In a juniper and pinon forest in the South of New Mexico, I killed my first elk. There are no ways to describe it, except through poetry. This is the poem I wrote afterwards.
Only a forest as sparse as this could
be both broad and quiet enough to hear.
Everything quiet except
her eyes on me saying yes
jagged pranayama breath
attempt to stay calm.
People knew about sparse forests once
moved across the land
before the snarling violence of fences
private property stranglechoke.
I don’t remember asking Them for guidance
apparently didn’t need to ask to get it but I do remember asking
Teacher Can I Shoot Standing Up
yes
My mouth a perfect O
after the terrible thunder
gaping at still Michael Camoface
instead of studying through the scope likeishouldhavebeen
Second Shot he snapped, moving now, but
I couldn’t work the action fast enough
my body dumbheavy
Where is the blood oh my god did I miss
Everything that was still in motion
I fucked it all up again
could have injured her scoped myself bloody
forgot the gate code cut myself on a knife ruined
it all, froze my ass off what am I doing here anyway
could crash the truck i always fuck everything up
Everything that had been quiet thundering.
And then we saw the giant body swell on
tufts of recovering blue yellow grey grass
one third ground cover.
Oh my god I said into the giant bunny ears and stroked them
so they could hear me say thank you
only wanting to peel all my clothes off
and get inside her hotness.
He prefers the musk at the joints and I prefer
the sleek smell of clean shiny muscle
popping sticky bubbles
There is a lot of work to do. He said.
Which means stop stroking the fur
squeezing thick white neck fat getting fur on my hands
stop wanting her head on my lap
wanting her clean life
thanking the universe for a clean shot
Usually cold like this makes me think of
my brother crying terrible panic cry in suburbia
frost on the windows and nothing outside and
that’s about as bad as it gets.
but now this cold seems like
another kind of truth.
When we popped the grass stomach
white-blue shiny vein bubble
then the bald eagle came.
Because smell is the truest thing.
“She gave herself to you,” is what Sarah James, the Gwich’in elder told me, when I told her the story of that first elk. We had been talking about the Caribou hunt in Alaska, and hoping to get invited up North on a hunting trip, I told her my story about successfully hunting a cow elk. She did invite me to Alaska, but I wasn’t sure if I could handle the cold. I never had to decide, because the pandemic hit and I couldn’t go anyway.
Why I went hunting: I can cease to be alienated from my food, I told myself, more connected to the land, connected to the ancestors, by being a hunter. But of course the problem was that I wasn’t (and still am not) that good of a shot. Worse, I hate guns, I hate shooting, and I hate practicing. I hate the thunderous kick of my .257 or a .270 against my shoulder, hate burning through ammo, hate it when I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m usually trying to practice alone because my shooting and hunting mentors live hundreds of miles away from me. Every time I take a shot, I feel the gravity of what I’m doing, think about what could happen, and worry.
*************
On a future day, in Wyoming, near Jasper.
Since I never win the “lottery” and draw for a tag in New Mexico, my hunting mentor Michael and I had decided to drive up to Wyoming, where you can buy an over-the-counter elk tag. We headed to his friend’s ranch just outside of oil country, on a bare and wind-whipped section of land. This land felt empty for some reason, like some terrible act had been committed here. The sky was permanently grey.
This land had also been grazed by cattle, so the ground was in terrible shape, and Michael told me that there were plenty of elk here but that they were stressed. The grass and the ground here made it look like we were on a different planet than the one I had been in in the Valles Caldera in New Mexico. Here it was trampled and dusty, no tufts of grass.
The high ranch land rings a valley; we started up high on the south end of the property that we had permission to hunt, working our way downhill and east. I became a lizard in my head; I was aware of everything happening around me. Every fiber of me wanted meat. It takes awhile to acclimate to the discomfort of the constant cold, the constant walking, the constant wind.
On the first half of the first day, we saw the giant herd, thousands of animals, more than I had ever seen in New Mexico, pushing across the other side of the valley and straight toward us. It was a riverflow of grey and brown, stark in the day, and too far to hear their footfalls. We set up on a ridge, and Michael got into position. This time, there would be no shooting off-hand, standing up like the last time that I had done, a completely irreverent beginning.
Michael took one shot at 350 yards and you’re bad luck, he told me. And he doesn’t like to shoot at that distance anyway.
We walked more, and separated. I saw a small group uphill from me, and I wanted the meat, and I wanted it fast. Unlike Micheal, I did not relish in the suffering of being out on the land in the freezing cold, especially not here. There was something wrong with this place.
I sat down and balanced my shooting arm on my knee like a tripod, even though I knew that I wasn’t stable in this position. A cow looked at me over the edge of the ridge. I got her in my sights broadside. A raptor flew over. I took a shot. I’d like to think that I asked for permission from some higher power, but I’m not sure that I thought about it much. It wasn’t like it was with the first elk.
She ran down hill and I heard the terrible thunder of another shot, and went to see where she had dropped with Michael’s second shot. I had only blasted her front leg, shattering it. She lay dying slowly. And she was young, perhaps a yearling. Perhaps a year older.
And oh jesus, I thought, I owe amends on this one. I wanted to roll back time, to not have taken the shot, to not fancy myself a hunter without the skills to back it up. I didn’t want to be any part of the violence over this land, and yet she lay slowly dying and needed to be cleaned.
Michael saw another injured and limping elk in the valley below us, injured either from his first shot, but probably from other hunters. And had I been more competent to clean and carry out my elk by myself, he could have taken her. He didn’t, though, because there was too much work to do with the elk we had down. We quartered her and carried the meat several miles back to the truck. As we slept in the freezing cold, battered by wind, I thought of the injured elk out on the land, and what would likely happen to her. I pushed back thoughts of a curse.
Michael told me that the meat would be good, and that if I had killed a yearling at least I didn’t kill a mother. He reminded me of what ‘natural’ death might have been like for her, and I thought of the bull limping through the caldera. Nevertheless I had committed the mistakes of a person in over her head. I hadn’t thought about shooting the last cow in a line of walking elk (because that’s where the older ones out of their calf-bearing years walk), hadn’t asked for permission, and this one hadn’t given herself to me.
My amends, I told the animal, will be to never eat beef. I knew that in addition to suffering at the hands of fallible and greedy hunters, that these elk were suffering from their competition with cattle. I felt that I could at least do that to make it up to the herd, although I would never be able to give this young cow her life back, nor change how it ended.
Driving back to Utah with the animal in my pickup through some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen, I talked to my friend Stan, who used to hunt with his Cherokee grandfather. He listened to my guilt and shame. Well, you took her now, he said, so your job is to use her energy the best that you can.
What the fuck else would I be doing Stan, I said. I hung her in my boyfriend’s garage in Utah and carefully butchered her myself, feeding scraps to my dog, and taking the amount of care with each piece of meat that I wish that I had taken with the shot.
My friend Alexis had taught me how to butcher, which she learned from her father. He took particular pride in the way that he wrapped his meat, first in plastic wrap and then with particular folds of the freezer paper, each section becoming a Christmas present, a special gift. But this time, unlike the first, I didn’t relish the meat. Her father was a white settler and an amazing hunter who could shoot offhand at more than 200 yards and kill something. Alexis, who is an amazing hunter, talks about how he is the best hunter that she has ever seen. He took his own life a few years ago, and I like to think about honoring him and his trauma by wrapping the meat just exactly right.
No one ever taught me to hunt at a young age, so I didn’t know this: hunting is not romantic. If I want to have fantasies of being more connected to the land, my food, and the ancestors by hunting, then these fantasies had better be backed up by a masterful level of technical skill and attention to detail. And that skill is hard-won, expensive, boring, disciplined, and dirty. Otherwise it’s all just a fantasy.