 2011.

In 1982, for example, 16.7 million Americans spent a collective $259 million on hunting licenses and fees. Averaged out, that’s about $15.50 apiece. In 2003, 14.7 million hunters spent a total of $679.8 million, or about $46.12 each. Costs more than tripled in twenty-one years, much faster than the rate of inflation: Figures obtained from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, published December 2, 2004, and available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov/Subpages/LicenseInfo/Hunting.htm. Inflation calculated by West Egg at www.westegg.com/inflation.

the wealth of the average hunter is also on the rise: 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.

Ernest Hemingway used to worry that if American men stopped hunting, they would cease to be men: Hemingway’s views about hunting and masculinity are efficiently illustrated in his short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Paul D. Staudohar, ed., Hunting’s Best Short Stories (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000), 41–74.

Wallace Stegner, “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” in The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West (New York: Penguin, 1980), 147.

CONTENTS

Welcome

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: Going West

Chapter 2: Pulling the Trigger

Chapter 3: Gun-Shy

Chapter 4: Pull

Chapter 5: Guts

Chapter 6: First Kill

Chapter 7: Off the Mark

Chapter 8: Wild Tastes

Chapter 9: Good Dog, Bad Wolf

Chapter 10: Friends for Dinner

Chapter 11: Year of Death

Chapter 12: Killing Bambi, Reviving Artemis

Chapter 13: Deer Diary

Chapter 14: Big Game

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Copyright

Copyright

Names of certain persons have been changed.

Copyright © 2012 by Lily Raff McCaulou

Text here from “A Prarie Home Companion” is copyright © 2003.

Used by permission of Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved.

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