Every October, near my mom’s small Montana cabin, the American coots migrate. A coot is a small black diving bird (Fulica americana), belonging to the Linnean family of rails (Rallidae). It’s a strange bird, black with red-rimmed eyes, reminiscent of wearing a thousand hangovers at once. Its feet are an awkward evolutionary stalemate between a water bird and a land bird. They’re absolutely enormous, lobed, but with extending clawed toes that can somewhat easily navigate land. Hunters call them ‘mud hens’ — attesting that the legal game bird tastes like the mud on its very strange feet, and most generally avoid them as table fare.

I haven’t eaten mud hen myself. I find them unappetizing simply by their strange behavior. They migrate by the thousands through Georgetown Lake, and stragglers are often frozen while they’re still alive into newly forming ice. These are some sad stragglers, and I watched in horror as their own flock mates ate the ice-locked coots alive. Yeah, not only do they supposedly taste like mud, they taste like each other. They are cannibalistic. Givin’ me the ick.

In the timeless words of Cotton Eye Joe, I raise two infinite questions: Where do they come from? Where do they go?

It turns out that many coots raise their chicks in the boreal-adjacent north. They prefer shallower waters with a lot of marsh to them, and Georgetown is the perfect stopping ground. The lake is human-made, which does not mean it was dug out by hand — as I thought for the first thirty years of my life — it was, in fact, dammed. The land that the water now covers was an ancient elk calving ground and hunting point for many Indigenous peoples. Now, it’s a shallow, marshy, trout- and Kokanee salmon-laden recreational point for many. And it offers these thousands of coots exactly what they need on their way from the boreal-adjacent North down to southern wintering grounds in places like Texas, Louisiana, and even Mexico.

Another strange thing about coots? They practice conspecific brood parasitism: females sometimes slip their eggs into other coots’ nests and leave the parenting to somebody else. Well played, sisters.

Yet, the coots are but one half of the spectacle on this migratory stopover. As the birds start moving in late September, our local bald eagle population grows a hundredfold.

Patriotic birds of prey fly in from miles around. I once counted 34 of them in a single tree. They arrive in droves for what I deem The Fattening, and indeed, a single bald eagle can render himself literally flightless by gorging on coot to the point of temporarily grounded rotundity. And this isn’t an abnormal thing for eagles. They can eat enough off of roadkill that they’ll be grounded until they pass enough feces for airborne adventures once more.

The metaphor, my friends, writes itself. Dare I enter this allegorical drama with a sense of American pragmatism?

I do dare.

One of my favorite stories of displeasure in chosen American symbolism comes from Benjamin Franklin and his abhorrence for our newly adopted emblem.

He writes in a 1784 letter to his daughter that proclaims, to paraphrase, the bald eagle sucks and that the turkey is both more American and more respectable.

For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy.

Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country, though exactly fit for that order of knights which the French call Chevaliers d’Industrie. I am on this account not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey.

This last part is easy to misunderstand in today’s manner of speaking. He’s making a haute joke out of the whole thing, which translates to the following:

Cowardly eagles get chased off regularly by tiny birds, and god forbid they use such an image for the brave officers of the Continental Army, who did, in fact, chase the King’s men out of the United States. Their nepo-baby descendants, who get to inherit the prestige without doing any of the fighting? That’s another story. Anyway, their eagle logo looks more like a turkey, and that serves them right. Fools.

Frank the Tank is roasting the absolute bejeezus out of these folks. And he speaks to what I see every year at Georgetown.

The biological behavior is called kleptoparasitism, and it essentially means that an eagle is the lunchroom bully stealing everyone’s sandwiches. Watch the coot migration and you’ll catch eagles absolutely destroying each other to save their own caloric expenditure regardless of the easy coot abundance. They often steal from the hapless brown-feathered juveniles to gorge themselves. Fights in the air happen regularly, and I know multiple people who have had their windshields cracked by, yes, coots falling out of the sky. The lake becomes a literal war zone of half-eaten rails. Walk beneath the eagle roosts and you’ll find layers of feathers and lobed feet, all by their lonesome, chawed until chawed no more.

Anyway, let’s hear more about this turkey from Ben-jammin.

For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.

He’s right. The turkey, unlike the generic eagle, is American through and through. Silly and vain, and yes, territorial. (Though, if we’re splitting hairs, a bald eagle is actually North American. I digress.) As a child, my friend’s 4-H tom turkeys regularly chased me over their barnyard fence if I wasn’t careful. And as an adult, I’ve hunted turkeys a few times and had a single success predicated on an expert hunting partner’s knowledge of these squirrely and social large birds. Up close, they are stunning individuals, with iridescent coloring of wildly vibrant blues, deep forest greens, and amber sienna browns baked into blacks and stark whites.

Turkeys are also both gregarious and collaborative in a number of ways. Yes, the males do fight come spring strut, but the species’ overall behavior reminds me of how wild horses choose to live. Young males often make up their own ‘bachelor’ groups by age class, while groups of females raise their poults adjacent to others, often forming large flocks of turkeys with varying ages on the female side.

Older male turkeys — toms are older, jakes are younger — often engage in what’s called male coalition courtship. These well-dressed gentlemen work together to court the hens, though only the dominant male ends up being the father of her children. Interestingly, the males that do this are often related, meaning that the collaboration genetically benefits their bloodline, regardless of which male does the reproducing. In scientific terms, we might call this kin selection or inclusive fitness.

All this to say, I’m annoyed with everything political at this very moment, everything except birds.

Birds are not moral or immoral creatures. I can be horrified by their cannibalistic and parasitic behavior while also recognizing that they’re operating under a natural order that humanity still belongs to. It is not my duty to assign judgment to them for efficiently filling their daily caloric needs weighed against the extreme expenditures required of bird life. A bald eagle nabbing a fish from an osprey is an adaptation, not a theft.

I’ve lived in or adjacent to rural America for much of my life. Out here, the need to be a communal creature often dictates that I read people as people first, rather than a caricature of what I assume them to be. My assumptions are often subverted, anyway, and I have learned that peaceful disagreement is actually what happens out here in the sticks far more than the opposing facets of media want us to believe.

Where I find myself perturbed is when I’m within a bubble, where the assumption is the norm rather than the question. The people who speak ill of the other side are often the ones who have remarkably few human interactions with the opposition, and who haven’t taken the time to attempt to understand it from differing moral frameworks. To me, that’s a failure that belongs to all of us.

Really, I’m upset with both left and right wings enough of the time that I’d rather exist somewhere in the murky and embodied middle, no matter what my voting record might tell someone about me as a data point.

At the end of the day, a functioning bird requires two wings, whether it’s a gregarious turkey, a cannibalistic coot, or a thieving and cowardly bald eagle.

The metaphor, it turns out, has written itself.

After we parted, I felt happy to have been able to share a small piece of that transition with the hikers. I climbed over the pass and hopped off trail, found mountain goat fluff, and tucked myself on a high ledge where I watched the wilderness stretch out to the horizon. A hawk circled hundreds of feet below me, trolling the treetops. I could hear birds and squirrels alarm their squawks then fall into silence.

The Places I’d Never Have Gone

When I first began hunting, the world suddenly opened up to me in a whole new way. I wasn’t simply scrolling through AllTrails to find a new trailhead. I was diving deep into public lands, learning the differences between state land, BLM, National Forest, Wilderness, Wildlife Management Areas, and more. I studied Montana’s Block Management program, then a whopping 7.2 million acres of private land that is publicly funded by Montana FWP for hunting access.

I found myself on a vast private ranch, searching for pronghorn on giant sage flats, spotting them from too far away, and watching them fly across the landscape like falcons to parts unknown. I climbed down into the canyon heart of the Missouri Breaks, where I hunted mule deer with bighorn rams not 200 yards away, bedded and watching. I sat in a blind on a wash in Texas, while feral hogs snorted their disapproval at my scent and giant whitetails passed through without skipping a beat. Tucked into a corn field pit blind, I watched as dizzying flocks of geese circled down in a broad tornado of motion, arcing their wings for perfect landings among 200 hand-stuffed decoys. And I’ve filed miles upon miles of game trails, picking up elk scat, squishing it between my fingertips, and yeah — smelling it to see how fresh it is.

The times, my friends, they certainly have changed. All of these places are off the recreational maps. I never would have found them if hunting hadn’t brought a new life to the landscape that I felt called to chase like a bloodhound on a scent line. The first time I caught a whiff of elk so close that I could nearly taste it still registers like bells in my memory. When I first caught a single antler tip of what would be my first tagged buck still shines in my mind like a beacon in the sage. When I saw the brilliant colors of a pheasant rise from beneath my spaniel’s muzzle, I gasped in delight.

What I keep coming back to is the surge of diamond-like sparkle that hits my hunter’s brain each time I find something new and exciting. It could be as small as picking up the baby tooth of a bighorn in a red sand canyon, or the knock-down drag-out power of a bull elk cutting off my bugle and running into my call. But I know that these are experiences I wouldn’t have shaken out of a recreational life. There’s no need to. You don’t follow game trails when your destination is a high alpine lake. You don’t go out on a private ranch without permission.

First, you need a reason to step off of the trail. Hunting gave me one.

Becoming A Participant

What I love, what I profoundly love, what has changed me from the inside out — it’s not the act of filling a tag. Across the past ten years, that has been a rare occasion. It’s the act of being on the landscape, doing what my friend and public lands advocate Randy Newberg taught me is participating on the landscape.

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I have always tended to bypass looking at what was rooted for what was moving through. My neurodynamic brain tends to sparkle when things are moving, lights up when I see a flash of an ear over the grass or a tine of an antler in the timber. It’s not really surprising to me that I became a hunter; I am wired for it.

I tracked animals growing up in rural Ohio, pocketing snakes and baby robins. Sometimes, I’d slowly follow the trail of a whitetail buck through the neighboring pockets of woods. In that place, I was closer to plants than any point in my life.

We were free to roam on that big farm landscape. The neighborhood kids would climb the mulberry tree off the covered bridge, and then we’d go home stained bright magenta. We’d pluck apples off apple trees in the fall, and we’d eat strawberries from a small hill with a shaded garden. I’d twist a sun-warmed tomato right off the vine and eat it in huge hungry bites, the juice dripping down the front of my shirt. Of course, we weren’t supposed to be doing these things, but we did anyway. Growing up on a 200-acre nondenominational Christian commune wasn’t all bad. The widespread community gardens and continual lack of parental supervision were on point, if you were a five-year-old with mischief in mind.

I would pluck fat purple clover heads and suck the nectar from the florets. I’d make dandelion crowns and wear them for the hour or so they would last before wilting. Trees were made for climbing and lounging. But I can’t really pinpoint what else I might have done with wild plants. There has been no ancestral hand-me-down plant knowledge or any real sense of human-plant kinship born into me. Whatever relationship my own ancestors had to plants has fizzled, and I am left a blank slate, trying to reclaim the pieces.

Until this year, plants have been minimally on the agenda. I am reaching backward to pull the knowledge forward, into my era. Thankfully, there are people who learn and retain this knowledge and share it effusively. I’ve dug into the work of Dr. Nicole Apelian and Thomas Elpel, as well as picking up a few guides specific to my neck of the woods. My neck of the woods is particularly interesting and occasionally abundant, and we are standing on the precipice of that abundant time.

The strange thing is that I cannot bring myself to forage. My hunting brain says to keep moving, keep going, keep climbing, there are tracks, you must follow them, there is scat, how fresh is it, now another step and another. I keep thinking that I will one day stop to bend and pick, to take home and experiment, but I haven’t done this yet.

Instead, I find myself being in relationship with these plants as needed. I made a spit poultice of plantain for a bee sting on the trail the other day — chewing a leaf, packing it onto my hand and repacking it when it would inevitably fall off. I stop and pull usnea apart simply for the delight of its bouncy inner band that stretches and snaps. I picked my first wild strawberries a few weeks ago. I press my nose into flowering wild roses and keep track as they begin to flip themselves into rose hips, which I will pick for tangy nibbling all through September. The thimbleberries are about to come in, and I grab them by the handful when they ripen. They’re not great for keeping, but they are perfect for plucking and walking.

It makes me wonder if some of us are born one way or another, born to forage or born to hunt. I am so far on the hunting side that the foraging side seems slow and bulky. Do I really need to pluck a hundred arnica flowers to make a bruise compress? Or take home plantain as a natural bandage when I have modern-day healing tech in my cabinet? I love knowing that usnea is a wild fix-all, but is it more useful dried in my kitchen or left in its element?

My burgeoning plant literacy is forcing my hand on the matter. Building knowledge in herbalism is pushing the idea that I can further decouple my dependency on continuing consumption and reroute it toward a relationship with soil and place. I do love to hunt, but I hate to kill. The power of killing, dressing, and butchering big game animals lessens my dependence on the industrial meat market, and that is profound and impactful. I don’t think I’d kill if it weren’t for that aspect of the hunt.

As I gain more knowledge, I’m pressed to think further than just the meat in my deep freezer. I’m thinking more about food sovereignty and dignity and what these two pursuits might mean in a world that is designed around consumptive industries.

But there is also a feeling that I must turn everything that I learn or do into a resource, and as I write it out, I wonder if that subconscious conflict is preventing me from foraging. I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility of foraging without deepening the relationship into more than just a new consumptive resource that I’m learning about. I haven’t figured out my positioning toward wild plants as I have with wild animals. When I hunt successfully, I am always leaving something behind for the ecosystem, as an offering of a sort. We share in the abundance of nutrients, blood, bones, and food. It is not one-sided, not as I see it.

How do I earn that sense with plant life? I think I need time to grow into that side of things.

I'll keep walking myself into the answers.

The recent monument news came to me not in headlines or papers but via the video-led devastation of many on social media. It’s a strange way to get the news.

I’m sad that this is the norm for us now.

In previous eras, trained journalists pulled the emotion out of the news. The “I” was disengaged, and the facts were centered — no matter what said journalist thought of the matter. The purpose is not to pull the humanity out of what’s happening; it’s to place the reader in a point of critical thinking rather than a psychological and emotional jolt. ‘Twas the anti-social media in that way.

We are in what I might call a modern era of accidental muckrakers. On an individual level, I get it. There is no training prior to being handed a TikTok or Instagram account. There is only the algorithm and a front-facing camera. And the algorithm loves a hot take. It’s thrilling to post an emotional video and have hundreds of thousands watch it. It feels like action. It feels like some sort of tension pushes against the powers that be in that moment. Rarely is that true.

It is simply less thrilling to play the long game and pay attention to the patterns.

But alas, this is why I’m here. I’m here to remind you of the small things, the historical facts, and, most importantly, the patterns. There are intentional actions that matter more than online outrage, and we must repositioning our voices in order to be heard. I want to note that you don’t necessarily have to take one away to engage the other. You can have your thousands of likes and eat them too. But, knowledge helps.

Time to kill the thrill with facts. Let’s get into it.

Understanding the Monument Cycle

If it feels like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante keep changing, that’s because they do. But the broader pattern is more than 100 years old. And the key here is to remember the following:

The boundaries of national monuments largely depend on which administration is in office.

1906: The Beginning of the Cycle

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to allow presidents to quickly protect important cultural, historical, and scientific places on public land. It should be noted that the Antiquities Act was an unremarkable thing at the time, and there was little contention over it. Theodore Roosevelt immediately used it to create national monuments, including the Grand Canyon before it became a national park. That was a little more contentious.

From the beginning, people argued over how much land should be protected. Don’t think Roosevelt’s ideas-turned-actions were celebrated, because they certainly weren’t. The Sen. Mike Lee of that era was Sen. Weldon B. Heyburn. But this guy was also against Confederate monuments. And Theodore Roosevelt was a purveyor of eugenics. So let’s not paint this as good vs. evil.

I digress.

Early 1900s: Small Boundary Shifts, No Court Challenge

Between 1909 and 1963, presidents reduced the boundaries of national monuments about 18 times. Most were relatively small adjustments based on new surveys or changing understanding of what needed protection.

The largest of these early reductions occurred in 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson removed nearly 300,000 acres from Mount Olympus National Monument. Even so, the monument remained protected and later became Olympic National Park.

One important difference from today is that there was no immediate court challenge. Wilson's reduction was accepted as a presidential action, and its legality was never tested. That early precedent is one reason the legal question remains unresolved, and has been thus for over a century.

1963–2017: Expansion Becomes Bipartisan (Mostly)

For more than 50 years, no president reduced a national monument. Instead, both Republican and Democratic administrations used the Antiquities Act to protect increasingly large landscapes—not just archaeological sites, but entire ecosystems, fossil beds, wildlife habitat, and Indigenous cultural landscapes.

Please note that none of these changes happened without outcry and pushback. And this is not an exhaustive list.

• President Jimmy Carter (1978): Created 17 national monuments in Alaska, protecting more than 56 million acres that later became many of Alaska’s national parks and preserves.

• President Bill Clinton (1996): Established Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument to protect nearly 1.9 million acres of canyons, fossil beds, and desert ecosystems.

• President George W. Bush (2006–2009): Designated several of the world’s largest marine national monuments, including Papahānaumokuākea in the Pacific Ocean, recognizing that entire ocean ecosystems deserved protection.

• President Barack Obama (2016): Created Bears Ears National Monument after years of advocacy by a coalition of five Tribal Nations, protecting a landscape valued for its archaeological sites, wildlife, sacred places, and living cultural traditions. Expanded Papahānaumokuākea to more than four times its original size, reinforcing the modern trend of using the Antiquities Act to protect large, interconnected ecosystems.

• President Joe Biden (2021–2024): Restored Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante and created or expanded monuments such as Camp Hale–Continental Divide in Colorado and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni–Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

2017–Today: The Pendulum Returns

The modern cycle began with Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante.

• 2016: President Obama created Bears Ears.

• 2017: President Trump dramatically reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante.

• 2021: President Biden restored both monuments.

• 2026: President Trump reduced them again, this time even more substantially.

Yes, this is an annoying pattern.

It’s Not the End of the World…or These Monuments

As I see it at this moment, three outcomes are possible:

• Another political shift. A future president could restore the monuments using the Antiquities Act…again. I see this as being the most likely scenario.

• A Supreme Court ruling. The Court may finally decide whether presidents have the authority to significantly shrink monuments after they are created. With the way the Court is situated at this particular moment, I’m curious at what they’d decided.

• Congress acts. Congress could rewrite the Antiquities Act or permanently settle the boundaries, though that has proven politically difficult. Think of this as a 1% chance. Yay politics.

What’s Unique About Trump’s Recent Changes: They’re Bigger

What’s different today isn’t that the debate exists — it’s the scale of the changes.

The current reductions are among the largest in the history of the Antiquities Act, and they may ultimately force the Supreme Court to answer a question that has remained unresolved for more than a century.

This also blatantly ignores the will of the Indigenous peoples of this land. If you want to follow this in a meaningful way, I recommend supporting Len Necefer’s Substack. He speaks to this a million times better than I ever could.

What Can You Do? Be Prepared to Stay the Course

At the most recent public lands rally, I was talking with someone who has been in public lands advocacy for a long time. I asked if the cycle ever got tiring. This was now my third round of advocating in person to stop the sale of public lands, and I had the understanding that I was in it for the long haul.

“It’s just a part of the process,” they told me. “It’s also the knife’s edge that keeps public land advocacy groups funded.”

This is the part that we forget — that it takes tension to create tension. There is no tug-of-war without the opposition. It reminds me of the hilarious fact that a liberal government is better for gun and ammunition sales than a conservative government ever will be. Fear drives action. But fear over time can also cause burnout.

I've often wondered how public lands advocates could become more proactive. But after tracing the history back to 1906, I'm not sure this story exists without opposition. Conservationists need challengers just as challengers need conservationists.

I leave you with this, in the most unhinged example of conservationists vs. the Mike Lees of the world.

Sometimes, I think we need to thank the opposite side. They remind us of what we have to lose.

And Please Don’t Forget to Actually Write Your Representatives

And call them. And comment on their social media before you make that post. And bother the crap out of them.

It’s the one thing that makes a data-driven difference.

Really, history is made by the people who keep showing up after everyone else has moved on to the next outrage. It’s made by the people that get out of the app and build a pattern of communication with their reps.

This, my friends, is the long game of public lands advocacy. Keep showing up. Then, settle in. We’re not here for ourselves, but for the seven generations down the line, who will hopefully get to experience Grand Staircase like I’ve been able to experience it, and then pass it on to their children.

I live for clouds out here in this arid and elevated stretch of the sagebrush sea. There is one tree on these 20 acres, and it only offers shade to songbirds, mice, and occasionally my little brown spaniel.

When the sun shines on this little farm, it shines white and hot. The other day, my neighbor and I were lamenting that it’s a defeating sort of sun. It’s the kind of sun that burns you in 15-20 minutes if you’re not careful. My truck often reads 110+ degrees when I step into it. The horses and long ears spend countless hours in their shed or chasing the shade of the barn. The border collie digs cool holes to lie in (much to my dismay) while keeping a diligent eye on his herd. The brown dog wants to be inside more than outside, and inside this tinbox house is not always much better. I have a rolling A/C unit that I pull around with me on the worst days, but for the most part, I make do without it.

Then, there is that which shall not be named: the wind. She deserves to be blown over in italics. I do not say the word aloud for fear of waking the spirit that breathes through the funnel of the Pintlers and the Flint Range.

I envision her as a tall skyward woman with long curly hair who wears billowing dresses. She regularly sends the full glory of her curls and skirted fabric into the sky, across the plains, and up the foothills of the Boulder Mountains that begin just a few hundred yards from where I live. She is both tepid and tenuous, occasionally monstrous in her blowing vanity. She kicks up rolling dust clouds that send the horses galloping for shelter, she attempts to peel back the tin roof of the shed, she shakes the house that I live in with both hands when she’s most tempestuous, and she steals many evenings that should be productive with her forces. My deck has a 6-foot-high wind block on the prevailing side. It’s laughable when she’s in motion.

She turns the heat into a dirt-filled exfoliant. She shifts bearable cold into dangerous, stinging chills. If we leave her out of the picture, the wide difference between 110 and the -58 that the depth of winter sometimes brings is a humbling equation. Combine her airs into the extremes, and I find myself nearly worshipping the constitution of everyone who has spent a lifetime here. This stretch of Montana prairie is not a place for wimps, and I am kind of a wimp, and I have had to face that part of myself here.

So, when I woke up, the sheet of clouds blocking the mighty sun offered immediate reprieve. She continued to sleep; stillness reigned. I wore a sweatshirt to combat the delicious morning chill. I drank my iced coffee surrounded by my yawning and nuzzling equines, freed from the shed on their own volition. I walked across the drive to visit with my neighbor’s buckskin stud colt, scruffing his fluffy baby-soft neck and cradling his Lilliputian muzzle in one hand. I listened to the trill of the horned larks, the song of the vesper sparrow, the chittering of a bluebird. I played ball with the brown dog and the collie.

The brown dog is currently sitting at my feet, the ball not two inches from his paw should I get up. He is a perfect image for my internal understanding of the dog days of summer, this little guy stretched out on the cool linoleum floor, napping the midday away.

When the Dog Star Rises

Arise, dog days of summer. Arise is, in fact, the correct terminology. The dogs we are talking of here are celestial, not earthbound. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that Sirius — the brightest star in Canis Major, the ‘Great Dog’ constellation — rose so close to the sun from July to August that it intensified the heat during that time of year. They determined the dog days to be July 3rd to August 11th, no matter where one was at. The phrase, translated to English over 500 years ago, stuck like glue.

We could nitpick this. Latitude dictates our starry views, meaning that if we’re counting on Sirius rising to indicate the dog days, they’d be different the world over. It is, of course, oriented to the northern hemisphere’s experience of summer. The modern equivalent of the dog days here in my exact location of Montana would be August 20-25, with the star first appearing around 6am, though likely blocked at that time by the mountains surrounding me.

I can get behind the ancient starry hypothesis that summer heat intensifies when Sirius cuddles the sun. We are either lucky or burdened with the current astronomical truth of the matter, but out here on the prairie I’d make up a thousand strange and comforting hypotheses to help me make sense of the extremes of this country.

On this day of reprieve, I will be lucky to get what feels like a hundred things done that I’ve been putting off due to heat and unrelenting weather. I have a house to clean, a barn to reorganize, and two wild donkeys to bother.

This wimp is relishing a cool, still moment. I should get going before she does.

Please do not speak her name.

There is far too much to do today.

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When I first started The Westrn in the spring of 2024, I had no idea where it would lead. Two years brought a wild flux of change, momentum, ambition, and teamwork that built so much that I’m still really proud of.

But over the past six months—through teaching high school, through writing less and thinking more, through spending a lot of quiet time in outdoor places instead of chasing deadlines — I realized something. The stories were never really the point. They were always pointing toward a bigger question.

How do we build a deeper relationship with the outdoors?

Not just by reading about it. Not just by buying the right gear. But by paying attention and asking better questions. By becoming more curious, more capable, and more connected to the places we spend time.

That’s the work I want to dedicate myself to. So today, The Westrn becomes Nicole Qualtieri.

Not because I’m leaving outdoor journalism behind. I’m not. In fact, I was recently accepted into the incredible Master of Fine Arts program for Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana, and I begin my graduate studies next month. (Eek!) Hopefully, I’ll be able to share much of that journey with you as well.

Over the coming months, you’ll start seeing new essays, field notes, books, journals, and practical tools, all built around one simple idea:

Helping people build a richer relationship with the outdoors.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. You helped shape The Westrn into something I loved and something I’m still really proud of. You supported more than a dozen writers in telling amazing and even award-winning stories. Honestly, it was a dream come true in many ways, and the devastation I felt as it began to shift on the sand dunes of change ushered in this period of personal and creative evolution.

Really, I’m grateful to have had the time to figure it out.

I hope you’ll come with me as it grows into something even more meaningful.

And if you’re new here, welcome.

I have a feeling we’re going to ask a lot of good questions together.

See you outside,

Nicole

Curiosity has been on my mind as of late, for a plethora of reasons. And really, it’s a hum that doesn’t stop. I’m so often insatiably curious to the point where it’s probably a little problematic.

Here’s an example from two days ago, while sitting on the couch enjoying my coffee:

Oh, look! A bumblebee! Where does he live? Who is his queen? Why is he so fluffy? Wait! Is that the local pronghorn herd on that hill over there? Why are they running? Are they running from something? Ah! They’re playing! They are playing SUPER hard! Like, the fastest I’ve seen pronghorn run. Were they training the babies for the hard migrations ahead? Was play simply built into the system of endurance work for these Pleistocene-era creatures?

This curious process is simply part of the recipe of me. But if I’m being honest, I’ve been experiencing a low yet intrusive level of anhedonia over the past year, and it’s been a strange reckoning to keep my curiosity alive and limber.

Luckily, I’ve had a reawakening.

How My Students Helped Me Reclaim My Curiosity

I spent the last six months filling an emergency gap as an English teacher at my local rural-adjacent high school. It was, quite honestly, the most fun, the most difficult, and the hardest work I’ve done for the most menial pay and the least amount of energy I’ve ever had at the end of the workday.

Much of the general public seems to want to speak ill of this coming generation, to which I say shame on anyone who thinks they know anything about them without spending ample time with them. They are children, if nothing else, and they reminded me that curiosity is integral to survival.

Over the course of our time together, I watched curiosity take root in unexpected ways. My eighth graders discovered a love for acting as they studied, performed, and rewrote scenes from Romeo and Juliet. My juniors wrote informational essays about what they loved, and in my little town that meant plenty of hunting and fishing—from just as many girls as boys. My constant doodlers dove into art history. One of my LGBTQ+ students researched Stonewall and was thrilled to learn what people had endured so he could be so casually and openly himself in high school.

I wanted to show them they could write about what they loved, discover where those passions came from, and enjoy the process, even if writing wasn’t their strength. Somehow, despite my lack of a teaching background, it worked. These kids were all in on discovery—asking questions, chasing answers, and digging deeper into what lit them up.

It certainly took a wee bit of prodding initially. Many of them said they had nothing to write about. I sat with these kids, and we talked it out until we found the thing that lit up their faces. I realized then that curiosity, though natural, can sometimes take time and intention to tease out. It took the right question to figure out the next question, and then we were off and running. I came to see curiosity as a result of this questioning process, rather than the usual stack of domino-like inquiries falling in my brain.

Living in the Questions

I have kept a magazine snippet I cut out of Oprah magazine (lol) when I was in high school. It’s a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I came back to Rilke’s poetry as an adult. (Widening Circles, I’m looking at you.)

I'm beginning to think curiosity is more like a muscle. It weakens when neglected and strengthens when exercised. And maybe the smallest exercise is simply asking and living in one more question than you did yesterday. If anything can break the performative certainty that is rampant in this online era, maybe it’s a one-more-question practice that helps us take the next step toward growth rather than conviction.

So, in honor of living in the questions, in gratitude for my ever-curious students, in the daily grind of beating back my haunting and strange anhedonia, in awe of the pronghorn running full tilt along the edge of sage and pine, here are 100 questions to help us, me, you reclaim a sense of curiosity, of wonder, of awe, and maybe even of laughter.

I don’t know if these questions will change the way you move through the world. I do hope they’ll help me change the way I move through mine. So take one with you. Into the woods. Into your backyard. Into whatever your classroom is.

You don’t have to answer them all. Just don’t stop asking. And please, add a few more and help me out.

100 Questions for Curious People to Carry Outside

On Paying Attention

Theme: Learning to notice what you’ve overlooked.

1. How would a toddler explore the area directly at my feet?

2. What is taking my attention from this place?

3. Do I know the plants here?

4. How has this place changed since the last time I was here?

5. How long can I be still without wanting to move?

6. Does moving more slowly change my experience?

7. What can I offer this particular patch of ground?

8. What is this particular patch of ground offering to me?

9. If I am quiet for a long time, what do I hear?

10. If I am loud intermittently, what happens?

On Storying A Place

Theme: How we can better understand and interpret landscape.

11. What stories are buried here?

12. Where does this waterway end up?

13. What is old or new here?

14. How does interdependence work in this ecosystem?

15. Who lives or lived here?

16. How do the seasons affect this area?

17. What does the weather change here?

18. Why is the land shaped in this way?

19. How did I receive access to this place?

On Wildlife

Theme: Learning to think like other creatures.

21. What is the biggest or smallest being that lives here?

22. Where are the animals at this exact time of day? Why?

23. Who might see me that I am not seeing?

24. What disruption am I causing to their day, and how could I change that?

25. What rare or endangered species inhabit this place?

26. Who is talking right now, and what are they saying?

27. What wild homes exist in this wild neighborhood?

28. Who else walks this trail?

29. What animals are below or above me?

30. Why are they all so cute, even when ugly?

On Plants

Theme: Paying attention to what is rooted.

31. What is so common that I am overlooking it?

32. Why are these plants here?

33. What is native/non-native/invasive/evolving about plant life here?

34. Do any of these plants offer me nutrition/medicine?

35. What plants are specific to this landscape or more universal? (Hints: Usnea! Plantain! Yarrow!)

36. Are there any life-threatening plants in this landscape?

37. Who holds the Indigenous/scientific/local wisdom of plants in this ecosystem?

38. What do these plants have to teach me?

    ---

On Relationships

Theme: How humans fit into the landscape.

39. Do I know who the original inhabitants of this landscape are?

40. What resources exist to help connect me to the ancestors of this landscape?

41. Who else is enjoying or utilizing this landscape and to what ends?

42. Who manages this place and what is their relationship to it?

43. How does access affect this place?

44. What responsibilities do I hold to the past, present, and future inhabitants?

45. Who are the caretakers of this ecosystem?

On Becoming

Theme: Your identity as an outdoorsperson.

46. How do I define myself in relationship to place?

47. What is my signature offering as an outdoorsperson?

48. Do I give more than I take?

49. Where does fear touch my outdoor life, and how can I expose myself to fear as a tool for growth?

50. What place does joy serve in my outdoor space?

51. Am I a participant, an observer, or a mixture of both in the outdoors?

52. Am I part of nature or outside of it?

53. What barriers exist in my heart/soul/self that prevent me from better connecting to the outdoors?

54. What am I really darned good at out here, and how can I celebrate it?

55. How can I get more comfortable being alone in the outdoors?

On Growth and Learning

Theme: Building competence as outdoorspeople.

56. What intrigues me about the outdoors that I want to learn more about?

57. Can any primitive skill sets inform the skill sets that I already have?

58. Are there any activities I haven’t tried that are calling to me?

59. What opinions do I hold about the outdoors that I should question?

60. Is there anything that I am embarrassed to ask/try?

61. What do other people seem to understand about the outdoors that I don’t yet?

62. How does the lifelong pursuit of mastery play into my outdoor experience?

63. Who do I view as masters of my interests, and how can I connect with them?

64. What are my limiting beliefs and how can I destroy them to make room for growth?

65. How can I accept any physical barriers in order to better my experience?

On Wonder

Theme: Joy. Joy. Awe. Discovery. Laughter. Delight.

66. How do I welcome more wonder in my outdoor adventure?

67. What made me laugh or smile outside today?

68. Who can I share this place with that will impart more joy into the experience?

69. What can I change about my presence or patterns to welcome a greater sense of discovery?

70. Do I experience more positivity by being still or by moving?

71. What would 6-year-old me want to do here?

72. Am I taking things too seriously?

73. How does a gendered culture expect me to experience/act/behave in the outdoors?

74. What is the last thing I remember delighting me in an outdoor space?

Stewardship

Theme: Reciprocity through observation rather than politicization.

75. What trade-offs exist in this place historically, in the present, and in the future?

76. Does this ecosystem need direct or indirect stewardship from me, and how can I best offer that?

77. What small thing can I do today to improve this place?

78. Who are the original stewards, and how did they historically manage this landscape?

79. What has changed in this place in the past 100 years?

80. Will this place exist seven generations down the line?

81. Who are the modern keepers of this place, and what support do they need?

82. What does stewardship mean to me?

On Community

Theme: The interconnectedness of being together and learning from one another.

83. What community exists in or serves this place, and how can I contribute?

84. Who taught me how to better exist in the outdoors, and who could I teach?

85. Are there local organizations or groups that create outdoor opportunities here?

86. Who are the outdoor educators that specialize in this sort of outdoor experience?

87. What knowledge or traditions might be disappearing from this landscape?

88. Who holds the stories of this place, and where can I find them?

89. Are there volunteer opportunities that make sense for me?

90. What role could I best fill for the outdoor community at large?

On Presence

Theme: The soul + spirit experience of being outside.

91. What feelings or emotions am I carrying into this place today?

92. What is my reason for being here, and how can I expand on that reason?

93. How does my internal world change after time spent outside?

94. What do I take back with me into the modern world?

95. What do I sense here, not with my mind, but with my soul and my spirit?

96. Does the outdoor experience double as a spiritual experience for me?

97. What rituals or traditions can I create as a sacred offering?

98. What spiritual guides can help influence a deeper connection to wild places?

99. If I were to listen for the spiritual as well as the natural, what might I hear?

100. What questions do I hold that I can live in from a soul perspective, rather than answer?

As you have probably noticed, I am in a moment of internal inquiry and evolution, both on Substack and in my personal life.

I have a feeling these questions are the beginning of something larger. Thanks for being here while I figure out what that is. I’d like to end with the last line of Rilke’s incredible poem Widening Circles:

Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

There is a campsite that I love that sits in a little-known spot in Mt. Haggin Wildlife Management Area near my home. It’s impossible to see, hard to find, and on a two-track that looks like it could lead nowhere.

It does lead somewhere.

That place is a stunning campsite with an established fire ring under two old-growth Douglas firs that abuts the headwaters of the Clark Fork River. Red cliff spires reach into the skies, and if you know where to look, you can follow a trail miles down a rarely trekked creek, where endless rose hips and thimbleberries grow. I’ll be honest, I haven’t even camped there. I don’t really need to; I live 20 minutes away. But I often park there, throw sticks for my dogs, and hike from that very picturesque spot.

Last week, I popped over for a quick hike, and this beautiful little oasis was desecrated by mounds of toilet paper, wipes, and even dirty underwear that was now spread out over the small stretch of pristine grass surrounding the campsite. I was so disgusted and overwhelmed that I became flooded with anger. What alarmed me even further was the sheer state of helplessness I felt against the tide of disrespect that these people left in their shitty wake. Last year, another person parked an impossibly old RV in a nearby spot, littered the place with trash, gas cans, and children’s toys. They stayed well beyond the 16-day limit ascribed to all campers, letting tires go flat and cans go empty beyond the confines of the camper.

I long ago made a promise to myself to pick up the trash that others left behind, but instead of a sense of superiority, I’m beginning to feel like maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s a Sisyphean effort. On another hike near this same spot, I pulled part of a side-by-side bumper off the trail. I am often amazed at the places where I find beer cans, some likely decades old, when following skinny game trails high into the mountains. I’ve found countless plastic water bottles, a chihuahua-sized dog jacket, a blaze orange buff, beer cans (obviously), and even a few rusted-out firearms. Granted, a few of these things were clearly lost, not left, but the human imprint is one that lasts, even in landscapes that can make you feel singular in a moment of visitation.

I can’t help but think the people who camped in this particular spot knew they were doing something wrong when littering a clean dispersed site with the most disgusting trash one can leave. It feels impossible to me. You need to have a modicum of familiarity just to get back into this particular public lands haunt. There are no advertisements, and it’s only open 6 months per year.

And anyway, how can you wade through the levels of camping-adjacent material without running across one mention of litter? People generally do not like litter, even in the most concrete of places. I recall being about six years old in the early nineties, riding my banana seat bike back home after school, when my accidentally open backpack let fly a folder of papers. As I stepped off my bike to try to collect all the papers blowing in the wind, the neighborhood kids called me a litterer! They yelled it at me, they didn’t help my panicked attempt to collect everything, I burst into tears on the sidewalk, with the called-name shame attached to my being like a scarlet letter. Litterer! Never!

We knew the word then, and we know it now.

Litter is not a new concept. Nor is it a new problem. At this point, I’m not sure that the stewardship gap — the gap between those who steward and those who mire — is even an issue of education. There are simply people who intentionally care, and people who intentionally do not.

The scariest thing I’ve felt, though, is that sense of learned helplessness. I will admit the following: the last time I hiked, I didn’t pick up an ancient beer can. I walked past some side-by-side headlight refuse. I was — I’m sorry to admit this — too grossed out to pick up the bathroom trash. These things stayed a part of the landscape. My own shame has been sitting in my gut for days. I don’t like it. I refuse to become it.

There are permanent signs of human scarring all around this particular spot. If you know what you’re looking at, you will see the mounds of rock not as a natural shift in landscape but as mining tailings. If you read the signs, you will know that miners lived and died tragically, right here, that this waterway was absolutely destroyed for the profit of very few, and that groups of modern stewards put the pieces back together. There are chimneys still standing from original homesteads and buildings. There are strange pieces of steel that were likely part of something pulled by horses. If you look even deeper, you will find more signs of Indigenous humanity that stretch back thousands of years.

Some of these things tell stories. Others left permanent scars. But much of what I find and pack out is simply small and impermanent, neither story nor scar.

Do I wish I could hand the occupants a trash bag and watch as they cleaned up their own mess? I do. Did I feel angry that they took up my emotional safe space with this disgusting predicament, then felt I couldn’t bring myself to do what they should have done? I’m upset with myself for it. I really am. But it is impermanent, and there is a high likelihood that I will go back today and it will once again be pristine, if not by my own hand then someone else’s. I can also promise myself not to let this be a defeating moment, but one of acceptance.

I must accept the things I cannot change, but I have to accept responsibility for what I can. My new normal, in addition to educating where I can, is to acknowledge that people have always left things behind, but I don’t have to.

That’s what I’m thinking about today. Here’s to a litter-free week for all of us <3

My alarm goes off now at 6:45 each morning. This, to me, is an anomaly. Me, of skipped 8 am classes in college. Me, of the truly 9-5 remote work world. Me, of a lifetime of midnight bedtimes. Night owl is what they call me; I left all the worms for the early birds.

The night owl in me respectively prepares the forced early bird for her days. The coffee machine is set up, requiring only the press of a button. I set my truck keys next to my daily wash of vitamins, and I hit the remote start button to ensure warmth upon forthcoming entry. My outfit for the day is picked out. I wear my watch to time things out as best as my certified ADHD time blindness allows me, too. I begin to play music on my phone as the morning glaze ensures that I will set it down and forget about it, lest it sing songs from its unlikely perch. I curse my died-in-the-wool permanent circadian rhythm. It never truly catches up with this schedule, but over the past few weeks, it’s gotten a little more normal. I try to stay within its bounds on weekends. I’m working to make it work.

If there’s a gift in any of this, it’s that I am partial to sunrises. Becoming a hunter gave me something to woo over in the pursuit’s prescribed early mornings. The dull eyes grow a little shine when trained on the stretch of sun over a horizon, warm colors seeping into inky blues slowly blotting out the stars. My morning drive is magnificent. The Anaconda-Pintler range takes up most of the scene, with gripping pinks, golds, silvery-blues, the reflection of snowfields, and the majesty of purple mountains. This commute is not a city one, drenched in towers and concrete, but one dripping with mountains and the sizable elk herd that I now know like the palm of my hand. Here is where they cross over, there they are as tiny dots on the ARCO fields, grazing upon the buried Superfund waste of Anaconda’s once active smelter, now to my left. It looms over this little town, and its effects are long from forgotten.

My drive takes me directly to the combined junior/senior high school, situated on one of the prettiest streets in Montana. Upon parking, I slip my badge on, grab my packed bag, and head inside.

Each day begins at 8:11, but the school’s clock is 3-4 minutes fast. I have to remind myself of this against all that time blindness of my morning. I get there by 8 am. Set up my computer, slides crisp in the front of the room. I teach two classes of juniors first, then a creative writing class, then an eighth-grade class, another junior class, and I finish with a tidy and small class of eighth graders. In the span of a few weeks, I’ve stepped incompletely out of the role of writer and into the role of long-term substitute English teacher. They call me Miss Q, not to be confused with “miscue,” though it’s likely something I’m doing way too often at the moment.

Most of my juniors come in weary-eyed to that dreaded first period. I see them as kindreds; we’ll get through this together. Each class that switches in and out of the room takes on its own personality. There are a few that are rowdy brigades of jovial mischief. Others are quiet and studious, and there are always one or two a day that seem to stretch into the world of an energetic tug of war. If I view these 50-minute periods as a game, it is far less treacherous, and so that I do. Framing and reframing are constant when working with kids, as is Oscar-worthy acting necessary through the hardest moments, or the moments in which my opinion is on their side; however, from a teaching perspective, my job is to hide that opinion so thoroughly that they choose to do the thing that none of us want to be doing in the first place. I am not without a well-developed skillset in this eternal tradition of adult-pupil performance. Though I am starkly new to the educational side, crowd management with children is baked into my blood from many years of working in after-school programs, reading programs, youth sports, day camps, and sleepaway camps. I can, at the very least, quiet a room of rowdy 13-year-olds with a single clap of the hand. Or two. Or three. (They respond to each of my claps with two claps. It does, occasionally, take a while.)

This interesting switch of employment, thankfully, isn’t without mentorship. A highly experienced English teacher scaffolds my days with slides, projects, and support. I mostly get through them, though lenience might be a weak point. The editor in me offers revisions, comments upon comments, and multiple chances to get assignments just a little more correct. Sure, I’ll extend this deadline. Give a little more padding. This got to the point where the kids told me enough is enough, just give us the due date, and I realized the folly of my error.

'“You’ve been super fair and given us more than enough time,” one junior told me, the class adding a muttered and nodding collective agreement as she spoke. “If we haven’t gotten it done at this point, it’s not because of your timeline.” I recognized in that very moment that I could be a little more black-and-white with them, and that they could even help me set that standard. Being overly fair could also be interpreted as coddling, and I needed to quickly cross that verb off my list of duties.

Coming into the classroom in late January, I was far removed from the years I spent working with children. The last kid-centric job I held was in 2008-09, when I served a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a therapeutic recreational center for kids with disabilities just south of Boston, MA.

Is it an American pastime to speak ill of children, and how whatever modern technology of the time is ruining their lives? It must be. I didn’t know what to expect from this group — the closing runners of Gen Z’s generational relay, with Gen Alpha close behind and six-sevening on their heels.

I remember that cable television and the rise of the chat room were the black stains on my Millennial childhood, and how the long sign-on sound indicating the hijacking of the family telephone line signaled that I was about to jump into the depths of a perverse internet, willing and ready to murder me at every moment. I have borne witness to the rise of fabulous kids, smart kids, empathetic kids who, under Millennial parents, seemed to have a therapied and parentally-informed adjusted sense of the world that was never offered to me, simply because it’s a newer development. I figured this experience would sit somewhere in the middle, and I was not wrong.

The reality is, I walked into the school with curiosity stuck to the bottom of my Adidas Sambas, trailing me like toilet paper a few squares behind, leaving me vulnerable to the reality of the kids in my classroom. All 112 of them.

Anaconda is not, as one might guess from our rising house costs, a town of historic means. Many of my students are living through childhoods with truly adult problems at the center of their young lives. In my first few weeks, they’ve trusted me with secret stories that have inspired the mama grizzly in me to rise on her hind legs, claws sharp, to tell them to get behind me, that I would take on the front line of their life — if only I could.

But, I can’t do that. They are, if nothing else, on the front lines of their own lives, as I was when I lost my dad to cancer my sophomore year of high school, then moved from Ohio to Colorado in my junior year, so my mom could take on a bigger job to support two teenage girls.

I got through it, I tell them. So can you. And I believe it when I tell them that they can, even if my grizzled hackles are standing up through the wool knit of my teacher-appropriate sweater.

They all have phones. Phones full of games, Snap, TikTok, the ‘gram, ChatGPTizzle. They are phone geniuses. They are phone acolytes. I was worried about phones coming into the classroom, and rarely are phones an issue at all.

Let me repeat that: phones really aren’t the issue they’re made to be. The kids are well-behaved with them, and routines are established that have prevented them from being an issue in my classroom.

Every Friday morning, the school reserves a half hour for what is called Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Personally, I love it. And because I love it, the kids get into it. This past week, we played a game of “Would You Rather” to talk about attitudes. Would you rather have unlimited sushi or tacos for the rest of your life? Would you rather always hit a green light or never stand in line again? Would you rather give up all forms of social media or Google search & AI?

The last one astounded me. Only one kid joined me in giving up social media.

Really? I said. Doesn’t social media bum you out? (I say this after deactivating my Facebook for the first time in 2005, and feeling only a sense of ‘good riddance’ in the aftermath.)

It’s how we stay in touch, they told me. Plus, they still have AI and search capabilities within social media, ‘experts’ who can tell them what’s what, and the ability to learn from each other’s opinions, rather than the garbage internet. Point taken. But also, really? I stand by my reaction. I’m still flummoxed by theirs.

After this exchange, I thought back to my time in high school, the elaborate efforts my friends and I made to stay in touch between periods. We’d write decorative letters in gel pens, fold them into neat origami patterns, and slip them into hands as we passed each other in the hallway. In the notes lay secret codes that couldn’t be deciphered, drawings, dreams, drama, crushes, rivalries. Shakespearean worlds we made, and we made them together. Social media seems to fill this gap, I think to myself. And in that, I rectify the situation.

On my first day of teaching, I made a fill-in-the-blank profile for each student to fill out, to get to know them, and to get a sense of who they were. It had basics like name, birthday, what period I had them, and then a bit about futures and dreams. If you could be an expert in anything, what would it be? What is your dream job? Is there something that I should know about you? I made the last question optional.

Dreams of expertise made me laugh. Most kids just wanted to be good at the school subject that was most difficult for them. Math! So many of them said math. Science. The STEMs. They are firmly planted in their present. They would like that part of life to be easier. I love that for them.

If I were to listen to the powers that be, the ones that inspire anxiety on the half of this iPhone generation, they’d probably tell me that kids just want to be influencers, content creators, famous on the TikTok algo. Only one kid out of 100 said they’d like to create content, and I’ll tell you it’s a kid that might be good at that game of numbers.

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, I read through a cadre of dream jobs that seem to remain unchanged since my own version of time immemorial. Marine biologists. Dolphin trainer. Criminal psychologists. Veterinarians.

Veterinarians!

Others wrote that they wanted to be welders, linemen, and diesel mechanics. A few standouts said they’d like to be a neonatal nurse, a quantum physicist, or a rodeo athlete at the NFR.

I almost wept as I read of these dreams. They are so tangible and childlike, so close to my own childhood dreams. These are jobs that make us feel like we’re helping, we’re having adventures, we have the answers to the problems of the innocent. These are the comfort food the pile of cloud-like mashed potatoes of dream jobs. The kids are all right, I said to myself. Amidst everything, they are still just kids. And they’re all right.

In spite of everything. In the optional question, I saw answers that ran the gamut. Some kids were brave enough to tell me that they’re dyslexic, that they might need extra help in my class. One girl told me to try not to get too close to her, she didn’t like when strangers wanted to be her friend. Another told me she that she too loved horses. Others talked about their hobbies, and still others told me things far more serious to note here. Most simply answered no or left it blank. Some of them have since opened up to me, told me secrets that I carry like a gift in my heart for them, secrets that the whole town knows, but I am able to see them without those secrets until they, in their own quiet moment, decide to impart them with faith to me.

There is such a great uncertainty wrapping around many things we assumed were solid as cement, were agreed upon solidities. Substack is thick with people who have opinions, light-shedding abilities, crackin’ headlines that will pull you in and make you hit subscribe only because you so vehemently agree with those opinions. The body politic seems to be shedding parts and rearranging into a monstrosity of odd proportions.

What hope? We say to ourselves, what is there to hold onto?

I’m here to ask you to shed the skin that once told you that iPhones are ruining the brains of the next generation. They are, as this MTV brat will tell you, not a monolith. They are filled with rainbows and big dreams, reaching toward the future with bright eyes, trying to figure out the basics of sentence structure like we all once did, and reminding me that I can hold them accountable to deadlines, even when they’re struggling.

And then, a few days ago, I saw an exchange that tugged the strings of my heart, which then fell to pieces on the floor. Two girls, in the hallway, exchanging a perfectly folded origami note, with colorful writing on the outer shell of the paper, with a nod and a knowing smile, with no words exchanged. I nearly gasped with delight. I nearly fell over in a spell of nostalgia. If I had a chair, I might have fallen out of it.

The kids are all right. By God, they are.

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-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.

I hold the moose calf’s unsteady gait as a rhythm against my own beating heart.

The knees seem like the biggest parts of that little body, her hocks pumping to try and keep up with a mother so long-legged she seemed above the landscape, a potential for flight if the matriarch decides to leap into the sky.

I was running. Uphill. Stopped in an instant by the crashing through the brush, and less than ten yards from the pair. There was no acknowledgment. Just leaving, running past me. Keep up, the long-legged mother seemed to say, keep up keep up keep up. Brand new. Her tufts of unfolding fur finding the pockets of sun in the canyon, drying for the first time, licked into waves by her mother. How the two dogs free and bounding never saw them I don’t know but they didn’t.

I have known this cow for a few years now. She has always been different. Taller, shorter-coupled, lean in the way of a dancer. I’ve seen her as a two-year-old, now likely three, or is it four? This drainage is her home. I think I know the place somewhat but she knows it even more than I could ever. She knows it through four seasons, through the windstorms that rip trees from their roots. She knows the curves that make for easy walking, the pockets of rose hips and thimbleberries, the easiest way through the scree up high and down low.

Though she is likely the most dangerous animal in the area, especially with a newborn at her own knees, I have felt the energy come off of her in waves and it’s curious, it’s soft, it’s something else. I’ve made a promise to this drainage: I come in peace and for peace. I carry no gun. I walk to walk. I know where the spruce grouse lives, where the bachelor bulls bed, where they come down for water, where the mother moose sometimes sleeps off the trail with tall grass curling around her body. I also know the drainage where the bull moose, a likely father, lives. It’s about a mile as the crow flies.

I hold my own energy out like either an offering or a gift. When things seem overwhelming, I go there and it lifts from my shoulders. I think maybe I’ll only walk this far and then I keep going, called forward, by the pair of moose tracks, by the birdsong, by the coolness against summer heat. There’s always a reason to stay longer. To relish the place.

A creek ripples through its narrow confines, and there are spots where the trout fry cut through the water, jump, and hide. They are fingerlings, safe in the glacial cold, tumbling through sun and shade. My dogs know the deep spots where they wet bellies and tongues, and in most places it’s crossable by a single big step. If you so choose to walk all the way through the canyon, you’ll find the chimney of an old homestead, still usable and intact. People camp there, building fires, pulling trout from the old homemade dammed pond below. The only things I consume are rose hips and berries. The trout rise and I let them.

At one point, this spring, a very old pine ripped from its roots and crossed half the width of the canyon. Storms had whipped through and the idea of being caught in the mire sent shivers up my spine. Wind events, we call them in Montana. You’ll come to a spot in the trail where it looks as if God pressed him palm down unrelentingly, flattening dozens of trees to the ground. I had to climb through the creek and around the brush to keep going, until someone took a chainsaw to the huge trunk in the trail.

Things change. Sometimes we are a part of that change, whether we want to be or not.

Perhaps my peace treaty of keeping my hunting adventures elsewhere is my effort to avoid changing a place that has so often been bothered by human touch that irreversible damage lines its boundaries. Mining tailings. So many of them. The piles of rock are tell-tale. Sometimes I catch glimpse of a hazy figure out of the corner of my eye, walking in the trees. These are the things I tell no one. But I’ve seen him, more than a few times. Walking, like I am. This has happened to me since I was a child, and whenever I learn more about the figures, I learn of untimely deaths. This area had a plethora of deaths, mining and otherwise. But if this is where his spirit walks, I can only assume that heaven is here in its own right. Believe it. Don’t believe it. But it’s happened. It’s happening. This small canyon speaks to me, shows me, and sometimes it calls me.

It called to me, weeks ago. I was already driving somewhere else, with my dogs, taking off for country that I hadn’t seen in some time. I ran an errand, got in my truck, and then turned around. Pulled toward the canyon. I’d driven a half hour into town and drove back past my house, down the two-lane highway, and then climbed the dirt road toward the path through pines and scree I’d taken so many times.

I saw her crumpled form when I pulled past the campsite. Saw her and felt my heart sink into my feet. She was still. She shouldn’t be still. No. No no no. The dogs were already whining with anticipation and when I kept them shut in the car, they whined some more. I walked up to her, slowly talking. I had yet to see her eye, newly bluing.

“Hey girl, hey girly,” I sang to her nervously, but I knew. The calf, now a year old, had a front and back leg diagonally caught in the barbed wire. Thrown on her side by the violence of struggle, she had died a brutally unfair and unspeakable death. Impossibly caught. Nausea rose in my stomach. I kneeled by her body and placed a hand on her neck, not warm but hot to the touch. I just missed saving her. Just missed it. Tears fell on her winter-thickening, tawny coat. I whispered expletives, then pulled my knees into my body and sat with her, apologizing.

But I also understood the offering. The call. I had made a promise to this place, and in return it offered nourishment. Newly dead, the moose calf could be salvaged.

I placed a final bite of grass in her mouth. My truck held all my hunting gear, my sharp knives, my game bags, headlamps, and my beloved Silky saw. A cool silence fell over me in a shroud, and I began methodically pulling her hide back, began breaking apart her carbon copy short-coupled long-legged body inherited from her mother.

Her mother.

There is a point in the day where dusk hits a tipping point. For the crepuscular among us, it’s when the long shadows of the sun no longer give away locations, and shade covers the earth. When you hunt, it’s a clear moment, one in which restless animals finally choose to move, one in which you too can cover country once those animals make themselves known.

I wasn’t paying perfect attention to the turnover. But her mother was. Against the working silence of my effort, hooves hit dirt hard and fast in a trotting rhythm. Initially I thought someone was trotting a horse down the road, but when I turned, her mother stood, head high, staring from forty yards away.

Her mother. Her worried and restless ballerina of a mother. My friend, my canyon companion, of many years. My hands are holding my knife, both covered in blood. A hindquarter rests in a red-stained game bag against the fence.

She is not human. There is no weeping or wailing, no flinging down of her elegant body. Internally, I am the one feeling all of this things, feeling as if somehow this is my loss as much as hers. She turns and trots twenty yards to try and get a different look. I am talking to her the entire time. She’s gone, I tell her. She was gone when I got here. I’m taking her with me. I’m…

As I talk, her ears wheel back and forth like motors. Later, a friend asked if I was scared, as if she was going to think I was the predator and come after me. No, that didn’t cross my mind. Not at all. And anyway, I was right.

I don’t know how long I stood in silence with her after the explanation but I knew to not break the moment of solidarity. She stood a long while. Then, with a flick of a tail and a shake of her head, she turned and walked into the pines. Away from her daughter. Away from me.

I turned back to the work of making meat from a life.

All fall I had been hunting with my bow in hand, carrying small disks that fit into the upper palate of my mouth, adjusting my breath and tongue pressure to create bugles, mews, and the many sounds of elk. Say the curious and correct thing, and a bull will come screaming from the forest at full tilt, filling the air with both sound and fury. The season of the rut had turned over by this point, meaning that bugles were waning. Still, as dusk lengthened into nightfall, a bugle rose, restless and unsure, from the bench where I knew the bulls to sit during daylight hours.

It’s a perfect spot. The wind swirls and whisks itself around the mountain, deadfall rises to the edges of the mountain bench, the bulls are road-adjacent and are offered the scent of the trail throughout most of the day. They are all-knowing. Curved getaways cut into the mountain offer funnels into timber so thick it can feel like evening in the middle of the day when you climb into the foliage. Anyone trying to get to or at them is gambling, but they are in their house, and the house always wins.

As hard as I’d hunted, I had yet to fill a tag with my bow, and I held no such tag for a moose. Getting a legal moose tag is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure for most of us, but Montana’s game laws offer some respite. Game wardens can issue tags that allow us the prevent the ‘wanton waste’ of meat in circumstances where an animal is killed by car, or caught by a barbed wire fence.

The word ‘waste’ sticks like a splinter in my palm. Waste. There is no waste in the natural order of things. I could have left her here and the world she was born into would have taken her back like a gift offering, or a ritual sacrifice. Coyotes, owls, ravens, the magpies already waiting in the trees, the hungry organisms in soil, the dry and desiccating air, the coyotes singing on the edge of it all — she could have contributed back the small amount of life she had taken.

Instead, much of her musculature sat cooling against the barbed wire fence. Her hide, thick with the promise of coming winter, sat folded neatly beneath the quarters. White with fascia, her distended rib cage held a plethora of organs already engaged in the business of turning what was once dust back to it. It swelled with the possibilities.

Managing the emotional structure of the moment felt both obscene and pragmatic. I needed meat. Hunting, though fruitful in both adventure and experiences, was proving fruitless. And much like the entanglement of pasterns and barbed wire, my professional situation kept pressing me one way, then another, then offering up a promising possibility, then taking it away. The barbs of life were in my own ankles, the obvious metaphor of struggle so familiar I couldn’t not know what it meant to be her in the first moments, struggling to survive, struggling so hard that you struggle yourself into the next lifetime.

I had what she didn’t. Opposable thumbs, conscious reasoning, an education that helped me make the most of this loss and then turn it into a gain, and — most audaciously — hope. Cutting through her hind end, I found that she’d separated one femur from the pelvis so much so that she’d done internal damage. Even if I had saved her, she’d gravely injured herself far beyond the wire cuts at her ankles. Even if I had set her free, suffering and a likely death probably awaited and sooner rather than later.

I still don’t know what to make of this, really. I called the game warden and began crying when I told him the story. I told him I had the pictures to document the situation, and he said that he didn’t need them. The salvage tag arrived in my email the next day. A legal moose in the freezer.

A few weeks later, I killed a pronghorn doe in the final hours of the season on a long stretch of BLM land on the Wyoming border. I climbed over a barbed wire fence so quickly that I tore the soft fleshy part of my hand open and made the shot covered in my own gushing blood. The shot was a bit of hail mary, I couldn’t get an accurate read on my range finder, and I sent the bullet with good form and well wishes rather than a force field of defined accuracy. It found its mark.

The rest of the herd left and the doe stood there, woozy. She turned and walked another fifty yards, where she laid her final rest in the sagebrush. I thought maybe I’d hit her in the gut, maybe I’d taken a bad shot. I sat sick with that misguided belief, with prior experiences haunting me. It took more than thirty minutes for her to die, and when I walked up to stillness once more, I noted that the shot was so perfect that it felt impossible for her to have lasted so long. To have held onto life so calmly and purposefully. At the edge of my knife, she transformed from animal to meat, from form to function. I told her how strong she was, that I admired her strength and would embody it. I am doing my best to keep that promise.

But across the board, this season hit me like a brick wall. There are seasons that I’ve barely hunted, when my own constitution wasn’t up to the task of determining life and death. Sometimes, I yearn to be back in the ease of my prior life, a life before hunting, when a warm and sunny fall meant more long hikes in the golden arches of aspen and larch trees, or cardigan-and-sundress brunches filled with champagne and laughter, or riding a horse in the outdoor arena rather than the indoor. Back then, just seeing a moose was the pinnacle of excitement. I’d catch a glimpse into a wild life for just a moment. That was as far as I thought it would all go. I was wrong.

After years of living close to the land, I have traded the ease of enjoyment for the intimacy of the familiar. I became so curious about knowing a place that the place, in turn, began to know me. If anything, that must be progress. That must be what humans are meant to do, how our ancestors made it all work.

But I’m still grieving that little moose. I have been for weeks, and I’m not sure how to shake that grief from my bones. Perhaps it’ll fade when the long winter begins to turn over, when the days get longer and longer, reaching towards spring renewal. Or perhaps it’s something I’ll just carry with me, from the inside out, until I adjust to the weight of it.

And, perhaps next spring, I’ll once again run into the long-legged mother, with a new life tottering at her knees, fresh and ready, doe-eyed and curious, as long-legged and innocent as every calf before her as ever been.

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-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.

I’m in the back seat of the drift boat, again. It's late April in Montana, 28 degrees, and snowing sideways. My brother-in-law Jeremiah, our guide Slade, and I sit in the only boat in sight on the Madison River. We won’t see another boat all day.

I just watched Jeremiah catch the biggest trout of his life. Candidly, the 24-inch long, battle-worn rainbow would have been my personal best as well.

I’m shaking. Partly from the cold, but mainly because sitting two seats from a friend landing their biggest fish is pretty exciting. It’s similar to the feeling of watching a buddy kill his or her first elk; it is exhilarating, you’re just not the one holding the rod or the bow.

The bend in the rod — and the large flash when the fish went to run — told me that it was big. But I would have missed out on much of the fight if my back was turned to the action, and I had instead kept fishing for myself. I would have missed Jeremiah’s reactions, the tense moment when the fish raced toward a fallen tree, and the nuance in the guide’s movements that said, “this fish is different.” I wouldn’t have seen that personal best until it was in the guide’s net.

Sure, from the back seat certain thoughts do go through your head. If I was in the front seat, would I have a new personal best? Unknown. If I was in the front seat, with Jeremiah in the back, and he still caught this fish, would my perspective be the same? Would I still be shaking?

I’ve never fished from the front seat of a drift boat. While I’m a competitive person, the number of fish I catch doesn’t matter to me — unless someone else is counting. That made my first couple of trips in the back seat a little frustrating. Then, I realized that living in Montana affords me the opportunity to take more of these guided trips with friends and family than I could have ever dreamed of prior. Because of this, I’ve learned to appreciate the lens that the back seat of the drift boat — technically the stern — offers.

My love affair with fly fishing began during my childhood summer vacations, when my family traveled to Rocky Mountain National Park. My dad and I would carve out a couple of days to chase brookies, and avoid elk, in the beaver dam-crafted fingers of the Big Thompson River in Moraine Park. When I moved from Texas to Montana, I immediately fell in love with the sheer size of the rivers, the fisheries they support, and the stream access laws that allow all of us to enjoy them.

I don’t own a drift boat — yet. When choosing a place to fish, my wife and I look as much for scenery, solitude, and relaxation as we do for water features that might hold numbers of hungry trout. Our favorite fishing hole is roughly an hour from home. To get there, we drive past dozens of large riffles and pocket waters where we probably have a chance of catching more fish. It certainly isn’t the best spot on the river as far as the fishing goes, but that’s part of why we like it. To us, fly fishing is less about how often we catch fish and more about the entirety of the experience.

People, as I’ve learned from the back of the boat, are a big part of that entirety. One of the benefits of living in a destination state is that your friends and family want to travel to you, even if they’re partly escaping southern summer heat. I try to use each visit as an excuse to book a guided float trip — admittedly as much for me as for my guest. It isn’t a hard sell by any means, but if need be I’ll paint a guided trip as one of the best experiences to be had, which I would argue is the truth. What better way to see Montana and get away from our busy, always connected, day-to-day lives than floating down a river?

In my opinion, the front seat of a drift boat is the most coveted spot — at least if the goal is catching fish. More importantly, it’s also the best place for a less experienced angler to sit. There, the guide has them in full-view, and they can provide instruction from cast-to-cast on what’s going well and what needs to change. So when arriving at the ramp, the natural spot for my visitor is at the bow.

Watching a friend who has little fly fishing experience on their first guided float trip is a microcosm of learning to fly fish over many years. It often starts with a much-needed casting lesson in the boat ramp parking lot, followed by the initial excitement of actually casting a fly to the water. Nervousness and frustration set in over missed opportunities and knotted lines. A slow period occurs where everything seems to be going alright, but the fish just aren’t cooperating.

Perhaps the angler in the back seat actually catches a few fish, while the beginner is left wondering what they did to upset the fish gods. Finally, if the aforementioned gods bestow generosity, there’s the first fish, the photo op, then another, and another. By the end of the day, your friend is casting to and catching fish before the guide tells them where to cast. The view of all this from the back seat is spectacular. It also allows for capturing all of these stages in photographs so you and your fishing partner can later relive the experience together.

Besides having a back row seat to your buddy’s escapade peppered with occasional hilarity (ever watch someone catch a fish on their backcast?), manning the stern offers other benefits. From there, it’s much easier to learn from the guide regarding fly choice, dropper depth, the amount of weight required to reach fish in the current, and why you’re fishing this particular stretch of river or this run versus that one. I would never have seen my favorite guide Slade Fedore, of Slade’s Montana Fly Fishing, tie a clinch knot using only one hand — a task I have requested him to show me over and over, without learning how myself. The view from the stern also allows you to see the guide’s entire process — how they read the water, how they teach different personality types, and their approach when the fish aren’t biting what they were yesterday. The back seat of a drift boat, as a result of its vantage point, might offer more learning opportunities — and more enjoyment — than the mighty bow.

Fly fishing is a teacher. The lesson comes in the entirety of the experience, and not always in the number of fish you catch. Some of my best fishing memories have come from the back seat.

My wife and I recently welcomed our first son, giving us a full boat. He has obviously yet to pick up a rod at one month old, but he’ll likely be a fisherman too, so I’m grateful for the hours I’ve spent learning in the back seat. Until he’s older, I will choose the back of the boat and all that comes with it. At least until I have one of my own.

A new drift boat will make a perfect first birthday gift.

Brian Worthington lives in Bozeman, Montana with his wife, Labrador retriever, and 2-month-old son. An avid gearhead, he leads the brand partnership team at Guidefitter and spends his free time hunting birds and big game, fly fishing, trail running, and showing his Texas-based family all Montana has to offer.

I am currently in Year Ten of my hunting adventure, and an adventure it surely has been. I started out hunting in yoga pants from Target, Sorel boots that leaked, and a borrowed hunting jacket from my office — which at the time was MeatEater’s home base.

Back then, I traveled out into the hunting unknown in a little white Chrysler sedan, with my brand new .308 rifle, and a near-zero idea of what I was doing. I’d never owned a gun before, and hunting was as foreign to me as the far corners of the Earth.

Fast forward a decade, I’ve spent the better part of the past month chasing elk around hills with a bugle tube and a bow. I have successfully hunted in multiple states, filled tags for multiple species, packed out multiple big game animals solo, processed dozens of game animals for myself and others, and written hundreds of articles about my time outside. I own and trained my own Boykin Spaniel to hunt birds, and I’m training two wild donkeys to pack game. I’m perhaps maybe a bit of a deep diver into things that I enjoy, if you haven’t figured it out already.

So, if anyone is equipped to tell you how to get started as a hunter, I hate to take the cake, but the cake is mine. In the timeless words of Lil Jon, let’s go.

How to Become a Hunter

The Two Tracks to Becoming a Hunter: Legal vs. Personal

There are really two tracks that I think about when navigating the maze of becoming a hunter.

The first track is what I’d call the legal track. This covers the wide range of educational requirements and hunting regulations that you need to familiarize yourself with in order to legally hunt wild game.

The second track is that of the personal track. This consists of building your outdoor skillset, your emotional skillset, your hunting tool (rifle/bow/shotgun) skillset, and your hunting skillset.

Both tracks, to me, are equally important. I think the latter track doesn’t often get talked about in the way that I experienced it as a woman who came to hunting as an adult. But from personal experience, the legal track is the more confusing track to navigate at first, and it’s obviously highly important for any hunter to stay within the boundaries of the law.

Because of this, I’ll lead with the legal track first, and address the skills track in another episode and article.

In short: Hunting is a highly regulated activity and it not only differs from state to state but on a level of defined ecosystems within each state, often called units. Hunters are generally required to complete hunters education and often an additional bowhunters education if archery is on the table. They’ll also need to develop a deep understanding of hunting regulations, boundaries, tags and licenses, and other state requirements. If hunters plan on hunting out of their own state, they’re tasked with understanding multiple sets of regulations that may highly differ from what they’re used to.

Every state manages their own separate system for hunter education, tag and license allocation, wildlife and hunting regulations, and more. Your requirements and regulations for Maryland differ greatly from requirements and regulations within Wyoming.

Your first task is finding out what name your state management agency goes by.

Here in Montana, we have Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and we colloquially call it ‘FWP’. In Colorado, you’ll need to look up Colorado Parks & Wildlife. In South Carolina, it’s South Carolina Dept. of Natural Resources. The name varies greatly, but their responsibilities in managing fish, game, and recreation generally fall under that specific roof.

Each fish and game department will have resources for you to help get you started. But I’ll do my best to give you a broad generalization of the minutiae that you can expect in the navigational process.

Hunters Education: Time to Get Certified

The first step in becoming a hunter is signing up for your state’s hunter education program. Some states may not require completion, but if you plan on hunting beyond your state at any point, you’ll absolutely need certification. Plus, it’s an amazing resource to connect with local hunters and volunteer teachers that are invested in providing mentorship.

Most courses offer the ability to do most of the course online through and attend a single field day. More than 45 states utilize hunter-ed.com to administer the online portion.

You can find your state’s requirements by clicking on the link below.

Find Your State's Requirements

The course tends to cover a variety of topics. Here’s what Montana covers, for example:

• Four main rules of firearm safety

• The P.R.O.V.E. Method for Firearm Handling

• Key points about landowner relations and hunting ethics

• Selecting a firearm/ammo

• Safe firearm handling, including trail carries, obstacle crossings, loading/unloading firearms from vehicles, handing off firearms

• Basic animal identification

• Shoot/don’t shoot scenarios

• Zones of fire

• Shooting positions

Hunter education mainly focuses on gun safety, learning when to shoot, and awareness around the basic ethical decisions you’ll make as a hunter. Animal identification is especially important in states that have a lot of variability across big game. Being able to distinguish a mule deer from a whitetail is paramount in most Western states, and in some areas, you’ll need to be able to identify a black bear from a grizzly.

Though some states may not require the in-person field day, I suggest attending one. I went with two girlfriends, and we had a blast shooting clays, practicing safe in-field scenarios, and learning from long-time hunters.

Bowhunter Education Adds a Deeper Layer

Even if bowhunting is not on your agenda, I suggest getting your bowhunter education completed. Basic Hunter Education is more general and safety-oriented, but Bowhunter Ed tends to build on the basics of a hunting skillset. You’ll learn things like shot placement on animals, how to blood trail if an animal is wounded, outdoor preparedness, and more.

I really enjoyed my in-field day for Bowhunter Education even more than my initial Hunter Ed requirement. I see it as a great addition to your overall education to becoming a hunter, and if you do decide to pick up a bow, you’ll have your certificate finished and ready to go. (Plus, if you’re in a state with elk opportunity, most archery seasons happen during the best time of year to hunt elk. I highly recommend bowhunting elk during the rut.)

You can find your state’s requirements for bowhunter education via the link above. And most states do offer the same combo of online/field opportunity to become a bowhunter.

Bowhunter Education Opportunities

Learning How to Shoot at a Local Rod & Gun Club

One of the biggest walls I needed to climb in order to become a competent hunter was my lack of familiarity with firearms. With no one in my family to teach me, I turned to friends and co-workers for help. Even then, I found it intimidating. And I’m well aware that not everyone has access to friends, family, or co-workers who are avid shooters.

If you’re in that boat, I have some suggestions. Local rod and gun clubs are one of the best spots to connect with educators and instructors that are in your area. These are typically private ranges that require membership or entrance fees to shoot. If an instructor isn’t available at that club, they’ll likely know someone who offers instruction.

Some ranges might focus on shooting for personal safety, and they might not be able to accommodate shotguns or rifles, but I suggest calling the range anyway and asking where a new shooter interested in hunting might find some help. People generally love helping a potential new hunter into the space. Gun shops, archery shops, and big box stores like Sportsman’s Warehouse also should be able to point you in the right direction.

Find a Range Near You

Take a Hunting-Specific Shooting Course

There are tons of shooting courses out there in the world, but not all of them apply to hunters specifically. You might have to dig, but if you want to invest more deeply in your firearms training, I suggest attending a private course developed for hunters specifically -or- the tool you’re choosing to shoot with. For example, taking a precision scoped rifle course would certainly help someone interested in shooting big game in a state like Montana, or learning how to shoot skeet with a shotgun would give a hunter the basics of shooting upland birds or waterfowl.

Various courses and organizations exist that serve different groups. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of shooting with stranger, use my resources below to connect with a community who might better serve you.

Here are a few options you can check out, in addition to doing your own research.

• Outdoor Solutions Shooting Courses

• Sig Sauer Shooting Academy

• Firearm Training through the NRA

• Swan Mountain Outfitters: 3-day Long Range Precision Course

There are many opportunities out there, at many different price points. Keep at it and you’ll find something that works for you.

Tags vs. Licenses vs. Permits

Across the United States, the terms ‘tags’ and ‘licenses’ can be both interchangeable and confusing. Here’s how I tend to think about it.

A tag most often refers to a single animal, while a license is typically something that you carry that allows you to hunt a certain animal or area for the duration of the season.

Currently, I carry a general tag for a single elk in Montana, and I have a license to hunt upland birds for the 2025 season. But I know in a state like Texas, you buy your deer license, which comes with a number of deer tags as part of the licensing process.

The third word you might hear used interchangeably is a ‘permit’. It’s up to you to determine what each state agency means when it uses the term tag, license, or permit.

If you need help understanding the lingo, I always recommend calling the agency and asking. They’re usually skilled at educating folks in how things work, especially if you’re new to hunting or coming in to hunt from a different state.

Resident vs Non-Resident Hunting

You’re likely a resident hunter in the state that you’ve lived in for the past six months or more, though this might not be true in your state. You’ll need to look up what your state requires from you in order to be a legal ‘resident hunter.’ Residents takes priority within every state, meaning your license and tag opportunities where you live are more numerous and more affordable.

Non-resident opportunities are as big as the United States itself. Want to hunt deer in Texas? That’s pretty simple, given that you have a connection to hunt in a state with mostly private opportunities. Want to hunt caribou in Alaska? That’s a big adventure, with a lot to consider. Interested in hunting moose in Montana? You might have to put in for twenty years or more as a non-resident in order to draw the tag in a lottery.

Your best bet for becoming a hunter is within the state you call home. Look up your own state agency’s hunting information to understand how costly it will be for you to get started hunting. Then, look up a state that has an opportunity you might be interested in one day, like hunting elk in Colorado or hunting turkeys in Florida. It’s a fun exercise in starting to understand how state management can differ greatly from one place to another.

Where Can You Hunt? Private Land, Public Land, and In-State Boundaries

Understanding hunting opportunity where you are is highly dependent on understanding where your opportunities to hunt actually exist. And lack of access is one of the biggest barriers facing modern hunters. If your family owns a 300-acre private farm in whitetail deer country in Ohio, you’re probably set for private access. However, if you live in a place like Wyoming, you have millions of acres of public land in addition to potential private land that you’re able to hunt.

Public land can be state land, national forest, wilderness, or land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Some states allow hunting in state parks, while others don’t. National parks are generally off-limits for hunters, unless you’re in Alaska.

Public opportunity exists in many states, but some more than others. Texas is known as a state with low public access, but it does hold about a million acres of public opportunity. And it also offers mentored hunts on private ranches for new hunters.

Regardless of private or public land, most states delineate regions, units, zones, or boundaries that have regulations specific to those areas. Here in Montana, we have regions and units. Other states might have numbered ‘areas’ or ‘zones’. Each unit has its own regulations of what can and cannot be hunted.

I highly recommend picking up a printed copy of the regulations for the animals you wish to hunt in your state. I keep a printed copy at home, in my truck, and I download a copy to my iPhone so I can always check regulations when I cross regional or unit boundaries while hunting. I might be able to hunt a bull elk in Unit 318, but I cannot hunt a bull elk if I cross over to the 380 boundary. It’s one of the most coveted permits in the state, and you can only hunt there if you draw a permit by lottery. I’d technically be poaching and responsible for a high fine even if I accidentally crossed a boundary and killed an animal that is off-limits in that unit.

My go-to tool for understanding where I am across public, private, and state-defined boundaries is OnX Hunt.

It’s an app that allows me to look up where I stand and delineates all of the boundaries for me. It links out to regulations if I’m in service, and I’m able to download maps for the many times that I’m out of service. I buy the Elite package, and it enables me to turn on OnX for any state that I’m traveling through. Beyond hunting, I use it for camping, travel, hiking, and recreation nationwide. It’s an invaluable tool for hunters, especially in states with a lot of public access.

Other great mapping tools include GOHUNT, Basemap, and Huntstand. Huntstand is a really great tool aimed more at private land hunters in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeastern parts of the U.S.

General Units vs. Limited Draw

I brought this up, and now I must explain it. Across many states, there are hunting opportunities that are only accessed through a lottery drawing. This means that many hunters will apply year after year for a specific hunting tag or permit, and it may take a decade or more to ‘draw’ that particular tag.

This applies to special tags like mountain goat, bighorn sheep, or moose here in Montana. But it can also apply to limited opportunities within particular units for animals like mule deer, elk, or whitetails.

Essentially, you play the lottery for a specific hunt. And like most lotteries, you don’t win very often. But you can play the odds.

My favorite tool for better understanding draw opportunities is GOHUNT Insider.

I mentioned that it also has an excellent mapping tool for hunters. But, my favorite use for GOHUNT is its incredible Insider platform. Using GOHUNT’s filters, you can determine what hunts you might want to apply for, both in the short term and the long term. You can develop plans, build adventures, and keep working towards your aspirations, year after year.

I’ll mention that I’m not paid or affiliate-connected to any of these platforms. I just actually believe in what they do, because I’ve used them myself. I recommend them because they work, and if I can figure out how to use them, anyone can. Promise.

Nonprofit & Agency Mentorship

If this all feels really overwhelming, it should. It’s a lot to digest. It makes a lot more sense when you’re in motion rather than reading a list of convoluted terms and regulatory advice that lacks specificity because every state is different, and etcetera and etcetera and oh my lord, is it all too much?!

No! I promise you, there are resources that can help you navigate all of this! Here are a few resources that I freakin’ love for connecting folks to the hunting community.

• Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA): You probably have a BHA chapter in your state, and BHA’s grassroots community is what it’s all about. BHA focuses on public land advocacy, but its community is really vital to connecting hunters to opportunities locally and beyond. Reach out to your local chapter and connect with a community-oriented group of hunters. This is how I connected with multiple hunting partners back in 2015 — my first year as a hunter.

• BHA also has multiple university-based clubs! If you’re a college student, see if your school has a BHA Collegiate Club here.

• Becoming an Outdoorswoman (BOW): Multiple state agencies use the BOW program to develop specific and safe outlets for women to learn how to hunt. Look up ‘Becoming an Outdoorswoman’ in your state to see if it offers a program. Check out what Montana offers through BOW here.

• Queers & Camo: Co-founded by our own Kestrel Keller, Queers & Camo offers a unique opportunity for LGBTQIA+ hunters to find mentorship and community in both online presence and in-person events on the East Coast (for now). Connect with Q&C through their Instagram.

• Kinfolk Hunting Collective: A New York-based hunting community open to all, but with a special emphasis on creating a welcoming atmosphere for anyone who feels outside of the mainstream hunting culture.

• Hunters of Color (HOC): HOC offers a variety of opportunities for BIPOC folks, and its impact on mentoring, educating, and offering community for BIPOC individuals can’t be understated.

• Boone & Crockett: B&C offers free or low-cost opportunities for women, youth, and college students to come to Montana and learn how to hunt sustainably. Check out their classes here.

Perhaps I’ll do a separate post that compiles a ton of these specific resources soon…TBD! Lmk if you’re interested in that in the comments below. Alternatively, if you know of a resource I haven’t included, please add it in a comment!

Educational Programs & Guided Hunts

You’d think I’d have exhausted all my resources by now, but I absolutely have not. Last but not least in the first part of my resource guide comes the best sort of hand-holding of all: In-field educational and guided opportunities.

If figuring out your own logistics isn’t your best skillset, the best place to get started as a hunter might be through a hunting professional that takes you into the field, on a high success sort of hunt, and then takes you through the process of what happens after an animal is tagged. This is the most expensive route, but it’s also the most in-depth.

My personal favorite course is From Field to Table, led by my friend Greg Ray and his team. I wrote a review of one of Ray’s Texas courses in my GearJunkie days, and I highly recommend reading it for a full understanding of these courses. A few courses are currently open, and hog hunting is a blast. Yes, I think you should go.

Another option is paying for a guided hunt. Outfitters often offer a varied list of opportunities, some being more accessible than others. Decide what you want to hunt, what level of adventure you’re in for, and you can research outfitters individually or be a genius and reach out to the state outfitter association for potential recommendations.

Hunt prices can range drastically, so don’t be discouraged if one outfit only offers $5000 deer hunts. Other outfits might offer entry-level hunts for whitetail does or cow elk at a much lower cost.

There are other opportunities that might exist in your area that seem too good to be true, but in the best sort of way. One such hunt is managed by the AMB West Hunting Program, an elk hunting opportunity near Livingston, Mont. that offers free guided hunts to the public on a lottery system. My friend Elise killed a beautiful bull elk on that hunt, and it was quite an experience.

Final Thought? Your First Hunt is The Hunt to Get Started

The nature of becoming a hunter starts with being curious about the process. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of how to get started. Don’t forget to listen to the accompanying podcast that supports this article wherever you get your pods, and keep your eyes peeled for the next chapter in the series.

In the second installation of our ‘How to Become a Hunter’ series, I’ll go more in-depth into building skillsets, choosing the right tools for the job, developing your outdoors skills, and more.

But for now, I hope this helps you — prospective new hunter — in the first step in donning camo and heading into the Great Wide Open where so many adventures and great meals await.

As ever, please comment and ask questions, add relevant info, or call me out on my BS. Lord knows I have plenty of it to go around.

In the second episode of Western Radio, Nicole Qualtieri shares her experiences at Rabbit Stick, a primitive skills gathering, and discusses the journey of becoming a hunter.

She explores the personal and legal tracks involved in hunting, emphasizing the importance of education, emotional skill sets, and understanding regulations. Nicole also highlights various resources available for new hunters, including Game and Fish organizations and nonprofit programs, while encouraging a community approach to learning and hunting.

Part two in this short series will explore the personal implications of becoming a hunter, from the emotional landscape of taking a life to building the skills you need to hunt successfully.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Rabbit Stick, a Primitive Skills Gathering

02:50 Exploring the Primitive Skills Gathering Experience

09:12 The Journey to Becoming a Hunter

12:37 Navigating the Personal Track of Hunting

17:37 Understanding the Legal Track of Hunting

31:17 Exploring Gun Training and Local Resources

38:07 Understanding Resident vs Non-Resident Hunting

43:13 Public vs Private Land Hunting Dynamics

54:23 Navigating Tags and Licenses

58:20 Resources for New Hunters

01:03:04 Conclusion and Future Insights

Need More Resources?

We’ve got you. We have an entire article devoted to the subject below!

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Ungulate Highways first appeared in Storying Extinction, a multimedia project built by Jack Kredell, Christopher Lamb, and Devin Becker. Kredell worked with The Westrn’s editors to shorten the written piece for our publication. To see the entire project, visit the Storying Extinction website.

My fascination with nonhumans, particularly those who are extinct or out of reach — dinosaurs or abyss-dwelling giant squid — reached a fever pitch when I encountered a being who, until that moment, was known to me only from the pages of my encyclopedia and the museum.

Early one morning, my dad woke me up and carried me, half-asleep, to the bay window in the living room and whispered, “Look.”

All I saw was a blur of glaring light as I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Drenched earlier by my dad’s ritual dawn watering, the grass blazed and shimmered in the early morning sun. Slowly, the front yard took on its familiar shapes — the two sycamores with their fuzzy leaves and pastel trunks, the hedge with its clusters of white, bee-loving flowers. Then I froze (in some far-off world, I am still holding that breath): a long brown neck bent gracefully toward an island of dandelions. An animal — a deer. A deer was standing in the front yard of our suburban San Fernando Valley home.

It was my first time seeing real megafauna outside the articulated skeletons dredged up from the La Brea Tar Pits on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. My pulse quickened and my body ached to get closer. Wanting to see it without the dark-tinted mesh of the window screen, I ran to the front door and stuck a hand through the mail slot to lift the faux-brass door, but as I did, the hinge creaked and the deer bobbed its head, spun, and bounded away up the street. As much of me died in that instant of departure as was made alive by the arrival.

I say “bounded away up the street” but I don’t know where the animal actually went. It disappeared into the landscape as only deer and other ungulates can. They ghost. They get on their ghost highways and vanish. Though suburban deer aren’t too uncommon, it was a miracle to me at that age. It’s also my earliest memory.

I’ve replayed the episode of my dad waking me to see the deer countless times in my head. It’s one of the stories I associate with the San Fernando Valley, and yet, it is just as much a story about a different time and place, infused by later childhood years when I’d stalk white-tailed deer in the hardwood forests of central Pennsylvania.

In that encounter with the deer I was seized. “As we are seized,” write Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose in “Lively Ethography,” “so we bear witness in order that others may be seized: telling stories that draw their audiences into others’ lives in new and consequential ways, stories that cultivate the capacity for response.”

The encounter with the deer is the story of my becoming seized, of bearing witness to a shared world. It is simultaneously the response — unfolding over my lifetime from that moment until now — of ungulate dreams.

II.

I first heard of South Selkirk mountain caribou while driving from New York City to Idaho in search of a different ungulate — elk. I held a nonresident archery elk tag in my pocket and would try to fill it while visiting my grandmother in Donnelly, Idaho. It was late in the summer of 2016 and I’d just quit my job of three and a half years at a tech startup, a job which, in addition to low pay, gave me chronic lower back pain but no health insurance or time off to fix it. I didn’t know or care what was next. I just knew I needed a month of climbing mountains, grand views, shitty coffee, pumping gas, freeze-dried meals, cold nights, tired legs, and missing home, as opposed to standing in crowded subway cars full of bruised and angry rundowns like myself. Most of all, my back needed time off from sitting. The irony wasn’t lost on me either: I would spend the next five days in the driver’s seat.

My snot-green 1998 Jeep Cherokee stereo played a hunting podcast in which the episode’s guest, Bart George, a wildlife biologist for the Kalispell Tribe, discussed the tribe’s effort to save the South Selkirk mountain caribou herd, then estimated to be fewer than 15 individuals. Despite the alarming precarity of their situation, I was awestruck by the thought of caribou actually existing in Idaho and Washington. I became seized by caribou and their otherness with respect to the ungulate scene of the United States, which includes deer, sheep, moose, mountain goats, pronghorn, and elk.

The thought of caribou took me to another era — the Pleistocene epoch of my beloved La Brea Tar Pits. As a child, I longed to be among its extinct dire wolves, short-faced bears, and saber-toothed cats. I came to think of mountain caribou as an ice age phantom, a relic, a ghostly projection from the ancestral Cordilleran ice sheet. Part living, part dead.

In fact, the continent was already full of their ghosts; the recent extirpation of mountain caribou wasn’t a first for caribou in the history of the United States. We’ve witnessed a second death.

Until the mid-19th century, woodland caribou — a boreal forest-dwelling subspecies of North American caribou (Rangifer tarandus) — ranged as far south as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New England. Unlike their migratory Arctic cousins, the barren-ground caribou, these were mostly sedentary animals who for millennia lived and died in the coniferous snow forests of the northern United States.

Today, certain northeastern toponymies bear witness to woodland ghosts. Maine’s Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness, for example, is named after two brothers who shot and killed the area’s last caribou in 1854. With the exception of a few individual animals spotted in northeastern Minnesota during an aerial survey in winter of 1980-81, woodland caribou were all but eliminated in the contiguous United States by the start of the 20th century. However, southern mountain caribou — an ecotype of woodland caribou once also called ‘black’ caribou due to their dark, shadowy appearance — still occupied the northern tip of Idaho's rugged Selkirk Mountains as recently as 2019, though their presence remained tenuous and beleaguered.

The mountain group outlasted its woodland relatives by migrating, not to colder far northern latitudes, but to colder altitudes in the South Selkirks of Idaho and Washington. Here and in other ranges where they lived historically — the Purcells, Cabinets, and to some extent the Bitterroots — mountain caribou adapted to a life of wintry high-country solitude. Now, due to a combination of factors including large 20th-century fires, resource extraction, development, and an increased load of winter recreation, the South Selkirk mountains were no longer an oasis.

In the spring of 2019, news broke that officials airlifted the South Selkirk herd’s remaining three individuals to a captive breeding facility in southern British Columbia, leaving them functionally extirpated. That fall I entered grad school at the University of Idaho where I began asking myself a set of questions: What was their story, I wondered, and how does one even begin to tell the story of extinction? What does their extinction mean to us? What does it mean to the people who knew them through their encounters?

III.

Do you have an Idaho caribou story?

We are a pair of University of Idaho graduate students currently at work on a research project about the recent loss of North Idaho’s South Selkirk mountain caribou herd. We will be traveling to the South Selkirk Mountains and surrounding communities to gather ecological, historical, graphic, and geographical data that will be incorporated into a web-based deep map (multilayered interactive map) documenting ecological/community response to mountain caribou absence in North Idaho. A key component of this project is the collection of oral history from communities surrounding this area. We are seeking volunteers who have stories or encounters pertaining to the former Idaho Mountain Caribou herd for incorporation into the project.

A week after publishing our call for caribou stories in the Spokesman-Review we got a terse email from somebody named Bob Case:

On June 14, 2020, at 2:56 p.m., Bob Case wrote:

I have pictures of a caribou encounter.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy, an AT&T LTE smartphone

We agreed to meet Bob two weeks later in a parking lot. It’s starting to drizzle when he pulls up in a navy-blue Subaru Baja. He’s short, middle-aged, and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses despite it being overcast and rainy. He greets us in a strained, screechy kind of whisper which he informs us is due to a chronic condition called laryngeal dystonia where muscle spasms prevent the voice box from operating properly. Though it seems painful, it’s apparent right away that Bob loves to chat.

Without missing a beat and like some old-fashioned gumshoe, Bob unwinds the string fastener on a manila envelope and begins to narrate as he places a half dozen original photographs of a large mountain caribou bull on the bed cover of his Baja. Despite having used a miniature format 110 camera, the pictures of the massive radio-collared bull standing broadside in a Selkirk boulder field are otherworldly. They communicate both a sense of proximity to and respectful distance from the animal.

We attach the Lavalier mic to his collar, turn on our camera, and witness as Bob sings:

“I’m Bob Case and I took a hike up to Chimney Rock. I want to say it was either ‘93, maybe up to ‘95. Somewhere in there. And when I went up over this ridge, an open rock field, which you can see right in here [points to his photograph of the caribou in a rock field], I came down, I was walking down, and then this caribou stood up. Well, the people told me about being careful with the encounters with the different animals that could charge ya, and I said, well, they never told me about this [points demonstrably to caribou photo ]— what this could do.

“So I stood there and looked for an area where I could dive under the rocks to protect myself and got my camera out and started taking pictures. Then the caribou got up and it walked around just like this [now Bob is doing something with his hands that reminds me of an orbital model of the earth and moon. Bob and caribou are celestial bodies at this point, orbiting one another in the shared gravity of encounter] and it got closer and closer as it walked. When it got here, I believe it got the smell of me with the wind blowing and then it just walked off. So that was my day and I got to see a caribou and I been hiking ever since because that was the biggest thrill ever since I been hiking here.”

Afterward, I wasn’t sure if Bob had encountered a caribou or if a caribou had encountered Bob.

Later in the summer, we spend time with a subject who spent a decade trying to get a glimpse of a mountain caribou in the wild, without success, and here is Bob, the translocated Bostonian, wondering if he should dive under the rocks to avoid the charge of a radio-collared and translocated bull caribou, at the time the most critically endangered mammal in North America. In the video, Bob appears to get emotional during the last sentence. As he says, the encounter that day with a radio-collared bull caribou “was the biggest thrill ever since I been hiking here.” This statement still resonates with me, because of both the significance of the encounter for him personally and his complete lack of interest in the radio-collar as well as the politics surrounding the herd augmentation effort. For Bob, it was an encounter with something magnificent that could “charge ya.” It simply happened to be a mountain caribou.

His encounter story is a bearing witness to caribou, which are now absent from Idaho, but it is also a bearing witness to ourselves in terms of asking what world we choose to inhabit. Do we want to live in a world in which “this“ — Bob’s word for caribou because miracles do not possess taxonomies — cannot seize us in some alpine boulder field? Cannot make us want to dive under the rocks when faced with its nameless and terrifying beauty? Do we want to live in a world in which a deer can’t walk out of the pages of a child’s tattered encyclopedia? I am that child and because of that deer I now walk the ungulate highways in search of caribou ghosts.

I feel a strong kinship to Bob. As a child, an uncontrollable stutter caused my voice to seize and trip over itself, making it uncomfortable to talk. So I avoided people and instead sought the company of animals who relieved me from the burden of speech. They were gracious and let me practice my solitude beside them. There, I learned to sing with them. For an animal is a song, a specific reverberation of space and time that echoes and harmonizes across van Dooren and Bird Rose’s “countless interwoven ethea that together comprise the foundation of our worlds.”

I am beginning to think the song of mountain caribou in the lower 48 has ended, or is in the process of being forgotten. Extinction is a kind of forgetting.

IV.

While sitting face to face with an interview subject, I often think how I am looking at eyes onto whose retina appeared, inverted, and bore human witness to the image of a real mountain caribou. A physical trace now exists in their brain as the encounter’s dendritic signature. And as they talk, I feel the image of the mountain caribou migrating from their brain to my own, from their solitude to mine.

Greetings,

I may have some information relevant to your caribou research project.

Don’t hesitate to contact me.

Dave Boswell

I didn’t hesitate, but the call went straight to voicemail. A few hours later, while eating Chinese takeout, I got a call from a Spokane number:

“Hi, is this Dave?”

“Are you the caribou guy? Which one are you?”

“I’m Jack.”

“Well nice to meet you, Jack. My name is Dave Boswell. So you guys are putting together some kind of project about mountain caribou?”

I tell him about how we are building a digital deep map; a multimodal and interactive spatial narrative about caribou loss told through video and audio interviews, ecology, photography, and getting ourselves lost in the woods. The loss of a species is the loss of a world; a world that is mappable insofar as it is understood to be lost. We were going to map their absence. Gone is the starting point.

“Are you guys natural resource majors?”

“No, English.”

“Well shit, that’s weird. Have you ever heard of the Jeannot Caribou? It was shot by Jean Jeannot in 1892 and the mount was exhibited in the 1893 World’s Fair wherever it was that year.”

“Chicago?”

“It was the largest black caribou ever shot in the state of Idaho. I use the term ‘black caribou’ on account of their dark coloration. Long story short, I found two caribou mounts at a hotel saloon in Hope, Idaho and bought them. The smaller one I gave to the biologist Don Johnson at the University of Idaho. He wanted the jawbone for something. He measured the Jeannot caribou and said it was the largest specimen he’d ever seen. Hold your arms out wide as you can. That’s how big it was.”

I envisioned filming Dave sitting by the fireplace with a glass of merlot, the Jeannot caribou mount resting beside him, telling the story of how he, against all odds, rescued the internationally famous caribou from Hope, Idaho. I asked him if we could come see the mount and get his side of the story on camera.

“It’s in the basement at my place near Priest River. But it’s a sad story. Some teens broke into my cabin a while back and stole the antlers. Stole some other stuff too.”

“They sawed them off?”

“No, they used a fire poker to hack them off. You guys want to come spend the night at the cabin?”

I immediately called Chris to tell him about the enigmatic caribou aficionado who invited us to spend the night at his cabin in order to see the Jeannot caribou which, unfortunately, had been mutilated by teenagers and was now kept in his basement. Chris agreed without hesitation to spend the night at Dave’s remote cabin, the risk of visiting a stranger’s remote basement be damned.

In the weeks leading up to our visit, Dave becomes a mythic figure to us. He’s a true disciple of the gray ghost, a mountain hermit who wandered the Selkirk wilderness for a decade only to fall short of glimpsing his idol. The closest he got was a set of tracks at a place called Goblin Knob.

V.

Dave, holding a glass of wine filled beyond decorum, and his neighbor, Phil, come out to greet us. Dave’s voice is booming and sonorous, its intonation flecked with a pleasing grit. When he speaks, which is often, his backwoodsman’s penchant for a profanity-laced tirade is executed with the flair and verbal resources of an urbane lawyer (Dave practices at a small firm in Spokane). He wears blue jeans with suspenders and a white linen shirt, the front beginning to untuck itself. Pale blue eyes are deep set under white eyebrows. His shoulders are still broad, presenting an imposing figure despite being well into his 70s.

Phil is younger by a decade, mild-mannered and soft spoken. Phil’s T-shirt has the name of a conservation organization on it and features a tableau of African wildlife — zebras, rhinos, wildebeest, impalas, giraffes and elephants. His long hair is kept in a ponytail which has a beautiful sheen to it. He’s just been through a divorce. I immediately like him.

We move on to a larger cabin built by Dave and his brothers. The interior is dusky, storybook-like, and smells lushly of cedar. Our camera recording, Dave becomes uncharacteristically demure about his own encounter with mountain caribou, which in fact never took place. Chris and I make a dent in our bottle of whiskey. Dave takes a big gulp of wine. As I told him over the phone, we’re interested in precisely what you didn’t see and how that felt. He looks at Phil. Phil, however, looks at me and I realize we’ve got Dave where we want him. He is getting ready to sing.

“Phil, I told you these guys were crazy.”

Dave tells the story of how for 10 years he tried and failed to see a black caribou in the wild. He spent a decade going up and down the gnashing serrated teeth of the Selkirk crest on snowshoes. But to no avail. He saw tracks but never the ghost itself. Chris asks him what he thinks it would have been like to see a caribou. Dave smiles, repeating the question back to Chris.

“What would it have been like to see a black caribou in the old growth spruce forest on top of the Selkirk crest? If you were agnostic, you’d reconsider because God has just exposed his face to you.”

We lose the light and decide to film the same session again in the morning. We move back over to the first cabin and drink even more beer as Dave prepares a stir fry dinner.

“Hey,” says Dave, “You guys wanna see the Jeannot caribou?”

Phil yanks open the cellar door and gestures for us to enter like a maitre d pointing to our table. I see Chris hesitate, ducking his head under a crossbeam. The basement is illuminated by a single overhead lamp which casts an orange hue on everything. We’re all standing in front of a washer and dryer. On top of the washer sits a caribou shoulder mount-sized object covered by a black trash bag.

“Phil, why don’t you go ahead…”

And then we saw it — the worst example of taxidermy I’d ever seen. The Jeannot caribou now cosplayed as a hay-stuffed sock puppet with gouges in its head where antlers should have been. Instead of dark and depthless tan and black shadows cast by old growth canopy, its coat was the color of a Ritz Cracker. The frayed skin flap of the lower jaw had completely detached. Phil was using it to make the caribou talk like some profane and dilapidated Muppet.

“You guys want some caribou hair? It’s hollow. It’s so buoyant they used it to make life jackets in the first World War.”

Dave gives us each a pinch of formaldehyde-stained hair. My mind goes to the sinking of the Lusitania, and I picture the survivors bobbing in the cold Atlantic in life jackets made from dead caribou. Then, Phil mercifully places the abomination back in its trash bag. Chris and I go up for air. We need it.

We emerge to twilit skies. I feel the bowl of the meadow and its million buzzing insects begin to slowly tilt as I realize how drunk I am. Dave and Phil make their way to bed. We pour ourselves a Scotch from Dave’s liquor cabinet and find our way to the porch, which I promptly fall off, into the soft grass. Neither of us knows what to make of what just happened, other than it being an encounter.

Later that night, in our star-studded vortex of drunkenness, we spot a curious object in the heavens. It was like a star, except blurry and more massive in size. This blurriness, we established, was not our fault, but due to the object being covered in a kind of luminous mold — making it brighter than any other in the sky. Strangest of all, it had a tail. Then, it dawned on me: Comet NEOWISE looked close enough to reach up and grab.

If only we could snatch the comet’s tail, hack it off in the spirit of teenage vandals, and bury it high up in the final place where the last caribou in the South Selkirk mountains made its home, then the black caribou would come back.

But I am too drunk to stand on Chris’s shoulders.

Are there mountain caribou in the South Selkirk mountains of Idaho right now?

We begin to laugh thinking about the ‘face of God’ but neither of us know what the face of God looks like.

Jack Kredell is a hunter, writer, and PhD candidate in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho. His research examines the wildfire crisis through its emotional, ecological, and institutional dimensions. He has collaborated on digital environmental projects including Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho's Mountain Caribou and Keeping Watch, which document environmental change in rural Idaho and the western United States.

Sometimes, the best way to receive a long-form narrative is on the run. Or, perhaps in your car. Or, if you’re like me, cleaning the house. So, we’re expanding the way we offer some of our long reads, and we hope to add some great conversations to the mix as well.

In March of 2024, a piece called ‘On Killing Animals’ kicked off The Westrn with a start. A few weeks ago, it won the ‘Hunting Blog’ category at the OWAA National Conference in Chatanooga, TN.

We figured it’s the right piece to kick off our podcast ‘Westrn Radio’ and we hope you enjoy listening here on Substack, on iTunes, or via Spotify.

Let us know below if you enjoyed this!

Author: Kathleen Shannon
Summer 2025 Print Issue (Vol II)

On an icy cold February morning, 90s R&B blasts from the speakers of Elizabeth Painter’s heavy-duty Idaho Fish and Game truck, Big Boy. A French braid falls apart along her head and a half-eaten Kodiak brownie breakfast bowl grows cold in the cupholder. She lifts four fingers off the wheel to wave at a truck passing on the rural road. She doesn’t get one back.

“We’re changing hearts and minds,” Painter says, shrugging. “It’s the long game.”

It’s 2022 and I’m in grad school studying environmental journalism at the University of Montana, where Painter is a doctoral candidate in the wildlife biology department. It’s her third field season researching white-tailed deer survival rates in northern Idaho. She’s letting me tag along for a few days, so I can document her work while bettering my own.

Whitetails are considered the raccoon of deer, for their ubiquity. But that doesn’t mean they should be taken for granted. They make up “a lot of biomass in the system,” Painter told me. Despite being important prey for grizzly and black bears, wolves, cougars, bobcats and coyotes, the state hasn’t tallied white-tailed deer populations much beyond hunting data. Painter remedies that by tracking the predation and survival rates of does and their fawns, starting while fawns are still in utero.

“I’m basically a deer gynecologist,” she says with a smirk. Depending on their age and whether they’re pregnant, she fits deer with collars or other devices. It all requires trapping them first.

Off unassuming roads in mixed conifer woods, Painter has established a network of deer traps. Named for their inventor, the 1950s-era ‘Clover’ traps are rectangular stalls comprised of a metal frame with thick netted walls. At night, Painter baits them with hay, leaving one end rolled open as a door. When a hungry deer enters in the morning, it trips a wire and releases the door, which rolls down and shuts the cage with a clunk.

This time of year, Painter and her three-person crew spend most daylight hours setting and checking traps. When they pull up near the first deer trap of the day, a hush descends. They climb out and grab supplies from the truck bed. The only sound is the crunch of their boots on ice.

They follow a flagged trail, canopied by cedar and birch trees, toward a netted cage they’d baited the day before. As they near, two of them start sprinting. Painter, who is recovering from surgery (a herniated disk caused by lifting a deer), arrives last to find one technician bear-hugging the fawn under the front armpits like a wrestler while another straps front legs to rear, immobilizing her. Within a few minutes, the fawn is surprisingly calm, and the kidnapping vibe has dissipated. A tech struggles to fit the doe’s neck with a boxy black GPS device on a leather collar. “Hashtag collar conundrums,” Painter says.

Painter comes from a family of artists, and her first career path was, indeed, a painter. During art school at Bard College in Upstate New York, she got a migraine that never disappeared. She was in and out of school, sometimes flying home to California. “I spent a whole year painting sloths as metaphors for people,” she recalls.

While her friends struggled to launch careers as artists, Painter read about a woman researching wolves in Oregon. She pivoted and started taking general science classes at community college. She took wildlife classes online while she finished her last semester of art school. By 2015, she received her bachelor’s degree in wildlife science from Oregon State University. After just two months of learning Spanish, she went to Mexico to study conflicts between jaguars and cattle , earning her master’s degree from El Colegio de Postgraduados, Campus San Luis Potosí in 2018.

In freezing Idaho, Painter now rides shotgun while a technician steers Big Boy through the Coffee Corral drive-through. After catching the fawn that morning, the team had to euthanize an injured deer and found a few other traps empty. Idaho Fish and Game tasked the team with collaring 60 deer in the span of several weeks in two large study areas teeming with whitetails. They rarely capture mule deer. Painter opens the map app on her phone to point out nearby trap locations.

Collecting biological data from a white-tailed deer fawn (~7 months old). Alex is preparing a GPS collar that gets fit to each individual’s neck size.

When Painter comes across hunters, they often assume she’s studying the controversial wolf population. “No, we study deer,” Painter tells them. “We’re doing this for you.” It’s true that her work could affect the number of deer tags available to hunters. But whether that means more tags or fewer depends on the data.

Locals tend to be wary of the government. With limited budgets, the state agency can’t afford a permanent presence in every community. So Painter knows that planning years of field work behind the wheel of an Idaho Fish and Game truck means she needs to form good relationships with the public. It’s a mission that steers her approach to her work, and colors her interactions on the road. “Hearts and minds." She repeats it from behind the wheel like a three-word manifesto.

During those four years, Painter shared her findings with landowners and the community over lemonade and lunch. Her work shows that the primary cause of death for fawns in the study area is predation by bears – both black bears and grizzlies – and that mountain lions hit white-tailed deer hard at all stages of life. Across her 21,000-kilometer study area and all her field seasons, she captured roughly 700 deer total and found that the whitetails are “showing signs of population decline under current environmental conditions.”

That brings us to today. We’re both out of school, and working in our respective fields. We caught up on what’s changed during a recent phone call. She is now Painter-Flores. I am now a big game hunter.

Painter-Flores defended her doctoral dissertation in May 2025 and accepted a job at the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit a few weeks later. In a male-dominated field, she was glad a group of women interviewed her for the role. Years earlier, she had told me, “Being a woman of power is of the utmost importance in my life.” Coming up in another industry occupied largely by men, I could relate.

On our final morning together in the field, the team works on a trapped doe and Painter preps for her expert obstetrician procedure. After the usual measurements, they give the doe an ultrasound to confirm her pregnancy. Then, Painter installs a key tool for her research: a vaginal implant transmitter. The small T-shaped device immediately starts sensing temperature, light and movement. Those will change dramatically when the doe gives birth in early summer, triggering a radio signal to her collar, and then an alert to Painter. Finally, she’ll search for the new fawns, collar them and see if they survive or become prey.

After the team unstraps her legs, the doe bounds away, her white tail standing tall in the air. “See that?” Painter said. “She’s giving us the finger.”

Kathleen Shannon is a Montana-based writer, audio producer and ponderosa connoisseur who’s reported in camouflage, crampons, and wildland fire pants. She's rounded up her work at kathleen-shannon.com.

This article originally appeared as a feature in the Spring Issue of our newsprint magazine eponymously titled The Westrn. Get a print copy shipped from The Westrn Store for just $15.

Author: Sylvia Dekker
Summer 2025 Print Issue (Vol II)

I stumble, catching myself before eating dirt. It’s still dark, the trail only illuminated by the weak beam of my husband’s headlamp a few paces ahead. We crunch ever upwards, steps buoyant without our toddler and his various needs on our backs. My husband sings ‘Land of the Silver Birch’, a heads up for grizzlies. The sky lightens to a smudge of dusty purple. A glassy blue-green lake emerges from the trees, opening up the view of our objective.

That’s one big, faraway rock.

Rocks. So many rocks. I might as well be in the mountains.

I chuck a hefty one into the growing pile and eyeball the steep slope of my new yard, wondering how long it’ll take to turn a chunk of it into a productive garden. My back says forever. My arms agree with my back. I heave another and it splinters with a sharp crack. I slowly free patches of the steep ground from their burdens, the dirt underneath compacted into shiny brown pits.

It’s already May, and my Zone 3 growing season is a blink between frozen nostrils. Any frost-tolerant vegetables should have been seeded yesterday. A lifetime ago, my soil science professor insisted dirt was a derogatory term for the living soils we studied, best used to describe what my kids now track indoors. I snort as I try to stab a hole for a pea seed with my finger. Even he’d agree this was pure dirt: no structure, no porosity, no life.

I plant spinach, lettuce, beets and carrots in small sections in it anyway. My shovel scrapes into the dirt, sending shivers up my spine, and I know that when I pull carrots this fall they will be shaped by the small rocks buried beneath the surface.

The rock pile threatens to swallow half of my back yard. I pivot from chucking and begin intentionally placing heavy, colorful stones, creating rounded terraces. A garden of sorts emerges. Rock-defined beds remind me of a wander in the woods, hunting for shed antlers or little pink orchids.

I hate the brown bare dirt in the weeks post-seeding. It’s ugly and barren and stale. I anxiously wait for green shoots to emerge. When I irrigate, the water carves rivulets into the slope that disappear at the bottom of the garden.

I can hear the waterfall before I can see it. The noise propels me up the dirt path that winds through scrubby spruces and purple asters. The peaks are awash with warm, welcoming colours, but I’ve done this before and know the invitation comes with an asterisk of challenge.

Neither my husband nor I can budge one giant square purple rock, so it finds a permanent home in one of the bottom beds. I perch on it to survey this alien space I call a garden.

Why am I even bothering? Thistles, prickly lettuce and dandelions seem to sprout through the dirt every time I turn my back to move another rock. But it also seems like every time my feet and hands touch the ground, I become more attached to it. Creating a garden helps me hold nature close and keeps it relevant during this life stage when I’m more bound to home. I must work with its challenges to reap its gifts. The slow processes of planting, tending, and — if I’m lucky — finally harvesting is both rooting and grounding, literally and metaphorically.

My legs burn, my lungs burn, and I question why I’m doing this to myself, as I climb a long and steep slope. Sunshine spills over the rocks and juniper above us, wafting down summer-in-high-alpine warmth and spice. A bumblebee drones in wide circles around me. I begin trudging again, trying to disassociate from the discomfort and instead focus on my surroundings.

In the garden, I'm more than a passive observer; I’m an active being, spooking both deer and grouse. I manipulate things to be productive, plant things I like, and weed out stubborn grass. Here, I make hopeful decisions and changes that will positively impact the ecosystem surrounding my home.

The first year of vegetables was hardly productive. Nutrients, water, time and knowledge were in deficit. Winter lurked. It hailed often. Mule deer in velvet bounded over the fence, helping themselves to salads of spinach, strawberry leaves, and peas. My fingers bled after digging carrots in the fall. Like a false summit, the tops beckoned, luscious and tall. But the orange roots came out of the sticky dirt stunted, distorted, and deeply disappointing.

I tell myself roots in the ground is enough. Ground cover adds nutrients and organic matter. Roots break through the tough ground. My agricultural background informs this, but I still blink back tears of frustration and exhaustion.

I’m in this for the long haul. Life billows with the speed, enormity, and beauty of summer storm clouds. When my body — growing twin babies — tells me I can no longer carry my son up a mountain slope, my wanderlust gnaws. Nature beckons with all its little beauties and big adventures. I crave sucking lungfuls of fresh pine-laced air, leg-quivering exercise, and seeking little wild discoveries.

We emerge into a sun-drenched sea of color, and my jaw hits the trail. I pull out my phone and lag behind, trying to capture every wildflower and the vistas they frame. This is why I hike, I think. I make the most of the easy flat-packed dirt path. I soak in summer alpine bliss.

After the twins are born, a helpful friend pulls a chair up to the topmost rock wall and sits with her feet propped up. She reads a book, facing my wild, messy garden. In my postpartum fog, the fact that this cultivated space helps her relax blows my mind; I begin to intentionally use my garden as a place to recharge. I delight in watching frantic native bees on blooming dill and calendula. I drool over the last evening rays glowing through poppy petals. I take my camera out and capture visiting butterflies, tiny raptors, and gold finches.

This is why I garden. It’s not only for the veggies; I’m a flower girl at heart. A steep section becomes a chaos garden. I throw in several more packets of annual and perennial wildflower seeds –- pretty things I find along the trail like lupine and columbine –- and only occasionally pull grass and thistles. I dedicate an entire row running the length of the rough rocky rectangle to helpful plants like nasturtiums, marigolds, cosmos, borage, and monarda.

Eventually it blooms every color, from pink crinkly poppies to blue flax, buzzing with life that radiates out into the rest of the garden. The combination of blooms invites nature in for a feast. Hoverfly adults sip cilantro nectar; their larvae chow down on pest insects. Songbirds nibble sunflower seeds pollinated by mammoth fuzzy bumblebees.

The garden becomes my wilderness when the backcountry is out of reach. No one else knows where the paths really are. The bed shapes change every year. Rocks indicate random rows of zinnias, cornflowers, and sage. They mark the ends of a freshly seeded row of beans, ring watermelons that will never produce ripe fruit, and show where cabbages were before they’re chewed to smithereens by flea beetles.

Volunteer clovers and vetches pull nitrogen from the atmosphere, injecting the vital macronutrient into the soil. I leave them growing between the leeks that my kids helped plant. The rows are, at best, haphazard. The dirt needs more help, so we spread a dump trailer load of alfalfa hay, straw bedding, and goat manure over the entire garden. I can almost hear dirt becoming soil.

Standing with dirt-stained hands on my hips, I look over my messy, frustrating, yet fulfilling domain. I feel some hope and pride grow with it. This garden is now cultivating me, refusing to let me give up, teaching me patience. I wonder if, on this shady north-facing slope where slush still falls from the sky at the end of June, I’m finally figuring out Zone 3 gardening. From a fence post, a magpie chuckles in my direction.

A Swainson’s Thrush flutes ascending notes from the treetops below. It’s all open alpine meadow ahead. Blooms vibrate with insects among tumbles of rock. The perfect, lush, living garden conceals the harsh conditions it faces. We climb among clusters of deep pink paintbrush and rocky cliffs. We refill our water bottles in the crystal-cold stream and look back at the trail dropping down behind us, the shrinking lake, and the shades of blue peaks beyond. We’ve come a long way but a mountain still waits. The trail disappears in a boulder field. We snake from cairn to cairn. My hiking boots make mountain music with each step.

I slide around in Walmart crocs, moving rocks and pulling thistles. Strangely, this gardening thing is beginning to feel more intimate than wandering through the forest and sitting at the base of an old whitebark pine. Here, I invite the native species living nearby to pollinate, control pests, and share the foods we will eat. The relationships I’m developing with the forces are deep and appreciative. Among swaying herbs buzzing with happy insects, a kinship emerges.

Year by year, I start seeds in my basement each February, put final seeds into the soil in June, and thick frost sparkles on adult plants by September. I impatiently wait for snow to melt off the shady slope and for avalanche danger to abate in the mountains. I am as much at the mercy of weather whims at home as I am out there. I set up a cheap cone greenhouse to extend the season for my tomatoes and peppers so that maybe, maybe, they’ll produce fruit before the season ends. I practice crop rotation, trying to outsmart the flea beetles, slugs, and carrot weevils. I research companion planting. This turns my garden into a community of mutually beneficial, resilient, productive plants that rely and depend on one another.

My backyard’s biodiversity is thrilling, with some species more welcome than others. A ground beetle — shining like a black opal — burrows away. Rusty centipedes scurry as I dig potatoes. Spittle bugs and slugs slide around on slick stems. A tiny sweat bee lands on my arm, its forehead streaked with a stripe of Cheeto-dust pollen. Lacewings, lady bugs, crab spiders, caterpillars, butterflies and moths live, grow, and reproduce here.

We pause for a breather in a mountain goat’s dirt bed and examine his tracks. A ptarmigan waddles in the rocks above, cocking a beady eye at us. I relish every moment in the presence of wild things. It’s t draws me to the backcountry.

The day heats up, the slope gets steeper. We kick-step up a snow patch. Beads of snow shower down, sprinkling my sweaty, sunburnt skin. I get into the flow of uphill motion, soak in the pure silence of a day off from motherhood. A marmot whistles.

A dog barks at me from across the grassy alley when I hop into my strawberry bed to weed around runners while my kids nap. Detailed tending is for when patience is plentiful; today is not one of those days. I grab a hoe and release frustrated energy into the ground with each blow. I get into a flow, breathing in the scent of dirt becoming soil, pausing to crack my back. My hands turn brown — freckles on one side, dirt on my palms. Weed juice stains my thumbs green.

In the spirit of letting nature take the wheel, I let plants set seed at will. The next season, I weed around volunteer chamomile, sunflowers, spinach, flax, poppies, cosmos, and onions in my potato bed while three little kids pull sleds filled with small garden rocks in the lawn above.

I romanticize my every day now that the backcountry is that much harder to get to, and motherhood weighs like a warm but heavy blanket. It’s working. We draw chalk smiley faces on the rocks at the top of the garden. The kids gobble any and all fruit they see, ripe or not. I brush a mosquito off my youngest’s forehead. He grins up at me with strawberry-stained teeth.

Panting upwards, I suck a mosquito into my throat. I cough, spit it into the rocks, and take the last few steps to the pass. A sea of glaciers and peaks opens up. I forget about my burning calves. Dark rock towers on both sides of us, framing a sunlit icefield. A lake drops off the edge of a cliff. Blue peaks stretch out and melt into the sky.

Adventure lives as much on my steep garden slopes as it does on those made of tinkling shale. Even when the beets are tiny, the spinach bolts too soon, and the spaghetti squash is still green at frost, the garden satiates my hunger for the outdoors.

I embrace the chaos, welcome in both nature and little feet. I battle short seasons, summer hail, limited water, and challenging slopes. There are plenty of moments I don't enjoy about this place, like tweezing thistle spines out of my fingertips or picking slugs off my garlic. Overall, though, I’m harvesting a net positive: healthy food, hands-on work, productive procrastination, and straight-up beauty beyond my doors.

My legs shake with exhaustion. I enjoy this, I try to convince myself, as I watch a stone tumble away from my perch on the once big and faraway rock. It’s lifeless up here. My eyes wander to the blooming green below, but I drag them higher to where mountain and sky meet. It looks straight up, and I’m no mountain goat. I summon stubbornness. I put one foot above the other.

If I know anything about relationships, they’re a two-way street. I claim to be a nature lover, but treading trails, sharing my love for it, and encouraging others to get out there isn’t enough. In my garden, I give back in small but meaningful ways, all the while enjoying many of the things I love about being in the wilderness. The spicy smells, the discoveries, the aesthetics, and the rawness.

There is no more up. Everything in view is below and beyond. I barely feel the last few steps to where my husband flips through the summit box log. We relax on the peak for a long time, pointing out luminous crevasses, silty green lakes, and gravel raked into flowing lines by a long-gone glacier. I ignore the fact that we are only halfway done. As we begin the painful downclimb, I set my sights on wandering the level and colourful meadow again.

A butterfly flits under my hose shower in a flutter of dusty blue, and I spy a spiny juvenile ladybug patrolling a basil leaf. Every time I step foot in this garden, I connect with the wild. It’s a feeling I only get in the backcountry when I cut a morel, trace the rough pads of an old black bear print, or nibble a wild rose petal. As I head indoors to finish dinner with a bundle of fresh green onions and spinach, grown by these hands and this annual effort, I palm and scarf a few ripe raspberries the kids missed.

Between a hip-screamer of a downward step, I spy plump violet huckleberries dripping off green bushes along the trail. The berries pop, warm and sweet, in my mouth. My steps become lighter, halted, wandering. The rest of the downhill is a blur of colour, of satisfaction of birdsong.

I love it here.

I love it here.

Sylvia Dekker is based in a small town in the Albertan Rocky Mountain foothills. Fresh air, wild places, and the life they contain — from the smallest wonder to the vastest detail — are the heartbeats of her family and pen. She shares her love of exploring nature with her husband, toddler, and twin babies. Find her @syl.dekker and www.sylviadekker.com.

At its core, it feels like art. Art is hard won. It can often feel like shouting into a void, and then trying to make a sculpture out of the echo that returns to you. Really, it can feel impossible in the beginning. The impossibility caught up to us in the last issue. We dug deep into our own pockets to make it work, and we learned we need to get ahead of the game in order to produce the next issue pragmatically.

This is a long update, so in summary, we’re proud of The Summer Issue and what we made alongside our writers and illustrators. After doing this twice, we finally understand the scope and work it takes to get this done, and we’re raising $15,000 so that we can run our next issue.

We’re calling it The Hunting Issue.

That sounds like a lot, but we need to be transparent about what it costs to hire contributors, something we’re unwilling to compromise on. And we can’t hire them without a budget.

If you are already supporting us through either paid subscriptions or single purchases, we’re so damn grateful for you! We’ll make sure you get your money’s worth as we build to the next issue. More on that below.

And if you appreciate our digital work as a free subscriber, you can help by becoming an annual or monthly subscriber, an advertiser, or by keeping an eye out for soon-to-be-released merch.

Interested in the whole story? Keep reading.

Narrative Journalism is Worth the Effort

We focus on narrative journalism and narrative nonfiction within the broad scope of outdoor writing. We rarely report on what is beyond our experience; rather, we report what’s within it.

A story about adopting a burro can also educate about the plight of wild equines on public lands. A story about facing down wild animals can inform us of how our energy moves through the world — and how it might be our jobs to shift that energy. A story about a garden can press up against one writer’s longing to be in the backcountry, while family ties her close to home.

This issue, to me, is closer to our vision than anything else we’ve produced. It’s funny, punny, light-hearted, and fresh. The illustrations sing, the photography breathes, and the stories cross recreational pursuits, scientific adventure, family connections, and friendly mischief. When our readers look at this, I hope they feel the same sense of relief it gives our team. Traditional journalism can’t really offer us that respite at the moment. But I believe narrative journalism can.

In a world of specialization and high-intensity niches, versatility can feel like a gamble. If dice were tossed, this issue wins the shake-a-day pot. I’m proud of it. That said, we’re not exactly making ends meet.

The Honest Math of a Burgeoning Publication

Out of our 3,529 subscribers, 225 are paid subscribers. This works out to about $12,000/year here on Substack. We’re in the Top 50 Environment Substacks because of this, and we’ve often beat out some of the best environmental writers in the world on the Rising List. It’s incredible to be doing that well on Substack, while also telling of how difficult it is to make a living there. We’ll say, it’s also just successful enough to be dangerous: It tempts us to leverage that support to do more.

Most importantly, we’re committed to paying our contributors a market-acceptable rate for stories. With around 10 stories per issue from contributors, more than 50% of our budget funds the work of writers, illustrators, and fellow creatives. Our editing process is thorough, and it takes a few weeks to complete. Our biggest expense, then, is making sure each contributor is paid adequately for their work over time, and that’s certainly a spot where we refuse to budge. We’re not willing to publish something that only exists through labor exploitation. If we’re making this, we have to build the audience and market to sustain it.

For this to work, we’ve made compromises with paying ourselves, but we must impose practical limits. We expected to be doing editing and design work without compensating ourselves for a bit. By doing this we broke even on the first issue, surprising for a new publication. But with the second printing, we had to put about $7,000 cash into self-funding magazine production costs. That’s too deep in the red to repeat.

So in the spirit of “Do you want it to be good, fast, or cheap?”— we’re sacrificing ‘fast.’

Our Fall Issue is Now “The Hunting Issue”

Our next slated issue focuses on all the harbingers of our favorite season: Fall. Honestly, it’s the issue we’ve been most excited about as DIY hunters ourselves. We know many of you have been looking towards it as well, both as potential contributors and dedicated readers.

Fall is our time of year. It takes the footwork of time on the ground and puts something in the freezer, that we can go back to again and again and again. For the next three seasons, it also feeds our favorite sort of story — the kind you want to tell your friends around a campfire, bundled in your favorite fleece, with a beverage in hand.

So, we’re renaming the next newsprint magazine The Hunting Issue, and we’ll make it once we have the funds in the bank to do so, on a timeline that works for us and for our future contributors. Ideally, we’d be able to ship before Christmas, so it arrives along with holiday cheer.

We’d also like to make it a slightly longer issue, where we can give stories, images, and illustrations even more space to breathe, while offering more bang for your buck — or, more buck for your bang, if we’re being hunters about it.

How You Can Help Us Reach Our $15,000 Goal

We’re setting our initial goal as $15,000 to run The Hunting Issue, an amount that would allow Kestrel, L, and myself to make ends meet. But, we don’t want to go the ol’ GoFundMe or Kickstarter route just yet. We’d rather stay inside our Substack universe.

The biggest way anyone could help is to…

Pre-Purchase the Issue for $15

If we sell 1000 copies, we’re good to go. That’s doable.

But, there are a ton of other opportunities to help us bring The Hunting Issue to life. And again, if you’re already on board, hell yeah friends! We’re so happy to have you on our team.

But should you want to help further, here’s the list:

• Become an annual subscriber and you’ll receive both digital articles and print as soon as it drops. (And if you are an annual subscriber, don’t forget to fill out our address form to receive the paper!)

• Become a monthly subscriber and you’ll receive print articles digitally that are only available to paid subscribers. But, you’ll have to purchase print separately!

• Purchase a printed Spring or Summer Issue from The Westrn Store

• Pre-purchase ‘The Hunting Issue’ from The Westrn Store

• Purchase gift subscriptions or individual issues for friends and family that you think would like what we’re up to.

• Advertise with us! It’s affordable, and it supports our commitment to storytelling more than you know. We start at just $250, and we offer discounts for nonprofits, small businesses, and NGOs.

  Find Our Ad Rates Here

We’ve done our damndest to stay away from becoming overbearing fools when it comes to asking for things in market speak. So, just know that supporting us goes exactly where we say it goes — to the pursuit of art and storytelling.

Merch Incoming

We know the outdoors crowd loves merch, and you all have been asking for it. We’ve got a few ideas up our sleeve that we’re excited about.

• A “STAY RANK” t-shirt inspired by the advice column of the ineffable Rachelle Schrute

• A “GET (the) WESTRN” t-shirt that inspires folks to stay rowdy

• Hats, prints and stickers from our incredible illustrators, including 8-year-old Oscar Nichols-Chestnut’s badass skull drawing, our wrapping paper designs, and more

Already a Subscriber? We’ll Make Sure You Get What You Paid For

We know that print being on pause is not ideal if you’re already a subscriber. That’s a big reason we didn’t increase our price when we added print to the subscription model in January.

Our $50/year digital subscription promised two long-reads per month, and it stayed at $50/year when we added the newsprint magazine. It’s a silly decision from a business perspective, but it’s an honest decision when you’re unsure of how things will work long-term.

That said, we’re baking things into the annual subscription that we hope will convince you to stick around, like special discounts, pre-releases for merch, and other opportunities. And we’re still gunning to get The Hunting Issue out in 2025.

As our core community, we want to open the lines of communication. Have ideas that you think can help? Please let us know. Say something in the comments. Send us an email. Know us personally? Give us a call. And yeah, we’ll do your po

We’re new to selling this, but we’re committed to making it, and that in itself feels like a win.

Let’s do the damn thing —

Nicole, Kestrel, and L

The trainer stood in the center of the round pen, an athletic red colt circling him at a high energy trot.

“It’s about timing,” he said, stepping back, pulling off both pressure and energy. The colt quickly stopped, turned, and faced the man.

In the stands, a decent-sized audience listened attentively. In the mid-afternoon heat, horses and burros lazed in square pens at the Livingston, Montana fairgrounds. Their necks sported intricate white freeze brands, along with a loop of unique four digit tags, indicating their identities to prospective adopters.

The “First Steps” Horsemanship Clinic — led by a clinician who goes by the name ‘Mustang Matt’ — served as the educational leg of the Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Event in early June. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) brought nearly 60 unhandled mustangs and burros from public lands and corrals around the American West.

The adoption process for BLM mustangs and burros is unlike anything else in the horse world. America’s wild equines are protected by The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, signed into law by President Nixon. The animals’ ownership is held in the public trust, meaning that all Americans collectively own our wild horses and burros. The government has a vested interest in their continued care. So getting approved to take home an untouched burro or mustang means fulfilling requirements, including adequate fence heights, appropriate shelter, minimum pen sizes, and enduring a time commitment before the agency transfers ownership. Then, after a full year of care, adopters submit a final application for a ‘title of ownership.’ Once approved, a ‘titled’ mustang or burro is essentially like any horse in the equine market.

Currently, more than 80,000 wild horses and burros roam on public land, plus we have nearly 50,000 in government-funded holding corrals. This comes at an enormous expense to taxpayers, to the tune of $100 million annually. To me, taking mouths off the government feed bill is an act of public service — not only for feral animals coming into human care, but for the reduction of harm to native wildlife and sensitive ecosystems.

Though the truly wild ancestors of horses once roamed North America in the Pleistocene epoch, today’s wild horses and burros are better described as a feral and non-native species. Horses, in particular, are intensive and destructive grazers with a high need for water intake. They’re hard on the drought-ridden landscapes they mostly inhabit, and they’re just as hard on native flora and fauna. Rather, these 16th-century transplants evolved long ago to live and work in partnership with people. If I had my way, feral mustangs and burros would go the way of the covered wagon, and each would have hoof care, immunizations, dental care, and the nutrition they need to thrive.

Unsurprisingly, few others share my viewpoint. The majesty and freedom of wild mustangs in particular gins up a certain kind of Western image. That picture is less rose-colored once filtered through the reality of a a busted tooth abscess, easily-preventable permanent lameness, death by dehydration, or worse. The wild horses and burros act passed to protect these animals. Yet in many ways it accomplished the opposite: it limits our ability to manage wild equines as we manage most wildlife — at the state level and independent to the needs of the landscape they’re affecting.

At least I have a leg (or sixteen) to stand on in this argument. All but one equine on my farm started life on public lands. My four-year-old mustang, Seven, comes from the White Mountain Herd Management Area of Wyoming. I somehow ended up saying yes to taking on her titling process at a wedding. (It’s a wanting metaphor I do not care to indulge.) I received her official title a few months ago. She grows bigger and more golden with each passing day.

Another friend — one Kestrel Keller — keeps their BLM donkey, Rocco, with me. (‘Donkey’ and ‘burro’ are synonymous.) Now seven years old Rocco is well accustomed to domestication. He loves cuddles, demands both daily hugs and affirmations of his unfailing beauty, and struts his way through life like a prized rooster in his prime. I hunted with him last fall. When he out-walked my mule in rough-and-tumble country, I became an evangelist of his surefooted virtues. My mind ran rampant with donkey-powered daydreams.

At Friday afternoon’s event preview, I daydreamed once again. I stood with my arms crossed over the rails of the burro pen for the better part of four hours. That unrepentant hyperfocus is what turned me on to hunting. Once animals are in front of me, I don’t want to do anything but watch. I will watch, and I will watch, and I will continue to watch. The downside to this is that the intimacy of understanding behavior will eventually drive me close to something like love. It’s difficult when you’re trying to fill the freezer and instead have developed some level of attachment to a wild animal. It’s even more difficult when you’re trying not to take a wild animal home with you.

So, I left my horse trailer at home. I told myself that I came to this event to write a story, not to add to my herd of critters. I eased up when I realized the burros were older and a bit unkempt. They weren’t the bigger and heftier burros I’d pictured packing elk. But some burros appear more structurally sound than others.

No! I tell myself. No! Not this time. So, I watch. And I continue watching. At this event, the attendees are just as interesting as the equines.

The desire to touch something wild seems to be attached, like a barnacle, to the human condition. Human fingers clamored for the velveteen touch of a muzzle, the strong curve of a neck, the full roundness of a rump. Begging hands reached in toward the burros from two fence lines. The burros responded by pressing against the back rails of the pen, as far as possible from the spiny tentacles of wanting energy stretched in their direction. People jotted down numbers. They laughed at donkey antics. They crossed arms and watched.

Any herd of animals becomes a herd of personalities if you pay attention long enough. To my eye, the burros evolved with each passing minute. A shaggy donkey with fluffy ears laid down and rolled happily, finally stopping to scan the crowd with curious eyes. A tiny ragged fella harassed the whole herd, biting and kicking unremittingly. The youngest donkey had a happy-go-lucky Hi! How are ya! sort of expression that all but guaranteed him a home. He was the first to come around to the reaching hands. Over the weekend, a few other donkeys did as well — realizing that scritches and pats weren’t that bad after all.

Other donks looked on with dismissive judgment in their hearts. Enjoy being eaten, a small and curmudgeonly black burro seemed to say. He stayed tucked into the far back corner, wearing an oh hell no look that endured. He occasionally pinned his ears at any long-eared compatriot that seemed to be enjoying himself too much.

I begin jotting down numbers, just for fun, and without supposed attachment to an outcome. I like this one. I’d write it down. I see the solid build on that one. I’d write it down. One particular donkey held strong at the top of the list. One ear fell goofily to the side. He possessed both a flat, strong back and a big gentle eye. I read his tag number: 3024. But there were others. 3452. 1102. 3177.

My friend Elise showed up halfway through the preview. Hunting partners since 2018, we talked about how packing with donkeys could allow us to go further into the mountains, carrying less, and hunting more. Rocco was a constant inspiration. Elise decided she was in, and her donkey would live with me for the time being. Her excitement riled me up. I’d be going back to get my trailer after all. My heart softened. I pictured 3024 and his crooked ear happy at home with whoever Elise might end up with. Maybe I should get one too, I said. Elise grinned. Folks perusing the burros caught pieces of our conversation and became curious.

They can pack? How much weight? Can they keep up with a horse? The questions rolled in, and the efficacy of these small yet resilient pack animals changed shape as we conversed. I became a de facto salesperson, extolling the virtues of Equus asinus. Donkeys aren’t simply cute lawn ornaments, I’d say. Currently, more than 40 million donkeys exist worldwide, and the majority still work for a living, mostly in arid and rugged third world countries. Pound for pound, a healthy donkey can typically carry 20% of its body weight under most circumstances.

Donkeys are thrifty eaters, desert drinkers, healthy to a fault, and thus live longer than other equines. They often continue working well into their 30s and 40s. Gasps from the audience! Yes! I reinforced this point: burros are the parrots of the horse world. Do not be dismayed by this older herd and their teenage years — they still have much to give and many lives to live!

Their reputation for stubbornness is, I’d mention, mostly a misunderstanding. Skeptical and questioning looks. Donkeys possess an admirable sense of self-preservation, a keen eye for trouble brewing, and a bit of intellectual narcissism that renders us occasionally flummoxed. They run on what enthusiasts call ‘donkey time’ and we are so inclined to endure this time structure until one or both parties throws in the towel. Raised brows…

Ok, so sometimes they’re stubborn. But they have their reasons and we have our curse words, right?! Knowing laughs! Chuckles! Plus, they’re delightfully social, and this plays to our advantage if we’re smart about it. Donkeys possess less flight but more fight. Disarm the fight through thoughtful socializing and training, and you might cultivate a long-eared bestie, like Rocco, who will follow you to the edges of the earth and back. Though even he sometimes causes minor drama, like pulling away in a fit of joy and wildly bucking a hundred yards down the trail when you take the first turn towards home. Run…away? Like, away away?

Here, I’d laugh nonchalantly, tossing my hair behind my shoulder. Oh, it’s all in good fun! The mischief, the shenanigans, the occasional rope burns on hands! Rope burns? Well, he did pack 140 lbs of elk meat out on a six-mile trip for his previous owner. Here, I’d show them the picture of Rocco, with a meat-laden pack. Wow, they’d say. Wow. People walked away in a confused but titillated fog.

At the very least, two people were convinced. Elise and I jotted down our final list of neck tag numbers, our picks for the following morning. We decided to reconvene at 8:45 a.m. to make the 9 a.m. adoption. Coffees in hand for us both, Elise beat me to the line, which was longer than we’d imagined. Apparently, one gal got up at 4 a.m. to stand in line and assure her pick of the mustangs — a brassy palomino yearling from Oregon’s South Steens herd. Others had been in line for at least an hour. The first-come, first-serve culture of the event was a bigger deal than either of us knew.

Our picks slowly dwindled. My heartbeat quickened. We started chatting with the couple in front of us. It turned out they lived just a few miles from me, in a spot I pass by often.

“Who are you standing in line for?” I asked, just making conversation.

“Two of the burros,” the couple replied.

“Oh, us too. Which ones?”

Three…oh…two…four. The first number rolled off the fella’s tongue, the second number fell into obscurity, and the air in my conversational thought bubble popped. I looked at Elise, and she looked at me, pursing her lips. My heart dropped hard and fast, like a kicked stone from a high trail, down a rocky cliff of disappointment, and into a rushing river of self-flagellation. We should have gotten there earlier.

“Oh, 3024 is a really nice one, I was hoping to get him, but it’s fun that I’ll see him in the pasture from time to time.” I meant it. The couple smiled kindly; we continued chatting. When we reached the office window, there was only one left on our list. That was good news for the adopted donkeys and bad news for me. I decided to forgo adopting a donkey, and Elise chose the sweet-eyed shaggy boy, 3177.

We filled out his paperwork and received his folder, replete with even more paperwork. After getting everything in hand, we hustled over to the arena to watch Mustang Matt’s clinic. He’d be working with two mustangs at two different levels of training, modeling how to work with the particular needs of each individual. Elise and I tucked ourselves into the stands, as Matt worked the young sorrel colt.

.

A good horseman makes the conversation between horse and trainer into a sort of interspecies waltz. Mustangs may not be socialized to humans, but they live intensely social lives and learn the equine language masterfully on the range. Matt’s many years of working with hundreds — if not thousands — of mustangs meant he too spoke their language.

Timing. Feel. Pressure. Release. To horse folk, these words invoke a sense of wonder at first. A person at the beginning of their equine journey may watch someone like Matt and think some sort of magic was at play. But, there’s as much artistry — if not more — in the human explanation. He breaks things down not only for the horse in the arena, but most importantly on a step-by-step basis for the aspiring audience, many of which hold folders of paperwork for their own new four-legged family members.

The next day, I arrived back in Livingston with a trailer behind my pickup. Six donkeys were left in the pen, including 3177. The five others were the only donks who hadn’t been adopted. In total, more than 40 animals found homes. And now, I looked at 3177 and felt compelled to offer him companionship in the journey.

The stragglers were, well, straggly. But the little curmudgeon was still there. He’d made me laugh throughout my observations, and that’s not a trait I take lightly. I looked at the sheet of available donkeys to find his number. This was 8945’s third adoption event. At 21 years old, he’d spent three years in government holding pens. Because of his age, he was eligible for what the BLM calls ‘sale authority’ rather than the year-long titling process. (The BLM does this for animals that might not otherwise be adopted.) He came from Sinbad, Utah. An omen. I smiled. A long-time household favorite, the comedian Sinbad held a space in my family lore that spanned decades.

I texted my mom: I found a donkey. He’s from Sinbad, UT lol. She sent a laughing emoji, and said she knew I wouldn’t come home empty-handed. I rolled my eyes at myself, as I wrote out the check, filled out the forms, and gathered his paperwork. A crew went to work funneling 3177 and 8945 into the gated loading zone.

The boys hopped onto my trailer, without much ado. Like so many equines and humans before us, we headed west towards home. We sailed at 70 mph on highways, with big wild stretches of country on either side of us. I imagined a future day when we would all pack into it.

When I got home, I backed the trailer up to my high-fenced run where the donkeys would get used to a new life — one of loving care and connection. Rocco snuffled tiny excited brays as two of his kind unloaded. He stretched his milk-colored muzzle through the fence, sticking out his tongue as he does when he’s at his most goofy. Noses touched. Seven and Mojo got in on the action, meeting new friends, saying polite hellos.

I stood at the green gate of the pen, folded my arms over the rail, and watched, and watched. I watched until the setting sun washed golden light over the nearby Pintler Mountains, the rugged Flint Range, and blue mountains even further off. Adventures beckoned from the ridgelines.

My pack felt lighter already.

Nicole currently writes an online column called ‘Four-Legged’ for The Westrn, where she documents the taming and training adventures of both Brasso the shaggy donkey and Kevin the curmudgeon, as well as her other four-legged creatures.