Girl Hunter

by Georgia Pellegrini

  There is just a sliver of moon as we leave Walmart and drive along the north fork of the Shoshone River. This is the geographical zone that I am to hunt in, according to my elk tag. But Stan begins to look confused. “We’re looking for a buck-and-rail fence,” he says, over and over again. “My night vision is bad, ever since I had that Lasik surgery.”

  Stan stops and starts his truck like the hiccups. He puts his high beams on, and as he does I can see the reflection of the headlights on a herd of elk, their eyes like orange coins in the black morning air. The eyes wink at random and some of the elk run across the road in front of us, then float up into the fissures of the mountain. Stan is unfazed and indicates so with a burp. Then he drives his truck into the ditch along the buck-and-rail fence toward the remaining elk herd, to keep them in their place.

  Once he is satisfied that they will stay where he wants them to, he drives down the road a little ways, to the area where his friend’s land begins. He parks his truck on the bare edge of the road and we sit in darkness. Once in a while, the speed of a passing car shakes us. I can smell the cold steel bullets for his handgun on the seat, more potent as I grip my seat tighter with each passing car. When it is lighter and the mountain silhouette grows dark against the blue sunrise, we climb out of the truck and gather our gear and begin to walk into the field quietly and quickly. We crawl under an electric wire and lean against a wooden fence to wait for the light. With the range finder, I look to the herd of elk and see that miraculously some of them are still in their place 166 yards away.

  “I don’t have night vision; I can’t see them,” Stan says loudly.

  The light rises further until at last Stan sees the elk. And once he sees them, he begins running directly toward the herd as they stand next to the road, barreling into the green field like a hunger-crazed bear. I watch through the rangefinder as they look at him, their orange-coin eyes blinking, and I think I see them laugh. The elk turn away and look toward the mountain, jump the fence, and spring into the crevices and out of sight. Stan lumbers back, hunched over, breath steaming from his nostrils.

  “We boogered ’em out!” he says.

  I don’t even know what to say, so I say nothing instead.

  We walk along the edges of the Yellowstone River, hoping to see more elk, but they’ve all gone up the mountain. Stan dials his cell phone, and talks loudly, piercing the cold morning air with questions to his friend about where there might be more elk. As he does, an unfamiliar truck turns into the road, and a man rolls down his window and asks Stan a question. As it turns out, this land I am hunting is not his friend’s land at all. We are officially poachers.

  I kneel down to tie my shoe and hide my face, then walk toward the truck while Stan smoothes it over with anemic jokes. This ranch belongs to the Diamond Match Company, and they don’t allow hunting here. If I had shot one of those elk, I could have spent six months in prison.

  As you might imagine, Stan’s grass-fed beef business turns out to be a completely separate entity from the land the Native Americans own, and that ranch is very, very far away.

  So now on the second evening in Wyoming, I sit in this vast stretch of desert mountain land, in a bedroom full of pink ruffles, dolls, and children’s books, in his home that seems to be without a real address, with no cab companies and no car service for 100 miles, wondering how to leave. That is when Stan calls me and tells me our next hunt will be on horseback and to come fit the saddle to my height. The possibility of filling my elk tag is alluring; I want there to be a silver lining in this trip. But mostly, I want elk jerky.

  So I walk down the dusty road toward the horse corral, where Stan huffs and puffs as he pulls the saddles out of the truck and tightens the buckles.

  “Did you get a sandwich?” he asks suddenly.

  “A sandwich?” I asked.

  “Yeah, for tomorrow. You want to eat, don’t you? This is when I expect the guest to think,” he says.

  I fit my saddle, ride the horse in a few small loops, then take off the saddle and bridle. Stan shimmies onto a horse, too, and the horse bucks violently.

  We put the horses in a corral for the night, and he asks me to feed them. I try to open the gate at the end of the haystacks while he drives a combine full of hay toward me, but the gate, which is really only a vague separation between two wooden posts, is bound tightly with rusted old wire. This gate hasn’t been opened in years, which means that these horses must not eat very often or they don’t spend a lot of time at Stan’s place.

  “Are you lost?” he asks.

  “No, your gate is wired shut,” I reply. “Would you like me to get some wire cutters?”

  He continues to mutter. But after the wires are cut, the hay ends up in the corral and the horses eat. And now in the dark, I feel my way down the long gravel road to the house, make tuna fish sandwiches, and go to sleep.

  It is so hard to leave your sleep on cold black mornings during hunting season, but it is even harder when you feel dread, the kind that causes you to wonder what disaster may befall you in the hands of a reckless hunter. But I motivate myself with the thought of filling my elk tag, as I slide out of bed and throw on layers of camo and denim. I walk down the long dirt road to saddle the horses again, who are as spooked as I am as Stan draws near. I climb into the truck that hauls the horses and lean my head on the cold glass to look at the stars. I watch Andromeda and can almost see her get bigger and bigger, feasting on the stars around her.

  “Are you usually this talkative?” Stan says, conjuring up a wad of phlegm and spitting out the window.

  We climb the narrow winding dirt road to the top of Rattlesnake Mountain, and after an hour, come to the end at 10,000 feet. There are two signs. One on the right says NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY. The one on the left says PUBLIC PRESERVE, NO HUNTING, WOOD CUTTING ONLY.

  “We can’t hunt here,” I say.

  “What do you mean, we can’t hunt here,” he says, more of a statement than a question. He walks over to the sign, and there is silence for a few minutes. Then he walks back and begins to lead the horses out of the trailer.

  “So what is the plan?” I ask, hoping to slow him down.

  “Well, I’m goin’,” he says.

  “But the sign says that we can’t hunt here,” I say again, the anxiety making my voice higher, a round lump forming and rising with it.

  He stands with his hands on his hips and his head cocked and paces around and sucks his teeth and grumbles. “In all my life I’ve never seen anything like this. Humans have exceeded their carrying capacity,” he says. He stands in front of the sign for a few minutes more. I wait, hopeful, and notice the sign for grizzly bears.

  “I understand the jargon now,” he says finally, and proceeds to finish saddling the horses.

  “What jargon?” I ask.

  “It’s just that side of the sign that we can’t hunt on, but we’ll go through on the other side,” he says.

  I pause, considering Calamity Jane. This is when I should channel her. This is when I should lasso Stan with a rope, tie him up, put him in the trailer, and drive us back down the mountain. But instead, I stuff my rifle deep into the leather holder strapped to my saddle and mount with the lump even higher in my throat. Although I would prefer to eat meat from McDonald’s than procured this way, I am at a 10,000-foot elevation, with no other sign of life, warning signs for grizzly bears, and no way out. I mount the horse in calm desperation and follow Stan the Man.

  I look down at my white horse with his albino eyes. I can feel his lungs heave out against my shins like a steamship. I know I can count on my horse’s eyes in the dark, more than mine; this is a strange feeling. I take some comfort in knowing that he probably feels the same way about the man on the horse next to me. They both let out grunts and snorts of displeasure.

  As the sun rises, our shadows appear on the ground like giant finger puppets, and I can see the snow scattered on the Rockies above like powdered sugar on a Bundt cake. The light flickers and t
he heat of the sun on my eyelids gets warmer. Soon a sky of blue marble above us shines down on the snow and the twitching muscles of the horse’s albino body. The silence is so vast that I would be able to hear one thousand pins dropping into the dehydrated cliffs of grass. There is no sign of life, hardly an insect, not even the contours of a melting track on the snow. But there are the ghosts of animals jumping across the hills, disappearing when I blink. And then I start to hear the reverberations of familiar sounds, echoing as they leave my head into the great room of silence. And then I start to hear the sound of reality, the voice of the man in the other saddle on the other horse.

  “Did you bring toilet paper?” Stan asks riding ahead of me and sucking his teeth.

  “No,” I reply.

  “You don’t think you’re going to need it?” he says, harassed and red faced.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I will!”

  “I have some you can buy off me,” he says without grinning.

  We ride higher into Monument Mountain, in silence mostly, except when he proclaims that humans have ruined his environment, about toilet paper, and how the world has overrun its carrying capacity.

  The horse trots and walks at its discretion, and I bounce higher off the saddle with every step. I can feel the small muscles on my back come alive and work, and my inner thighs begin to ache as I twist them inward and hold my feet in the stirrups. We ride higher, toward a boulder of limestone jutting into the sky, and guide the horses, slipping and snorting, to it.

  My two-legged companion gets off his horse and ties him to a tree, and I do the same. He begins to walk away toward the limestone boulder and announces he’s hungry. And so I open the saddlebags and retrieve our tuna fish sandwiches and walk toward the limestone boulder, too.

  At the top of the boulder, we scan the sides of the mountains and the thick pines for elk, lying in the afternoon sun. But there are no signs of life, hardly a bird. It is just utter silence, save for the sound of Stan sucking his teeth.

  We eat our tuna fish sandwiches and some dried blueberries and Stan retrieves a Butterfinger from the depths of his pockets. He then lies back on the rock, tips his hat over his head, and descends into a snoring sleep.

  I lean back on the rocks, too, and look at the blue marble sky. I close my eyes and a gold veil comes across them and flickers off. I take shallow breathfuls of the thin air and dream of nothing.

  After some time, the motor of a fly wakes me. I begin to wonder how Stan planned on getting an elk out of here were I to shoot one in this place where it is forbidden.

  I suppose that a poacher is most like the Paleolithic man. He helped himself to what a leopard stored in a tree, and what nature had to offer. Hunting was an expression of man’s first instinct and his first craft, with no limitations other than his own physical and mental strictures, both of which were challenged and expanded as he honed his craft. It must have been very freeing to play only by the rules of your own moral compass.

  The modern manifestation of that philosophy was Walter Earl Durand—a mountain man in Wyoming after the Depression. From an early age, he lived with ease in the wilderness and could hit almost any target at any time. He resisted the transition requiring hunters to have a license and a season to hunt and was eventually arrested for poaching elk. To him, it defied the natural human condition.

  Although there are many rules governing hunting today, there is still the essence of Durand in hunting—it is still my own morality that guides me as a hunter and meat eater. The great outdoor writer Aldo Leopold once wrote, “A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.” The problem with this, though, is that some people have a very weak moral compass.

  When explorer John Colter left the Lewis and Clark expedition, he came down through Wyoming and got into trouble with the Indians while traveling through Yellowstone. He vowed to himself that if he ever got out of that mess, all he wanted to do was go home and die in his own bed. And that is exactly what he did.

  In this moment, watching Stan snoring peacefully on a limestone rock, I begin to understand that sentiment thoroughly.

  Stan wakes up with a snort and a Butterfinger burp, takes the scope of my gun, and peers through it to scan the horizon for elk, grinding the wooden stock of my rifle against the limestone. But there is nothing.

  In the end, he agrees with my suggestion that it is time to go down. We begin back down Monument Mountain, leading each of the horses by rope for 3 miles. All the while, Stan talks about “his baby,” his grass-fed beef operation. He says that one ordinary burger patty has the DNA from two thousand cows, and how there is “no accountability” because ordinary ground beef is produced in so few locations.

  It is hard to listen to Stan. Not because what he says is inaccurate, but because he has made himself into a victim. Calamity Jane was never a victim. Stan loves the story of his failure as a grass-fed beef farmer in cattle country, where every other feedlot farmer is a success.

  Of course, there is some real truth to Stan’s narrative. He is one of only a few farmers in Wyoming who raise cattle entirely on grass. He grows the grass organically and lets his cows eat it until they are sent to slaughter at an organically certified slaughterhouse. Most beef production has a huge carbon footprint. Fertilizer is a petroleum product; a lot of fertilizer is used to raise the feed corn and a lot of fuel is used to get the cattle to the feedlot. So Stan’s heart is in the right place, but his business model is terrible. And the truth is that while he whines that he “cannot take a Super Bowl ad out for organic beef,” there are other grass-fed beef operations that are successful.

  Unlike grass-fed operations, most of the other cattle in Wyoming are sent to feedlots where their rations are controlled by “feed science.” They are fed more carbohydrates and less roughage. And because of the increased carbohydrate, the cow’s rumen, which becomes a four-legged fermentation vat, grows more sugar than the rumen can stand. And because it is growing more sugar, it produces more bacteria, and that bacteria starts to ulcerate the rumen. It is as if there is beer brewing in their stomachs. So the big feedlots add antibiotics to the feed to reduce the bacteria count in the rumen. That is how O157:H7 appeared—a fatal form of E. coli that came strictly from feedlots, and is resistant to antibiotics.

  Four companies—Cargill, JBS, Tyson, and Smithfield—control over 90 percent of this meat system across the world. It is a system that relies heavily on nitrogen and corn. After World War II, nitrogen fertilizer developed because nitrogen was left over from TNT, and we realized that if we put it in the soil, the plants would flourish better than they ever had. This was the advent of nitrogen fertilizer—a wartime commodity. After the war, it was disseminated to farmers, which led them to stop spreading manure as natural fertilizer, and opt instead to simply send the cows to dusty, centralized feedlots.

  I tell Stan no more elk hunting. “I have a lot of writing to do.” He seems perfectly fine with it, or at least that is what I gather from the burp. I ask him if I can borrow a car for “research,” and he says fine, and so I spend a day away from my two-legged friend and explore this empty state and its great brown mountains.

  I drive from 4,000 feet in elevation to 5,000 feet, through the Big Horn Desert, slowly past vast ranches owned by big companies or big individuals. I pass Heart Mountain, where the rock on top is 300 million years older than the rock on the bottom, prompting geologists to study it for the past hundred years. There are mountains all around me, to the south and to the east. The Big Horns tie together at the bottom through the Wind River Canyon like a big parched bowl. Now less than 30 miles from one of the world’s largest volcanoes at Yellowstone Lake, I move past pregnant cows and a range of wild Spanish horses.

  I ride through the north fork of the Shoshone River, named after one of
the poorest of Indian tribes. I drive through the town of Cody, named after William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a horse rider and trick shooter who was also a real estate developer and showman who built the Wild West Show and took it all over the world. Calamity Jane was one of his performers. Buffalo Bill was also a hunting outfitter, one of the first people to take people hunting as a business, and his clients included Theodore Roosevelt and the prince of Monaco. He was an entrepreneur of the Wild West and formed the town of Cody when Yellowstone became a National Park, in 1872.

  Past Cody, there is only one road across what the Shoshone called “the land of the stinky water.” It is the road to Yellowstone, where the geysers and water emit the smell of sulfur. I pass a V shape in the canyon where the sun never shines, and see herds of mule deer with dark, wet beads for eyes and shiny Rudolph noses.

  On the road are volcanic rock formations that look like crystals, and pine trees that are gray ghosts, ravaged by the pine beetle and wildfires. But despite the vast land, some houses are still clustered together, perhaps for scarce resources, or perhaps because even when given the space, we humans still desire one another’s company in the end.