Killing Animals Helped Me Make Peace With Death

I lost my dad to cancer when I was fifteen. Becoming a hunter helped me make peace with both the loss of my father and my own mortality.

This is the first long-form outdoors story published by The Westrn, an intentional community for people who love reading about the outdoors. For more information, check out our introduction “When Writing Is No Longer Art.”

My dad came to me in a dream the other night. 

Rarely, this happens. He’s come to me in a concrete room where we sat together and talked. He’s passed me on a slow-moving escalator, smiling warmly, greeting me with an eternal reality-bending sort of love. He’s driven by on a desolate two-lane road similar to the ones I love deeply in eastern Montana, raising the two-finger salute of rural America, causing me to u-turn and follow him into a setting sky of navy and stars. 

Usually, it’s a comforting dream. Usually, it’s a hello from somewhere else. An I-miss-you in motion. A moment of love. 

In this dream, it was my dad as I last saw him, his 5’10 frame skeletal thin from renal cell cancer metastasized murderously in his lungs, his eyes kind and velvet brown, but now sunk deep into his face. We stood in my mother’s kitchen in silence for a moment. He left to go somewhere, quickly, without speaking to me, and I begged my mom to tell me where he was. 

“He’s gone,” she said, “You’ll have to find him.” 

The despair and panic of the search set in, and somehow I ended up in the backseat of a rollercoaster high in the clouds, I could see the back of my father’s head, facing forward in the front seat. We were suspended in the sky, the two of us.

I called to him; he didn’t turn around. The rollercoaster edged up an invisible hill, click by click. Soon, we went over, and he disappeared fast as a dropping stone into the puffy white clouds below, the flying strands of his deep brown hair just visible over the head rest. I started awake before the light and whiteness hit. 

This year marks 25 years since his death. I have thought about, obsessed over, gotten therapy for, gotten dangerously close to, and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with mortality since that day. 

Today marks 8,829 days without my father. Today marks 8,829 days of meeting death in 8,829 different ways. 

This will also be my ninth year of hunting for my own meat. Sitting high up on bald mountain ridges with binos in hand, rifle on shoulder in the river breaks, army crawling in a fallow field, bow pulled taut as a bull elk yodels in the pines, walking miles upon miles in search of the bright burst of a pheasant from the grass, hiking alone in the early morning darkness, listening for the jaw clicks of waiting grizzlies in the creek willows. Sitting, present, watching, moving, waiting. 

I looked for my dad in all those places. And in those moments of real and imagined grizzlies in shadows, cold hands on warm animals, stacking meat I processed into my freezer — I began to see death differently. 

I saw her as the friend we would all meet one day, the superhero who would aid the ancient atoms of our solar-powered bodies into one energy, then the next, and the next, and the next. 

***

Learn to engage with death every day, and you’ll begin to see it everywhere. Consider it an exposure therapy by noticing. A practice of attention to endings that are also inherently beginnings. 

I came to hunting through this kind of noticing. Ten years ago, I embarked on a solo backpacking trip on the Continental Divide trail that would wind through 150 miles of high mountain passes, ice-cold alpine lakes, miles and miles of lodgepole so thick I couldn’t see twenty feet, and a loneliness I aimed to confront that began in the soles of my feet and stretched out from my fingers. The only way to address it seemed to run towards it, as fast as I could. 

Or walk, with a heavy pack, one step at a time, a la Cheryl Strayed.

The best night of the effort happened in a wildflower-filled valley that held the auspicious shape of an infinity sign. It sat at the base of the Highland Mountains in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest. I’d walked eighteen miles over two days, freckles appearing on my nose in the harsh hot sun. I was beginning to feel something lighter, happier, the cover of loneliness lifting. 

A coolness swept over the valley and I ate my homemade backpacking dinner of rice and dried beans with a purple spork. Golden light tipped the edges of verdant grasses and purple lupines as light wind moved through. The sun sunk low behind Red Mountain, and — 25 yards in front of me, as soon as the light tipped over — a cow elk burst from the thick lodgepole. 

She trotted out head high, confident and bold, looked around, and bowed her head to eat. Behind her, a spike bull stepped out, less confident, sure something was amiss. 

I stayed still, still as stone, as over a hundred elk emerged from the treeline. My tent was about 70 yards away, and I crouched my way towards it. Coyotes sang at the edges of the valley, and the elk mewed, played, and bickered all night long. I barely slept; I didn’t want to miss a thing. Elk grazed within yards of my tent, the door open to their feeding bodies, silhouetted by the Milky Way in a new moon sky. 

By morning, I had finally slept and the valley was clear and quiet, save bird song. I swung my turtle home onto my back, and I began to walk.

“Who gets to do this?” I asked the universe. “Who spends this kind of time with elk?”

Hunters, the universe responded in kind, clearly and nearly in my ear. I thought back to my stillness, my invisibility as the elk stepped into the valley, the ancestral knowledge that told me how to get back to my tent without being seen. 

“I am a hunter,” I said aloud, in astonishment. 

I am a hunter. 

***

I never saw my father after he died. I saw him the night before, in the warm and loving walls of hospice, the first hospital-like place I could bear to be in since his diagnosis two and half years earlier. I said I love you and he turned his head toward me in his near-death state, eyes closed, but hearing me. 

We were surrounded by people who were a part of our church, a few who had come into my father’s room at our home a few months before.

“Repent for your sins, and God will heal you,” I listened to the church leadership tell my dying father this with my bedroom door cracked. 

“God is punishing you and if you ask for forgiveness, you will be healed,” they repeated. My mom, younger than I am now at the time, boiled over in anger and told them to get the [ ] out of our home. The protector had switched — the original now vulnerable in bed, the mother grizzly sprung into action. 

Still, these self-righteous, indignant men were all around us as my dad went somewhere else, inching their way into our lives, our home, our experience of losing our father. 

Someone in that group decided my sister and I were too young to watch the burial of my dad’s ashes, so we stayed home as his remains dropped into the soil of northwestern Ohio, on the commune I had grown up on. 

His leaving was simply that. The ritual went on without his children. It left the sort of space for a Didionesque magical thinking that never really ends. 

Perhaps, like Mary Oliver once said about a box filled with darkness, that too was a gift.

***

Cultural context when it comes to death is a convoluted picture. We live in perhaps the single human era where death is mostly invisible, packaged neatly and tidily. It’s a job to be taken care of and monetized by others. 

Bearing witness to death for most people only comes in the moments when they might be putting down a beloved dog or driving past roadkill on the highway. Ask a small animal vet and they’ll tell you some people won’t even sit with that dog they’ve owned for 9 or 11 or 14 years in its last moments of euthanasia. 

Cowardice around death is ample, but — do I have to be clear on this? death takes us all — the brave, the cowardly, the righteous, the weary, the healthy, the very young and the very old. She is coming, and she is not shrouded in blackness and shadows. No. She’s smiling softly, standing in ragged overalls, a well-worn flannel, wispy braids in her hair, with dirt under her fingernails from tending the garden.

Bakers might be familiar with the term autolysis. It’s the kamikaze act of self-digestion, the moment when cells finally starved of oxygen burst at the seams and consume themselves with their own enzymes. Autolysis gives us great sourdough bread; it also allows the billions of cells that determine our existence to break down into new food for the rest of the earth to swallow up and turn into something both ancient and new.

It prepares the living minutiae of each body for their next job, the act of becoming transitional energy. Of feeding and fertilizing and making up the next lives beyond ours.

***

I’m high on a sagebrush-pocked ridge above the Missouri river, on a finger that stretches out towards the horizon and away from the rocky ridges behind me. I lay prone — my border collie companion lying next to me — and I am looking through my scope at a forked horn mule deer amidst a herd of does that my Montana tag tells me are off-limits. 

A bigger and heftier buck stands surrounded by his girls, and they are all looking at me. He’s the kind that generates bloodlust for most, but I have no time for that. And time is of the essence. Crosswinds move by upwards of 40mph, masking my scent. My gear is battered by the wind, and I’ve already hiked five miles. It’s a solid two more back to my rig, and I’d unloaded my gun for the day because hunting was still wildly new to me.

This is a hail mary, a moment most unexpected, a split-second decision that hunters have made since the dawn of human consciousness. 

The forkhorn steps into the reticle, broadside, 72 yards away. I aim for the spot behind his shoulder and punch the trigger in the ways of a beginner. 

Momentary chaos ensues, but I see the deer go backward over the sage as his herdmates burst from the tiny fold in the land into the beyond. Through the sage I see his antlers. They are still.

I look over. My gun-shy companion has bounced about three feet, and he is still lying down, wide-eyed, looking at me. 

I reload and wait and watch, watch and wait. Minutes go by, no movement. 

***

I didn’t come to hunting with the express notion that I would somehow overcome my many anxieties around death, or the grief of losing my father, or anything close to that matter. There is never a complete resolution around those sorts of wrinkles in consciousness; they are unanswerable questions to live in, not sort out. 

The immediate question I came to hunting with was, could I kill an animal? 

It’s a question that deserves its own reckoning. The desire to hunt didn’t come from wanting to fill my freezer. It came from wanting to spend more time in direct relation to wild animals, in big wild landscapes, in the wildest kind of circumstances. 

I could do that and be a wildlife photographer. Sure, to some degree. But hunting taps into something much different, much deeper — within each of us is a knowledge that is instinctual and ancestral. I felt it when the elk stepped into the field. I wanted to feel it again, and again, and again. 

Do I need to tell you that I hunt for meat in order for you to be somewhat okay with this question of killing? Must I add that my absolute favorite part of hunting is the field dressing, the processing, the intricacy of butchering with my own hands? Do I get a sense of pride and deep connection that is absent from picking out a steak in a glass box or throwing a package of Oscar Meier wieners into my grocery cart?

Fine. Those things are true. But if that’s what you want to walk away from this piece with, I refuse to give you the easy out. 

Save the repetitive banal for those who want the obvious answers. I am not here to cajole you, dear reader. We aren’t here to talk about dinner. 

We are here to get closer to death. 

***

The morning my dad died, my parent’s friends took me and my sister to the Columbus Zoo as a distraction while my mom took on a new set of responsibilities. 

I loved Jack Hannah; we loved the zoo. It was an obvious place to go. 

But zoos are mostly sleepy places where you look for the paws of animals sticking out of caves and human-made dens. They are living seedbanks for the endangered, a place where wild creatures get three hots and a cot. 

You stand on your tippy toes at each habitat, waiting from something to happen. 

Not on that day. My sister and I tapped into another energy that boiled on the surface of our being. Everywhere we went, the animals came to the edges of the cages and followed us step for step. The wolves met us as the glass. The lions paced alongside us, their golden eyes wide and wild. My beloved gorillas sat just across the fence, knowing. I can’t explain it, and I’ve since learned many things that are beyond explanation. But the zoo came alive with the new wilderness we were facing. 

We were fundamentally different. We were changed. They knew. 

I remember reading something in the years after my dad’s death that said children grew sky eyes once they lost a parent, a faraway look that engendered some altered sort of eternity. I can’t remember where I read it, but I do remember staring in the bathroom mirror, looking for the sky in my own eyes. 

***

I’m sitting in a goose blind in eastern Washington. In front of me are two hundred stuffers. That is, decoys that are made from actual geese by hand. 

The man in the blind with me and a few others is a world champion goose caller with a line of waterfowl calls behind his name. This is my first time hunting geese, and listening to this man call geese is like sitting in front of a classical guitarist. I know that this is advancement beyond a beginner’s scope of understanding; it’s impressive nonetheless.

It was warm that day, the flocks of geese flew over us and over us, not wanting to land. But at some point a few geese began to filter down, and we raised our shotguns to shoulder, firing on the words take ‘em. 

Watching flocks of waterfowl swing down over a blind dizzied me with excitement. The day before, a slick-coat black lab brought my very first duck to hand — bursting with greens, blues, browns, and whites. Love happens in colors, like it did for me then. 

The goose blind was different, a pit blind dug into a cornfield. It measured maybe three feet wide by ten feet long and likely five or so feet into the ground. Laid over the blind were hinged flats of plywood covered in grass and dirt to camouflage the pit. A foxhole of sorts. 

We’d keep hands on the doors as the geese arced their wings like a plane readying for landing. Then we’d pop out guns a-blazing when they swung into shooting range. 

At one point in the day, a single goose came into the call. He flew circles over the stuffers as the songs of his kind blared out from the pit blind. When he landed, his head popped up straight, eyes wide as saucers. 

I imagined myself walking into a neon-signed dive bar, blaring with music and colors and the sounds of people, drinks set on the bar, lights low. I look around only to realize that I am surrounded by mannequins, wax figures, bodies stilled in motion. It’s just me and the music.

“Do we have to take this one?”

“Yep.”

When we swung the pit doors open, I watched, but I didn’t fire. 

***

The biggest lie we tell ourselves in hunting is that the individual doesn’t matter, and that somehow, without hunters, the conservation of wildlife wouldn’t exist. 

Here’s the burn: it’s not hunting that lends itself to conservation; it’s the regulation of hunting and our legal obligation to it. 

I was at an event for a gun brand where I was one of the few women there to shoot and review the tools at hand. An older man and I stood in the corner of the tent, shooting the breeze. He asked me what I liked least about hunting. 

“I don’t really like killing,” I said, “The violence of it turns my stomach.” 

“Me neither,” he then looked off, and stretched out a pause, “but sometimes, I just want to kill a fucking deer.”

He leaned in closer, quieting his voice. I remember his teeth being a pale shade of yellow, his pupils widening in the shade of the tent.

“There’s just something about seeing an animal, taking a shot, and watching it bleed out and die. I guess, maybe, I do like the violence of it. It makes things feel real.”

Finally, some honesty.

Sure, we contribute to conservation. But we are also predators. And the insatiability of our predatory instincts means that laws are passed to keep us squarely in the camp of hunting is conservation, the most selfless, honorable, and righteous place to be.

It’s an invisible border. It is easily crossed. At the end of the day, I’ve never really bought into that three-word mantra. I believe the nonhunting public when they think they smell a rat, because, oftentimes, they’re right. 

***

I’ve just spent nine November days deep in the heart of Montana’s eastern badlands. There, the land inverts on itself, creating mountainsides you walk down to get to the heart of the country. Just as animals live in the crevices of high peaks, they run, sleep, and eat deep in the folds of the land. Here, you walk down to hunt. This means if you pack out, you’re on an incline. It’s an insult-to-injury kind of landscape. My sort of place. 

These pseudo-canyons lack the hard rock expanses of, say, the red-walled Grand ditch in Arizona. Instead, the loam beneath foot and hoof is a volatile kind of clay that turns to slick, compiling glue when wet. Walk even 100 yards in the stuff and your boots will add layer upon layer of what the locals call “gumbo”. It rolls itself like a shaggy bread dough onto the tread of your tires, rendering vehicles useless when rains come hard and heavy as they often do. 

Rain came in at intervals during my time skirting the broad edges of the Missouri river, and gumbo eventually took over my life and pushed me out of the landscape back to pavement headed west. But I’d snuck a few dry days in at the beginning. On what was likely the last warm sunny afternoon of the year, I piled up on a little ledge in the sun, leaned against my daypack, and slept solid for three hours. 

In some places, the soil turns itself over to a deep red clay, and that clay infused my skin, my clothes, my boots, the black carpeting of my Jeep. I brushed it off the white patches of Butch’s coat, but the color stayed in place, an infusion of the earth. My black-and-white dog turned tri-color.

The night before I left the country, a dream came to me in a wave of red wet gumbo. A dream or perhaps a vision offered up. Less a dream than perhaps an ancient memory that must have lived within the atoms of the landscape. Perhaps I breathed it in as I slept; perhaps the soil transferred the memory over to my body as I traversed the folds, crevices, and vegetation within it. 

I am in tall grass, dry and dead with fall and covered in the frosted tips of the morning. I’m crouched down in a position that holds both hiding and the opportunity to run should I need to, but most of all, it’s a crouch of bearing witness. This isn’t my body; it’s the body of another, someone so thin and lithe I feel nearly weightless. Like a child before puberty, all limbs and structure anew. The eyes, however, belong to me. 

Over the tops of the grass and sage, a herd of wooly mammoths in motion is passing across the valley, the hilly badlands behind them. They’re not running with fear but with an ease of forward motion, the gait intentional and collected. They move in dream time, which feels and appears to be slow motion, and the rising sun presses light against them as it rises behind me. 

The family group is represented from calves at the hocks of mothers up to the elder matriarchs of the herd. Ice hangs from the tendrils of their thick woolen coats, felted against the cold of pushing winter. The colors are deep browns, ombréd to tawny blonde edges by sunlight and summer heat. 

Bursts of frosted air explode from their mouths and trunks, and arced tusks stretch out across and over the bodies. They move as one mass, broken only by sizes, slight gaps, and illuminating outlines. 

I can feel the deep bass rhythm of their footfalls in the land below me. But the dream offers no sounds. Only silence. Vibrations. Visions. 

I wake up chilled. The thick smell of game hangs in the air for a split second, my heartbeat racing against the night. 

***

Where do we make room for magic, in this world of data, charts, graphs, and research? The anecdotal gets shoved back into the faces of the people who have faced the land daily. The questions then shove ancestral knowledge into a petri dish and hand it over to a plastic-gloved scientist with a spreadsheet. The scientist comes back from the clean white room to point out that all that you thought was, by the numbers, wrong. All while shaking the dust off his new cowboy boots, spur rest not included. 

Maybe I don’t want to know where clouds come from, or how water flows, or how the earth breathes through shallow points in its crust. Maybe the stories I would have made up about their presence would have held more awe and power. Maybe having faith in the myth of a cloud could lift the depression over this Prozac nation. Maybe the stories that should have been passed down to me were silenced against the so-called truth of numbers. 

The data never tells the whole story, anyway. It can’t give us a beginning; it certainly can’t give us an end. 

So it just alights in the middle of the narrative, pointing out everything done wrong up to this point, pointing out everything you didn’t know, and that in spite of your best intentions to take in all that ‘data’ coming at you, from every bluebird flying by across snow fields, from every turn of a tree leaf, from the herd of horses turning their rumps to the wind, from the bull elk through the pine boughs, looking, looking, looking intently into the depth of your forward-facing mountain lion eyes, that in spite of everything you know, every minute spent on the landscape, every moment imagining what might come next, you have done no research because you never knew the right questions to ask anyway. 

***

Lying in the sagebrush, the antlers are stilled, have been stilled, have not shifted in minutes. 

My heart rises and I stand up. Though I’m positive this deer has passed over, I’m ready to make another shot to end suffering, to put him in my pack. 

I make my way through the sage. 

I kneel beside him. His eyes hold a blue sheen, reflecting back a milky sky, my silhouette, the tendrils of sage above him. The coming winter pushed his coat into a deep thickness that I sink my fingers into. Tears well in my eyes but I don’t cry. 

Here is a death that I get to touch, to see, to feel, to be fully present with. This is a death that I can hold, grieve, feel the warmth and energy the life the body holds onto when no longer breathing. Bear witness to that film over an eye, bear witness to muscles twitching and moving as I pull hide and skin back, revealing internal memories of speed equaling survival in motion. 

For me, this place is sacred. Something in this moment heals what was lost when my father’s death was hidden from me all those years ago. Something here assures me that death is not to be feared, but honored as a transition from one energy to another. A stepping back from life and into another realm. 

The third thing it offers is the unimaginable reprieve of finding joy and celebration in death’s offering. This deer offers a feast, offers my body energy built in high sagebrush, rock canyons, wild waters. His sacrifice is felt on each heavy step back to my truck, each of my own bones weighted with his. 

We go together. Then, and now.

“I’m sorry,” I said it through a cracked voice, and I meant it. I’m so sorry. Thank you. You’ll feed me and my family, and your death is not in vain. This becomes a prayer that I say each time I am culpable, an honoring of sacrifice, a way of taking responsibility for lives stopped by my own hands. 

High on the ridge, blood on my hands, I followed the carmine musculature of the animal and looked down below at an arterial river flowing with life, mountains in every direction, a white sky filling with snowflakes that alight on my eyelashes as I look out over the land.

***

What will happen, when I go? Where did my father go, when the rollercoaster dropped him through the clouds back towards earth? 

I live in that mystery daily. My father was 45. This year, I’ll turn 40. I’m not sure how any of this happens, how I kept and still keep going, why he left. 

What I do know is that there is a sort of faith, a feathered hope building in my chest that was lost so long ago. 

Hope is the thing with feathers.

Each step that I’ve taken — on dusty dirt trails, through otherworldly alpine valleys, in the golden cottonwood copses of September, wading in powder blue glacial rivers — is a walking meditation in the hope, the faith that something, anything, maybe one thing will eventually happen. Perhaps an elk will bugle, a grouse will flush, a fish will bite. 

Most of the time, not much occurs. Most of the time, I walk in with the lightness of hope and walk out with an empty pack. 

But I see Death everywhere I go. She is out, moving across our little planet at every moment, the wind catching the wisps in her twin braids. She is foraging for morels in the scattered golden light of lodgepoles, harvesting sage to dry on her windowsill, putting a red-slashed cutthroat trout in her creel for dinner. She looks up, catches my eye, smiles and waves. 

I smile and wave back. 

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and founder of The Westrn. She’s worked in outdoor media for a decade, with brands ranging from MeatEater to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers to acting as the long-time Hunt & Fish Editor at GearJunkie. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Modern Huntsman, the Backcountry Journal, and more.