As I got older and started spending more of my time enjoying other outdoor pursuits like climbing, backcountry skiing and running rivers, I began to lose interest in hunting.
I also started to define myself as someone who did not hunt. I was someone who wore Patagonia fleece and climbed mountains, not some redneck who shot things for fun. I made sure I fit the labels I had created for myself.
I was never anti-hunting, I always understood the brutal truth that to live we must kill other beings (whether plant or animal). I was never against ethical hunting, I just became a non-hunter (but I still fished, still ate meat) for the last 18 years. But I have slowly come round full circle, and I have thought a lot about food, killing, animals and hunting. I read several great books a while back written by hunters (Heartsblood by Dave Peterson, Heart of Home and Bloodties by Ted Kerasote) which really explored the motives and ethics behind hunting. Good reads if you get a chance.
I never gave up fishing and have occasionally kept a fish to eat. In Nevada I actually went out hunting Chukars a few times. But this year I decided, for many reasons, to get back into hunting big animals, elk in particular. I bought a spike elk tag and literally dusted off my 30.06 rifle and pulled out a 20 year old box of shells.
Aside from the primary purposes of harvesting local meat from the mountain I work on and becoming part of the food chain in a more local and authentic way, I also wanted to go through the effort it takes to pack out a large animal in wild country without the crutch of an Off Highway Vehicle (OHV). A large part of my job has become responding to people complaining about roads that have been closed and a very common reason they provide for needing roads everywhere is that there is no way to retrieve elk and deer without an OHV. Not true, and I wanted to be able to prove it.
I spent four different days out looking for elk, all of the days were spent away from roads hiking in the backcountry and I got into elk everyday (just not the kind of elk that I had a permit to take). As I watched all of these elk, out doing what wild elk do in wild country, I wondered if I would really be able to take the life of one.
On the fourth day out, two days before the hunt closed, Myself, Todd and River hiked into a drainage on the backside of the La Sals and found two spikes.
I was surprised how much adrenaline started pumping just knowing there was a chance of taking an elk. Without boring you with the details I ended up stalking one from above on the canyon rim and taking one of the spikes. In the end the experience was one of satisfaction more than anything, but I would be lying if I did not say that it was also one of the most intense and exciting experiences I have had in a while.
We quartered the elk under a full moon, surrounded by bear tracks and bear scat. We did not want to leave any meat over night because of all the bear sign, so we divided his warm body into pieces a human could pack out and divided him up between the three of us and packed him out (without an OHV) in one back breaking trip. The coyotes found what we had left in the canyon about 30 minutes after we had left. Packing large chunks of meat out on my back, with my son, under a full moon with a pack of coyotes gladly howling about the large carcass they had found in the canyon bottom, made me feel more apart of the earth than anything else I have done.
Thanks Brother Elk
"After the carcass is dressed
and hung from the branches of a cottonwood tree,
I go inside and try and wash my hands-
but the blood won't come off.
There's no mistake.
I am marked for life.
I wear the elks tattoo
as its meat become my meat, and it's blood stains my blood.
Spirit
leaping from shape
to shape"
Part of the Poem "Skinning the Elk" by Art Goodtimes
"Not a single one of us has to catch a trout to eat. Nor, for that matter, do those of us who hunt big animals like moose or elk and feed our families for a year have to kill them to survive. We're making choices-more spiritual than economic- about grounding our souls in a landscape through participation, about becoming participatory citizens of a home place through the eating of what that landscape produces. The wading, the casting, the stalking, the picking, the plowing, are ceremonial means to procure nature's Eucharist."
-Excerpt from "Heart of Home" by Ted Kerasote
River looking for wapiti up high
Spirit leaping from shape to shape, in this case elk becoming four boys
La Sal Elk Country
Elk Country before the snow
