Antelope in the Bathtub at the Sundowner Motel
Kestrel learns what you find when you frequently lose things.
It’s 11 p.m. and I hope the night clerk at the Sundowner Motel can’t see my rifle and bloody white bag from inside the lobby. I’m waiting in the shadows of a dim, yellow street light next to the wide main drag in Dillon, Montana. My partner comes out with a room key, and we realize we have to walk past the big office window to reach the outside staircase. Putting our hefty cargo between us, with L’s larger body blocking the window, we walk in lockstep without catching the clerk’s attention. Blood drips from the bag onto the parking lot asphalt, up the stairs, and across the balcony to our room.
It’s hard to believe that only days prior, I sat in a mediator’s beige conference room with my soon-to-be-ex-husband, negotiating the terms of a split as peacefully as possible. I felt tremendous pressure about this meeting — not only because a lot of my future rode on the outcome, but because I feared his judgement. Since my teens, I’ve dealt with challenges mostly on my own: car trouble, broken down bicycles in the middle of nowhere, filing paperwork, bills, insurance, moving cross-country. When I met my ex in my 20s, I lived alone on a non-profit biologist's salary and I took care of everything myself.
Yet somehow, I left my 15-year marriage feeling like a terminal fuck-up. While my ex never openly admitted to considering me such, his behavior said enough. He wanted me to take on more responsibility managing our finances while also insinuating that I was bad with money. In a heated moment, he once said he “had a lot invested” in me due to my medical bills. He only walked it back when I reminded him that, while he may think I’m a depreciating investment, I am not, in fact, a boat or luxury car. When we seperated, he told me that he didn’t want me taking over my own truck payment because I might miss a deadline and hurt his credit. (Meanwhile, my credit has actually increased while solo despite his condescending perception that I’m a risk).
He turned 40 the day my mom went on a ventilator with COVID-19, and aging was clearly top of his mind. He said that watching me handle Mom’s medical crisis made him feel even better about growing old with me. It reassured him that I’m so capable. This could have been a sweet moment had it sounded like pride, rather than a revelation that a communication professional with a biology degree, first responder training, and years of medical writing experience was a handy patient advocate.
It took both my parents dying to realize that I believed a false narrative about myself for years. Yes, sometimes I create problems. And that’s why I learned about backup systems at a young age. Hidden spare keys. Memorized phone numbers. In the days before cell phones, a pocket of payphone quarters. Membership to AAA once I could afford it. Travel insurance. Logistics strategies. Plans B, C and D.
Some of us are born to have contingency plans.
Arriving in Bozeman from New York for our mediation session and a week of rifle hunting with my new partner, I got a text from my ex warning me that he needed privacy in the house I still owned with him, along with 24 hours of notice if I wished to come by.
And your new truck key is in the house, by the way.
Stepping into my former home, I felt relief and gratitude upon noticing the key hanging by the door. I lost the expensive spare months after we bought the truck together, and my ex kindly paid for a replacement. I considered taking the spare on the hunt just in case. But I decided it was more secure in my old home than with me.
Then I headed to the Bozeman airport to pick up my partner, L, for their first Western hunting trip. While moving and my divorce distracted me, L’s first hunting vacation excited them. For months, they followed my guidance while researching what to expect, some basic hunting strategies, how to dress, eat and generally be a good field buddy. Their efforts made me proud, and their interest in joining that part of my life flattered me.
Am I a worthy host and trip leader? Am I prepared to show them a good time on their vacation? I was anxious. Though no one set them, the stakes for this trip felt relatively high. It might reveal if we were well enough matched to be hunting partners. In this newer relationship, we’d only been in the backcountry together once — a grueling hike in the Adirondacks where we arrived back to the truck in the wee hours just as other hikers left the trailhead for a sunrise summit.
So I knew about L’s strong-headed tolerance for discomfort and backpacking experience. But I didn’t know how they’d relate to my goal-oriented hunting persona, who is much more focused on looking through binoculars than connecting with the person next to me.
Filling my antlerless antelope tag was first on our list. Then, we would look for mule deer and hopefully elk, pack a trailer of my belongings in Bozeman, and maybe squeeze in a hot springs soak if we were lucky. L knew it could be my last antelope hunt as a Montana resident, in a place that holds a lot of meaning and memories for me. They encouraged me to hold on to that part of my life despite moving 2,000 miles away. And we hoped to have some antelope meat to bring back to New York to share.
We spent the first windy night in my truck camper at a large rest area that we now jokingly call our favorite campsite. It’s a stone’s throw from a locally-run convenience store and diner. These humble roadside spots are longtime hunting season staples and I knew L, who grew up in the rural south, would enjoy the gas station taxidermy, reading gun raffle adverts tacked by the bathroom, and chatting with old men in suspenders drinking coffee just as much as I would enjoy seeing a familiar, dusty place through new eyes.
During our second afternoon out, I spotted a small antelope herd on a hillside tucked away in a strip of public land just off the road. We drove up a dirt access road that put us a few hundred yards away from them, and behind a hill. We only had to sneak over the rise and find enough cover to set up for a shot.
After an otherwise slow day of hunting, I appreciated the go-time rush of planning to approach the herd. With limited daylight, we quickly grabbed our gear and hoofed it up the hill. Soon, I dropped to belly crawl as the little horseshoe-shaped meadow holding the pronghorn came into view. L waited behind a sagebrush and napped rather than create extra motion. I slithered between openings in tall sage — practically a forest from my vantage — to move down the dry hillside and reveal the pronghorn below.
Around 200 yards out, several does from the herd were visible, milling around, grazing and totally unaware of a predator above them. I slowly set up my bipod and trained the riflescope on the animals below. I could sense them growing alert, looking up from grazing more frequently, holding their heads still and their ears at attention.
There’s a moment when the collective body language and tension in an antelope herd becomes palpable. At that moment, I know that they know something isn’t right, and my window to take a shot is rapidly closing. That is the time to understand the difference between decisiveness and rushing.
On that day, I felt decisive. I zoomed my scope onto what looked like the largest doe in the group standing broadside. I found her vitals, took a few deep breaths, and squeezed the trigger. Much to my relief, she fell over instantly.
I walked back to find L watching the sunset over the mountains. One last antelope in my favorite spot seemed like a fitting parting gift from Montana. Accepting it felt like releasing a giant sigh. “Please don’t think it’s always this easy,” I told L. They remarked that the long hike we did on our first day made that pretty clear. The antelope fell close enough to the truck that dragging her took no time at all. Actually, him; I shot a legal, immature male without visible horns.
When we got to the truck, I grabbed my door handle but didn’t hear the beep-beep of the automatic lock. I reached into my left pocket for my key. Then I remembered it’s not there, because my favorite pants with their zippered pockets don’t fit anymore and now I kept the key in a pouch on my binocular harness instead. I looked down to see only air where I expected the pouch to hang.
We checked our packs and looked around the truck. We walked back to the kill site and paced out a grid. Not there. We decided the pouch — which, of course, was camo and thus the same color as the ground — ripped off my chest harness as I drug my body around in the sage. We spent over an hour on the hillside reconstructing my path through green and tan vegetation on brown soil. I kept looking with my headlamp into the dark. It got colder and we had to move on to a different plan.
I braced for my partner’s response to the mess I’d created, but the exasperation never came. Instead, L reacted with little more than a smile and a shrug. “Stuff happens.” They found it hilarious, rather than a humiliating bit of irony, that I just got a brand new spare key. A ball formed in my stomach as I thought about telling my ex that I needed to stop by to get the new key, and why.
My ex’s predictable reactions to my misplaced items were always so hard to bear — probably because they reminded me of the way I judged my mother for losing car keys and running late for years. I internalized the way the men around us perceived her as scatterbrained, joking about her with rolled eyes. She had a pact with her best friend that if they ever ran out of gas, they’d call one another, not the men they shared beds with. By adulthood, I grew enraged watching the men she called friends or lovers demean her to her face, my mother too innocent and kind to notice. Years later, I realized the woman — who successfully traveled the world as a photographer, only occasionally messing up enough to tell a good story — probably had untreated ADHD and always did too much, mostly for others and with too few resources.
In my thirties, my therapist noticed that I had the same tendencies that made things hard for Mom. After one particularly hurtful fight with my ex over a lost (insured) cell phone, my therapist screened me for ADHD and I started getting treatment. In time, this even improved my ex’s perception of my struggles, and he grew more empathetic and began collaborating with me to set up helpful systems. I watched him learn to accept how my brain worked differently from his. But chastisement and frustration were still in play.
Sometimes a lost key is more than a lost key. Sometimes it’s an indictment of how you’re living, or maybe a reason someone is glad you're gone and no longer their problem.
Standing next to my locked truck amid darkness and plunging temperatures, my ex’s voice in my head wasn’t a real problem. The real problem was that our food supply and shelter were behind locked doors. At least the meat would stay cool. I would’ve broken a camper window if I had to. We decided we weren’t in any mortal danger, but I still dreaded how much money and time I was about to waste.
We started thinking about the most efficient path out of our quandary. A town of any size was 65 interstate miles away from the nearby 6,800-foot mountain pass that frequently closes in the winter. We could hitch-hike, but feared becoming subjects of the next true crime podcast. Lyft and Uber are irrelevant out there, and my friends who used to live nearby had long since moved away. The nearest cell service was 15 miles north at the convenience store or a ways uphill, if we were lucky. But then we would still be stranded, and who would we call anyway? I turned on my satellite messenger. For what? Maybe I could get a message to a friend who could call AAA for me? At least I had AAA. What do you even do with a bricked truck on the Continental Divide?
It was only a few flat miles back to Monida, which consisted of a handful of wind-beat houses, a private scrap yard and a garage (closed). Still, maybe there would be a light on, or a resident with a working phone. We wedged my unloaded rifle behind the truck cab and stashed the antelope in its white game bag on the roof to keep the coyotes off it.
In town, headlights appeared and the driver slowed for us. I explained that we had some vehicle trouble. He wanted to know what kind. “It’s me,” I said as a Taylor Swift tune about being the problem played in the back of my mind. “The vehicle trouble is me.” I groaned internally as he pontificated about how he liked to leave his keys in his truck. That’s what everyone says. But aside from risking stolen gear, weapons, and my laptop, I have intrusive thoughts about men hiding in my backseat waiting to strangle me, or stowing away in my camper shell. I never leave my keys in my unlocked vehicle.
But hey, at least we got an antelope, which saved us some face. Otherwise, I probably deserved to be roasted in a public Facebook group.
The stranger had cell service and offered me his phone. He let us stand outside his friend’s house under a flood light. This one person we lucked into meeting turned out to be a hunting guide, and we could stay as long as we needed while his team met in the garage. I called AAA. It took a long time to get through. A different guy came out and offered us some pizza while I sat on hold.
I swallowed my pride and texted my ex-husband to confirm that the spare truck key still hung in the kitchen, providing as little context as possible. He said it did, and that he hoped I didn’t need it. I actually do, I wrote. Just leave it outside and I’ll pick it up. I’m handling the situation so don’t worry about it. I got a message back saying he couldn’t come get us because that’s just my boundary. And he would not pay for another spare. Did he really not know that I would have rather withered into dust than asked him to rescue me?
Finally, I heard a AAA agent’s voice. They eventually decided to send out a flatbed wrecker from Dillon, an hour away. Lucky for me, I paid for the premium towing package, which got us to Dillon, and not a mile further. But they could only drop my truck at a residential address. I looked at a map and guessed the address of an acquaintance I hadn’t talked to in three years. He probably didn’t live there anymore, but it worked for AAA. The guide’s house didn’t have an address, so I just gave the AAA agent landmark directions and hoped they sent a sensible driver.
We waited for what felt like an eternity. A cat visited us and L joked about taking it home. I started to worry about L getting cold, but their spirits seemed high enough. We jumped up and down and followed the cat around to keep our blood flowing. L laughed at how the tumbleweeds stuck in nearby fences so effectively stereotyped the remote place nearly void of humans or cell phone service. Coyotes howled in the distance.
Finally, we saw the wrecker’s headlights. We hopped in the warm cab and sheepishly took the driver to my truck. As we watched the young man deftly secure a huge hook and cable onto my front end, dragging the truck over the grass onto the tilted long bed, L and I laughed at the ludicrous tonnage needed to right my mistake. The driver, without missing a beat, strapped my antelope to the flatbed in its white muslin sock. It made for a comically tiny bit of cargo.
L sat in the front and I slid into the back of the cab, still mortified. We tried making small talk with our driver. He chatted with L about living in New York, mentioning that he’d never been to a city larger than Butte (population 35,700). We quickly learned he was technically too young to take AAA calls. His cousin, who ran the company, was too tired to make the trip and asked if he wanted this one. I told him we were lucky he did.
Then he brought up his bloodhounds. This opened a spot for L to connect since they grew up with hounds in Louisiana. Our driver trained hounds, specifically for pursuing mountain lions. He liked to take hunters out so his dogs could tree cats for them, but he seemed just as interested in helping wildlife photographers find cougars, or photographing them himself.
I sniffed out some good questions to pass the time. Had his hounds ever tussled with one of the cats? They sure had, he said, but grabbing an ornery cat by its tail and yanking backwards gets it to roll over, just like any kitty cat. (His words.) I started to wonder if our driver was pulling my tail. He also liked to climb into trees with the mountain lions to get better photographs. Or wave a stick until the big cat flees, giving his dogs another chance to chase it. I decided this man definitely pushed his luck for thrills and noticed he drove a little fast, but I tried to assure myself we would make it to Dillon in one piece.
Then we learned that our rescuer used to work at a garnet mine where he cleaned and processed the gems for industrial uses. He gave us a detailed, step-by-step summary of his work. He probably could have drawn diagrams of the equipment he once used, if not for the fact that he was driving. I noted that I have science communication training, and that he had given an incredibly in-depth description of this process. Clearly he was very passionate about it, so why did he stop? He explained that he had narcolepsy, and that he fell asleep at work once, violating the mine’s zero-tolerance safety policy about sleeping on the job. He later learned that sleep apnea caused his narcolepsy. He didn’t sound sad, but I felt a sense of life’s unfairness on his behalf.
By time we got to Dillon, L and I were trying to talk this young man into going to engineering school. He dropped my truck on my “friend’s” residential street where I hoped no one would yell at us for the beeping and flashing lights of the flatbed. He tried his lockout kit on my door, but couldn’t gain access. Then he fudged the AAA rules and took us to a motel across town, depositing L and I with our antelope carcass in the Sundowner Motel parking lot. We said our goodbyes, then L and I debated our new friend’s actual age, with all his life experience. Did you hear that he did ranch work too?
Some hotels hang out a “Welcome Hunters” sign, fully expecting wild game processing might happen on the premises. Others strictly forbid the mess, with good reason. Either way, we probably go a step too far by icing our critter, whom L has affectionately named Brody, in the bathtub.
I’m already mentally apologizing to the Sundowner Motel staff as L and I shove Brody under a bench by the lobby door. L comes out holding our room key like a prize and joins me in my shadow by the wall. We have to get our contraband across the parking lot and up the stairs without raising any eyebrows. As usual, I’m overthinking it and L says it will be fine. We leave a blood trail across the parking lot, up the stairs and in front of our door. We enter our accommodation and are instantly pleased to see the area near the sink isn’t carpeted. We leave Brody on the tile floor and go out to fetch ice.
The Town Pump gas station is as dependable at midnight as it ever is. By now, L and I are slap happy with hunger, success, and the prospect of a shower. Maybe it’s our enthusiasm for chicken tenders and ramen, or maybe it’s because L called the gas station clerk “ma’am,” but she goes out of her way to ask the bartender in the Lucky Lil’s Casino next door if we could sit in there and eat. VIP guests of the Town Pump, we’re led through the tinted casino door and shown to a table near the slots. Several gamblers at least 20 years our senior turn around and appraise us, unimpressed to see interlopers. One woman perched in front of a Keno screen makes intense eye contact at L, farting loudly.
I ask L if they’re enjoying their date, and they say it’s their favorite. We down Mountain Dew and deviled eggs and L tells me about how their mom and dad parked them at the casino arcade and played video poker together when they were a kid.
We return to the room with a backpack full of ice. We soon realize that we need to shower before repurposing the tub, and we’d rather not put our musky hunting clothes back on. So we proceed with nudist meat care. With the antelope hooves-up in the bathtub and the body cavity full of ice, the bathroom looks like a staged crime scene or the backdrop for some kind of fetish photoshoot.
Just another night at the Sundowner.
The next morning we step out into the sunshine and head to the school-bus-turned-breakfast-burrito joint next door. From there, I call one of the best businesses for getting out of a vehicle pinch – the local U-Haul. This one is in an auto shop on the frontage road. As we’re standing on the street corner in our hunting clothes realizing that Dillon lacks a taxi service, a vintage Chevy rattles up into the parking lot next to us. A 90-year-old man named Swede jumps out and asks if we want to buy his self-published memoir, which he’s written about his life as a smokejumper, private pilot, and backcountry EMT. After admitting that we don’t have any cash or checks to offer him, he politely tells us where we can buy the book once we get our affairs in order and drives away. We watch after him, hoping we both live long enough to be half as interesting as Swede.
After a long stroll along the state highway, we get our U-Haul without incident, pull Brody out of the bathtub, wipe down the room, and put him in the cavernous trailer of the moving truck. On the way back to Bozeman to retrieve my spare key, we talk about how Montanans, especially anonymous online ones, tend to vilify out-of-state hunters. But despite my self-loathing about our situation, no one we encountered seemed even remotely interested in judging us.
Maybe L’s charm and my smooth talking helped, maybe it’s that people in truly rural places still maintain a practical culture of depending on their neighbors. Or maybe we benefited from the kind of delight both our fathers used to get from bailing out the less-prepared. Maybe all the good samaritans of our weekend thought precisely what the southerners we grew up around always said to poor fools in predicaments.
“Bless your hearts.”
I’m not alone in speculating that ADHD is only considered a condition to be treated because we live in a society that values consistent productivity, routine, and sedentary activities over the kind of seasonal feast and famine we evolved with.
A lot of us who tend towards hyperfocusing thrive as hunters, anglers, and foragers. Being obsessively wired for a dopamine reward can be great when you need to stay out from dawn till dusk, sit still for hours in the cold, or follow tracks through deadfall rather than quitting. Difficult-to-control impulses become intuition when deducing where and when to find animals. A tendency towards sensory overload is a boon in nature when subtle sounds, smells or shapes denote the razor-thin margin between meat in the freezer and fading hoofbeats. I have that tendency — and the roster of good-samaritan strangers it led us to — to thank for the bonding experience of a lifetime, with a partner who relishes my sometimes-chaos rather than recoiling from it.
Over a year later, we unearth one of the final packs of antelope from the deepfreeze. It reminds me of a rumor I’d just heard about Taylor Sheridan, the creator of the show “Yellowstone,” basing his next series in Dillon. For years, southwest Montanans have wondered when Dillon will get “discovered,” and the next western television drama craze might do it. You can kiss that sleepy town goodbye once the Yellowstone fans get to it, I suggest to L as we reminisce over our sagey dinner. Good luck finding an affordable motel room to ice an antelope in if that happens.
But who knows — maybe the next time we get stuck there, Dillon will have a taxi service.
Kestrel Keller is Executive Editor of The Westrn. Their writing and reporting on science, conservation and rural culture has appeared in High Country News, Smithsonian, National Geographic, MeatEater, Outdoor Life, Outside, and many others. Kestrel is a reverse transplant from Bozeman, Montana to New York’s Hudson Valley.
Really good, thanks. Eating squirrels (i've eaten my share), Thomas McGuane, big western spaces... (Your ex by the way sounds like a psychopath, as i think anyone who keeps a spreadsheet in their mind for their relationships must be. At the very least a pathological level of petty. Stay away from the petty ones, i've been abused by a few.) The episode with the car keys reminded me of a hunt in the big woods here in the Alberta foothills a few years ago, picked up a buck track not long after first light, shot him around 1:00, dragged him til dusk, realized i had no firm clue where i was. Left him for the next morning, found my way out, realized at the truck one of his tines had torn the bottom out of my Mackinaws and my wallet was somewhere back there on that long trail. At least i had my keys. As an aside, i'm not convinced ADHD is even real. Or if it is, it is created by the intense bordom institutional education subjects us to, in other words, it's not a problem with the person. It may actually indicate someone healthier than most. On hunting the Adirondacks, have you heard of Jim Masset, Joe DiNitto? Those guys are the real deal. You can 'catch' and release hunting by the way, i let a few bucks walk this year that could have been mine. I hope you keep this stuff coming, and good hunting to you.