That's the Breaks: Redress
Kestrel considers the emotional geography of a hunting spot
September 2021
We wade across the river by the light of our headlamps. It’s chilly and our group of three is quietly giddy with camaraderie, lack of sleep, and the possibility of finding a bull elk among the golden leaves of old gnarly cottonwoods. The sky is silky black and oozing stars. Contentment washes over me as I follow my friend’s silhouettes through the prairie grass. Nicole and I have hunted here before, but approaching from this direction is new to me.
The riverbottom’s smell of wet and dry mixing reminds me of my childhood and also something much, much older. When first light breaks deep pink on the horizon, I dissociate for a moment. I experience my friends carrying their bows, a butte in the background, as something essential. It’s the same light Charlie Russell painted, but he couldn’t have predicted us in it. Later, we watch two bucks feed at the edge of the cottonwoods, then work their way up their game trail into the sage brush.
October 2021
I return alone the last weekend of bow season, guilty that I didn’t tell the other two. I miss their smiles and banter, but anything more than hunting alone is too much. A few days ago, my mother got Covid while taking care of her mother, who got it from her unvaccinated son, who got it from his friend at their black bear camp in West Virginia.
With the Delta variant raging through her region, she spent three days on a gurney bed in the hospital waiting room. When I finally reached a doctor on the phone, they told me not to come out because they wouldn’t let me into their Covid unit anyway. She was on oxygen and stabilizing. All I could do was stay glued to my phone for the daily updates from a family doctor pressed into 160-hour weeks of emergency duty.
The first morning, I stalked a nice mule deer buck through the sage. I got within 55 yards of him, but never had a clean shot. He bedded under between pine trees on a steep slope, marvelously hidden in the shadows. I climbed to the top of the butte to peek into ravines. Mostly I wandered around and worried. An old, gray homestead at the top of the butte tilted precipitously with the prevailing wind direction. It looked unreal against the saturated blue sky and yellow cut field.
I took a photo to send to Mom.
When I was a kid she spent months photographing a small wooden boat decaying into a lake near our house. She would enjoy seeing that homestead returning to the earth too. We’d talk about what happened to the people who had lived there.
At the butte’s edge I got the first voicemail from Mom’s doctor. In his kind West Virginian drawl, the vocal equivalent of apple butter, I heard him say “Mom is doing better today.” Her blood oxygen had increased, she was alert and speaking. He sounded optimistic.
At midday, I cross the river and find a very old bison bone sticking out from the eroded bank. Mom could text a little, and I send her the ramshackle house and bone to let her know I love her. “I want to be there,” she messages back. “I must know more about that bone.”
I promise to tell her as soon as I can.
November 2022
I arrive at the spot unsure how I’ll feel about shooting a deer. When Mom died last October, I stopped caring about hunting. Or rather, I felt ambivalent about killing while missing the act of hunting itself.
The first buck I see is near the road. I follow him up a coulee and find him on a bluff in front of me. He’s in my rifle sights at 200 yards, but it doesn’t feel like his time to me. I’m not in the mood to take a life yet. Now I understand why old men like my dad are happy to let younger people sit in their treestands. It’s a good year to get more picky about which bucks I hunt.
On the way to the river, I get a snarky text from my uncle. We are feuding over my grandmother’s care. He’s using her modest social security deposits to buy military-style gun parts from Utah. I wish I would have gone somewhere without cell service, but I need to recruit some allies to look in on Nan since I live 2,000 miles away.
I stop at the eroded river bank to look for newly unearthed bison bones. I think about Mom. I don’t feel like going back up to the old homestead this time. It snows all day and I let the flurries insulate me from the outside world.
That evening, the whitetails I’m hunting fail to enter the newly cut alfalfa field at their usual time. Close to dark I creep through the woods near the field. Two antlerless deer run in front of me and the smaller one jumps a log, then stops to look back at something that isn’t me. In a split decision, I shoot her, then see a coyote that pushed them my way burst into the field. I suspect he’ll scavenge my deer’s guts after I leave. We helped each other out tonight. Ecologists call it mutualism. Maybe it’s a stretch to call it that in this case, but I enjoy thinking about being in a mutualistic relationship with the coyote.
When I cross the river in the dark with a pack full of meat, I wonder if the ranchers can see my headlamp beam through their picture window. I think about how tragic it would be to endure the past year only to slip and drown in such a shallow river.
November 2024
Katie and I are walking towards the same river on opening day of rifle season, a little late to catch the deer feeding, and she stops because the sunrise is so striking. I don’t rush because the light is special in this place and she ought to see it for herself. We watch a buck with lopsided antlers on a ridge, then pass the spot where I saw a cow skeleton next to a coyote skull with a bullet hole in it two years past. Pheasants cluck in the ranch fields and two bald eagles land on cottonwood branches. The landscape is just as abundant and interesting as I remember, and I’m glad it’s showing off this morning.
We cross the river. I appreciate that she’s game for it even though we’ve never been in the field together. We’re looking for a whitetail doe for her, and I’ll go after a mule deer buck if we see the right one. Nicole is taking some time to herself and setting up camp.
I’m grateful to be back in this place with friends. The last time I crossed the river it was cold, and wet, and solitary. I haven’t been back since Dad died, since my divorce. Dad understood how hunting represented reclaiming my life after the turmoil of Mom’s death.
If it weren’t for Katie and Nicole, I don’t know if I would have come back here again. Too many of the landmarks would remind me of the phone calls I made from eastern Montana to the small community hospital in West Virginia, and the croon of the doctor’s voice telling me that mom was getting better. Then his same voice telling me she wasn’t, that they were putting her on a ventilator and I needed to get there fast. I’m ready to let the landscape and the shared excitement of hunting camp do their work on me, and layer some fresh — hopefully joyful — memories onto this place like so much river silt.
So when Katie and I get to the eroded bank by the water, I don’t say what the bison bones or the old homestead or the butte mean to me, not yet anyway. Katie’s story — which as far as I can tell, is about gaining autonomy and new experiences as a hunter — seems a lot more hopeful. I’d rather live in that perspective today than pull her into mine.
Katie stalks a couple of whitetails in the cottonwoods and sage while I trail her movements. We watch a rutty spike chase a doe around the valley bottom, then push her far out of range. When the deer activity quiets in late morning, we consider going back across the river for lunch. Then Katie spots a ridge that might give us a view of where the doe may have gone. We scramble up the steep game trail and as Katie passes a lone pine tree she looks intrepid and confident in the same way Nicole and Andi did in the sunrise several years back.
At the ridge a whitetail doe surprises us by popping out of her bed in the junipers ahead. As we’re cursing our carelessness, I catch the outline of antlers below a boulder. Katie’s curiosity about the ridge has placed us with a clear view of a nice mule deer buck tucked into the hill across from us.
Severely misjudging the ravine’s width, I whisper to Katie that I wish I were a longer range shooter. She points out that it’s only about 200 yards and we both laugh at my pessimism and momentary loss of perspective. I’m worried about derailing our mission for Katie’s doe — she only has a few days to hunt in Montana with an out-of-state tag, while I have much more time. She reminds me again that I’m silly and should set up for the shot if I want. Katie hasn’t been part of the many hunting camps Nicole has organized over the years, but she’s intuited their ethic and reminds me that hunting success comes through shared experiences. Mutualism.
Katie hugs me in excitement after I make the shot. I realize that I’m not showing much emotion at that moment and hope my new hunting buddy doesn’t think I’m a sociopath. Later, I realize that I was having a hard time accepting the ease of the morning compared to the last few year’s struggles.
As Katie and I finish field dressing the buck and begin loading his leg quarters in our packs, I hear an engine put-putting not far from our little ravine. This is strange because there is no driving allowed on this publicly accessible ranch. I wonder if the rancher has crossed the river for some reason, if friends of the ranch are hunting from an ATV, or if someone is breaking the rules. Occasionally, we glimpse the ATV at the canyon mouth as it drives around the field below. I joke that maybe they’lll offer us a ride. It’s almost 70 degrees and I want to cool down the deer meat and ourselves.
When we enter the field, the old red Kubota side-by-side circles again and comes closer. The curmudgeonly voice in my head wonders what these yahoos are doing out here riding around on opening day. We see blaze orange. Maybe they also got a deer and are out fetching it? One of them is out of the ATV waving now. Are these some happy-go-lucky joy riders who want to see our deer? Or did something go wrong and Nicole has sent them out to find us?
Nicole.
That’s Nicole in aviators and camo, waving and smiling at us, sitting next to the rancher in the driver’s seat — a friendly, though stoic, woman who has always waved at me from the road. I guess we’re the yahoos now.
Katie and Nicole cram into the cab and I jump into the bed of the side-by-side for our luxury escort back across the river. Wedged between rifles, squishy game bags of meat, and antlers, I marvel at Nicole’s ability to make friends with the landowners, commandeer an ATV and show up like the cavalry. Mom would have loved hearing about this; she’d be glad I came back with friends again. While bouncing across the river rocks, I turn my face to the sun and feel more carefree than I have in a long time.
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 Upstate New York.