13.

THE PURSUIT OF PROTEIN

We’ve gone deep into the mountains. The high ground called me, the hills beckoned with safety, and we’ve pushed on, higher and higher, climbing into the wilderness of what used to be southern Colorado. There’s plenty of water, but the nights have grown cold. After a few days, I no longer worry about pursuit. We pass empty farmhouses, ranches without cattle. Some of the houses are burned. We move from pavement to a smooth dirt road.

Then, one morning, a couple of days’ walk from the last paved road, we find it: a small white trailer and a rough campsite, tucked away near a stream. I watch it for an hour from the cover of trees. Nothing. It feels abandoned.

“Let’s check it out,” I say. My wife comes with me, and the boy. At this point, our unspoken commitment is that if they get one of us, they get all of us.

I creep across the road, machete in hand, and gently pull on the door. With all my might I resist the urge to call, “Hello?” The door is intact and pulls out with a hiss.

As I climb inside the gloom, I can tell it’s safe. It’s so still. There are bodies, locked together in the corner, and from a brief look I can guess what happened. A family of four came up here to get away from the zombies, and one of them brought the infection with them. Now even the zombie remains are decaying and dried, and the rats have been at them.

The trailer is a treasure trove. There’s camping equipment, winter clothes, sleeping bags . . . our rags and blankets are tossed aside in something that feels like delight, like gratitude. Even better, I pry open a locked box to find a long, gleaming hunting rifle with a scope. There’s only a single box of bullets, but each shiny round holds the promise of life.

I step outside, as my wife and son continue to ransack the trailer, and consider the sky. It’s gunmetal gray. We’re deep into fall, the air is freezing cold at night, and I can smell the damp scent of distant snow. Normally I would make us move off the road, but we won’t last through the winter without shelter. Snow will close these dirt roads soon, which will shut down everything but survival. Maybe we can hole up; maybe that’s the smart gamble now. But we’ll need food.

What can I hunt up here?

Southern Co

—The sun slanted heavily into the canyon, cutting bars through the trees, on an unseasonably warm October day as I followed Don Yeager up the trail into the wilderness, into thin air. Sweat sprang out all over my body. One hour ago I had stepped out of the car after a two-day drive from sea-level Los Angeles, and now, after three uphill steps, I was blowing heavily, my pulse thudding in my ears. We were climbing from nine thousand feet, and I felt the oxygen debt rise like a red tide. All the old clichés about hiking at altitude came back to me, it’s like breathing through a straw.

We pushed into the timber, tall dark spruce and regal aspen gone bare for winter. Don could hear me gasping, so he set a forgiving pace. At the top of each steep push, each little hump, he stopped, looked around, and found some detail to point out or murmured a brief story, politely ignoring my shuddering breath. Every corner had a tale: the place his dogs had flushed out a mountain lion, a place where his son Kip had hunted.

Finally, we reached the top: a wide meadow of grass and sage, bright sun, wind, and the whelming awe of open spaces. We walked quickly across the open field, keeping our profile low, into a parklike “tree island” in the middle of the meadow that was fed from an underground spring. A heavy down log makes a perfect seat, and Don and I settled in.

Before us stretched a vast panorama of southern Colorado: canyon, meadows, steep hilly mountains, snow-capped peaks close at hand. Somewhere over there were the Continental Divide and the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Don is a lifelong hunter and a former soldier. He had served as an instructor in the marines’ Combat Hunter program, and he knew how to pick an observation spot. We had breathtaking command of the entire landscape.

Don raised his binoculars, compact, powerful 10x42 Swarovski’s attached to a harness around his chest, and began to “glass” the far side of the valley. His motions were smooth, born of a hundred thousand repetitions. I followed suit with my borrowed binoculars, and the far meadows and benches leapt into sharp, shimmering relief. I explored the edge of a far-off meadow for a long moment, then lowered my binos and stared at the epic grandeur.

My legs ached and I was coated with rapidly cooling sweat, even from that short hike. In a flash I understood something wonderful about glassing: I was hiking without hiking; here, from this vantage point with good binos, I could explore a good portion of this whole valley without moving. Part of the drive of hiking is curiosity: What’s around the corner? What’s over that hill? Now I could peek into hollows, study downed trees, and look over rugged cliffs without moving my burning legs. It wasn’t far from flying.

Don lowered his binos. “Not yet,” he murmured. In the silence, my breathing started to regain equilibrium.

“I spend a lot of time up here,” Don said. I had seen the calendar on the wall of his gunroom, marked with a check for every time he hiked up into the mountains; Don was sixty-five, but most days had two check marks. This is a big part of what Don does, and an essential part of who he is.

Don Yeager is the son of Chuck Yeager, the iconic pilot immortalized in The Right Stuff, a World War II ace and the first man to break the sound barrier. Don’s round forehead is similar to his famous father’s. He has crisp white hair and a weatherbeaten face, most often wreathed in a big grin. Even at sixty-five, his vision was much better than mine, as we quickly discovered. He and my wife, both progeny of fighter pilots, have 20/15 eyesight or better, while my vision, never wonderful to begin with, began a slow dive off a cliff about five years ago. Don is slender, with a neat military bearing and mustache that are slightly at odds with his West Coast friendliness.

The light began to slant more steeply, and a warm glow bathed the valley. At the “magic hour” that cinematographers love, the mountains were suffused in the rich amber of sunset, and solitary clouds streaked incandescent pink against the sky.

It was two days before rifle hunting season opened, and we were waiting for elk.

The elk loved the magic hour, too. That was when they would emerge from the trees to feed in the open. Dawn and dusk: that’s when you hunt elk up here in the mountains. The Combat Hunter manual that Don had cocreated, to teach hunting skills to marines, referred to this time as the mesotopic, when the low light “can result in inaccuracies in visual perception, making marines most susceptible to attack during this time.” The elk took full advantage.

“Well, they should be out here, they were out yesterday—but there are no guarantees with elk, I’ll tell you that much,” Don murmured. His voice was a comforting combination of country and California from the sixties of his youth. Sometimes a “dude” would sneak in.

“Elk, above all other animals, you hunt on their terms. You develop an enormous respect. Those fat-asses who hunt from four-wheelers don’t have any respect or understanding, and they don’t deserve it.

“When I got back from Vietnam,” Don said, “I didn’t hunt for a long time. I was tired of the killing, the death. I hunted birds, a few deer . . . but I didn’t want to kill anything with a rifle. So I picked up a bow maybe thirty-five years ago. I didn’t know anybody to hunt with, so I taught myself. It took me five years to kill my first elk.”

I knew Don was feeling confident; he had told me over the phone, months earlier, that I would be bringing home hundreds of pounds of elk. “So I should buy a freezer? Is that a jinx, bad luck?” I had asked.

“Hell, yes, buy a freezer,” Don had laughed over the phone line. Now, he was urging caution.

“Elk are weird. You’ll find out. Just because you see them some place one day doesn’t mean they’ll be there the next day. They really travel; they move all over the place within their range.

“It makes hunting frustrating. You’ll think you know where they’re going to come out, and then they won’t. Or they’ll be too far away, and you can’t get near them. You gotta walk a lot, without getting in a hurry—because if they see you, you’re screwed.”

The sharp senses of the elk were one of Don’s favorite topics. He had stories of getting caught by the elk and having to freeze like a statue for ten or fifteen minutes, frozen in a walking pose, because if you do anything to spook them, they’re gone.

“They’re incredibly wary, and they have a real deck of cards for detecting you. Not just the senses, but the herd means there are a lot of eyes. And their eyes bulge out from their skull, you’ll see . . . their motion detecting at their periphery blows me away. I’ve been a half-mile away, crossing a field, and the sun was on me, and then bam. One of them looks up, staring at you, and now you’re playing the statue game. And the kinesics of the herd means that if she continues to look, pretty soon they’re all staring, and now you’re blown.

“The old saying is ‘Elk hear you three times, see you twice, and smell you once.’ What that means is, if the elk see you or hear you, they’ll run, but they might not go too far. But if they smell you, they’re gone, for miles. Nothing will drive elk out like smell. You really have to understand and hunt the wind.” Hunting the wind means keeping the elk upwind of you, so your alarming smell is carried away from them. It’s easier said than done.

We glassed, breathing deep in the gorgeous clean air.

Suddenly, I heard a high, long, whirling sound, ending in a scream. It was inhuman and hollow, pure and lyric, like a humpback whale’s song crossed with a red-tailed hawk’s screech. Treble is what carries in the mountains. The sound echoed with some of that sense of space that a loon’s laugh carries; it could be miles or it could be a thousand feet. I knew what it was without being told—the bugling of a bull elk. The hair on the back of my neck tingled.

We were in the tail end of the rut, the elk mating season. The rut runs on the elk’s hormonal calendar, which in turn is driven by necessity. Winter is a starving time, when the elk have to outlast the cold on stores built in the summer and fall. The cows need to be impregnated at the right time, to carry all winter and give birth in the early spring, so that the newborn calves can grow enough to survive the following winter. During the rut, the bulls clash, compete for females, dash their famous antlers together, and bugle. The rut had been going on for a month, and had peaked maybe two weeks ago.

“The sound in the morning is really clear, when the air is moist. Humidity transmits sound better, like foggy mornings on a lake. The vibrations travel better.”

We paused, glassing in the hush.

“There they are,” Don said, and I aped his posture, following his angle.

Like magic, like ghosts, they had appeared in a distant meadow with heads down, grazing. They had dark legs and underbelly with a tan body. A flush of joy went through me: eureka! I had been reading and thinking about elk so much that to actually see them was a surprise, but also oddly familiar. My imaginary picture shook, then jelled with the real.

More elk kept appearing, until Don estimated that there were maybe a hundred animals moving through the high benches of sage and grass. What had been an empty meadow was now dotted with elk, plain as day, bold as brass. Their movement was deceptive: they seemed stationary, heads down, grazing, but they covered a lot of ground and were vanishing when I checked back.

“Sometimes you got to haul ass when you hunt elk,” Don said in the deepening gloom. “I usually hang back and wait for the wind to quit, but when the time is right, you have to go get them before they get out. Once they get into the timber, you’ll never get close enough. You run a lot when you’re hunting elk; there’s a ticking clock.”

As he said this, the elk were vanishing, fading into the trees.

As true twilight descended, the elk were gone. Like a magic trick, like the tide. Somewhere in that magic hour of falling light, maybe forty-five minutes, maybe more, was my window for shooting an elk, and then it would slam shut.

—

Is hunting what makes us human? David Petersen, Don’s favorite thinker on hunting, writes in his book Heartsblood that “to hunt is to be human.” He means that humans have spent many millions of years of their history hunting, and only about ten thousand years farming, so hunting was and is our natural occupation. He quotes famous anthropologists and riffs on archeological dates to prove his point.

Petersen uses this as the basis for a ringing endorsement of bow hunting, a pursuit that he loves and finds incredibly spiritual and natural. But even a layman like myself had to wonder: when were the bow and arrow invented? Primitive hominids that predate Homo sapiens probably would have found a bow and arrow a technological marvel not far removed from the space shuttle. The persistence hunt is a far more natural way to hunt, and I have to wonder how Petersen would feel about trying to run down an elk.

From talking to Daniel Lieberman, the anthropology professor at Harvard and exponent of the barefoot running/persistence hunt hypotheses, and from reading his book on the evolution of the human head, I started to glean a picture. The stone spear, the bow and arrow, even the persistence hunt are all merely symptoms of the real change. The real change was internal: the birth of strategy. The persistence hunt was strategic. In colder climates, where it was harder to get animals to overheat, other strategies evolved, such as chasing animals into mud or off cliffs, as the Plains Indians did.

All these hunting methodologies are symptoms of a larger brain, which goes hand in hand with the consumption of the easy protein and rich fats that meat provide. A big brain is a serious energy drain. About 25 percent of your metabolism when sleeping goes toward maintaining it. But its advantages are obvious, enabling the ability for what is sometimes called speculative hunting, which means to track an animal and imagine what it has been doing, where it’s going, and how it feels. The South African game tracker and author Louis Liebenberg has referred to this very ability as “the origin of science.”

As Professor Lieberman was quick to point out, successful foraging (as opposed to hunting) also depends on problem solving and memory, so a bigger brain would also lead to better foraging. The human brain has evolved to catalog and study and problem-solve, not just to learn tracks, scents, and minute details of animal behavior.

Lieberman urged caution. “It’s a neat idea that hypothetical deductive thought processes that hunters use are the ones we use when we try to solve a problem. But hunting is not the only problem that humans solved—it is an important one, but I suspect that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Foraging, social relations, predictions, and manipulations probably all play a role.”

Our “natural” state is to be a deep student of our environment. That’s the essential precondition of survival. Primitive man would have lived in tension, a profound student of his surroundings, or he wouldn’t have lived at all.

If you had a yard as a child, you probably remember it with a startling intimacy. You knew that yard: every inch, every bush, each step on the tree you could climb, the whorls and knots in the branches, the bare dirt spots, the sandy gravel, the soft grass. It was deep, profound, intimate local knowledge. You intuitively knew what was happening around you at all times. Primitive man would have felt that way about a much larger stretch of ground, but it was still “his” territory. This very ability is really what allowed Homo sapiens to expand and succeed the way we did.

These various factors, working together, are what make us human. Art and science (as well as less noble pursuits, like entertainment and sports) were born in the pursuit of protein and survival.

—

Don has a wondrous spread, nestled right in against a federal wilderness area. From the couch in his living room, we could glass elk with his spotting scope. The house was immaculate, with warm wood and high ceilings and giant racks of antlers. He practiced an old-fashioned hospitality—my house is yours. He’d agreed to serve as my mentor for about a week—not for money, but for friendship and for a love of the hunt.

Don’s son and daughter live on the property in houses of their own, both with kids. Francie, his wife, has a greenhouse and gardens, and egg-laying chickens run wild, although she complained that a mountain lion had been preying on them—she lost a couple this year. If anybody was in a good spot to ride out the apocalypse, it was the Yeager clan.

Kip Yeager, Don’s son, is a rangy, stoop-shouldered former marine grunt, a veteran of the house-to-house combat in Fallujah. Don, with a father’s pride and subdued awe, regaled me with stories of Kip—he’d gotten his first two elk when he was twelve, and had been guiding professionally at fifteen. I stayed in Kip’s boyhood room, which was decorated with the skins of a mountain lion, a black bear, and other animals Kip had shot or trapped as a youth.

Both of these men are hunters and outdoorsman first, warriors second, in the vein of frontiersmen. They aren’t big, buff, muscle-bound soldiers. They are the older model, thin and wiry and strong as hell, guys who chase elk for weeks above ten thousand feet. Kip had just finished a successful bow hunt. He’d stalked a particular bull elk for two weeks before getting the shot he wanted.

For all their martial prowess, the plain emotion emanating from both Kip and Don is warmth, friendliness, camaraderie. Don hugged me when he met me; we’d had enough phone conversations that we were already friends. And Kip wears a permanent massive grin, which only faded when he talked about some other outfitter’s unethical behavior.

This wasn’t confusing to me. I had seen it before with professional fighters. The better the fighter, the more mellow the man (and, in Thailand, the better the Buddhist). The ego gets burned away. These are both men who have well and truly gone to war, and yet they are almost incredibly warm.

Don talked freely about “his” Vietnam. Although he’d been drafted into the infantry, Don always took point and asserted control of his destiny as much as he could. He felt that the war was worse for the guys who felt powerless, like the men who had been shelled heavily by artillery.

When Kip was returning home from his third tour in Iraq, his third “pump,” Don calculated the angles and times and realized Kip would be flying overhead, so he went out and glassed the plane. Kip called when he landed and said, “I flew over our land!” Don said, “I was out there.” He’d been out there, watching for his son to come home from the war.

—

At midday, when the elk would be hiding in the trees, Don and I went out to shoot. Don was graciously allowing me to use his rifle, treating me like one of his own children, albeit a rather old and awkward one. Kip had shot his first elk at twelve, as had Dru, Don’s daughter. I was the “slow” son who gets to go hunting at thirty-six.

The rifle was a bolt-action Remington Model 700 hunting rifle with a stainless steel barrel and a synthetic stock. The bullets were 7-millimeter Magnum; the scope was a basic Leupold. Don had had the rifle for twenty years, and had spent less than eight hundred bucks on everything. He told me that a lot of hunters spend ten times as much.

We went out in the harsh sunlight to the side of Don’s property where he had a target set up and, a hundred yards from the target, a shooting bench. The bench was a massive steel desk (which Don had cut from the roll cage on a bulldozer) with a rubber pad covering the top.

I needed to shoot a little bit to acquaint myself with the weapon, and also we needed to zero the gun’s scope. Zeroing the scope simply means calibrating the aim. Don and I had different bodies, and the way we held and looked down the scope created different angles, so he would have to see where I was shooting and adjust the scope accordingly.

The idea was to be as absolutely accurate as possible here, under controlled circumstances. Then, in the field, as error began to creep in, hopefully we would have enough accuracy built in to still make good hits. I sat in the chair, over the bench and the rifle, and carefully wound myself in behind the gun.

“Now find the target. You need to figure out how to best find the target through the scope. It’s hard, and takes practice. A lot of hunters, they’ll see an elk, throw the gun up, and now they can’t find the elk. So practice finding it. I pick up my head and look over the top.” In hindsight, I should have practiced this more.

I practiced dry firing first, working the bolt without bullets in the gun. I could still hear Tiger’s voice in my ear: ppprrreeessss. The gun going off should surprise you. Don said to picture the trigger as a thin glass rod that you will break if you’re not careful.

“Your sight picture shouldn’t even move when you dry fire. Match the crosshairs to the target. When you shoot your group of three shots, every shot is the same.”

Now I could feel it and remember. Shooting a gun is really about the trigger, not about aiming. Anyone who can see can aim. It’s like steering a car; little kids can steer fine. The real trick is in pulling the trigger without disturbing the rifle, just as when you’re driving a stick shift the real trick is managing the pedals.

Kip wandered by and told me, “In sniper school, they teach you that your body is the most stable at the bottom of your breath cycle. So prepare yourself, let out the breath, and when you finish, touch it off.”

Don continued, “You want to train your brain, when you’re shooting at an animal, a lot of guys will look at the whole thing and just plunk the crosshairs in the middle. What you want to do is pick a spot, a tiny spot on the animal, and hit that exact spot. Aim small, miss small. Elk are very tough animals; they’ll get hit and haul ass.”

I slid three of the long, lovely gold-and-silver bullets into the rifle. I worked the bolt, pulled the stock to my shoulder, and watched the crosshairs float around over the target. I took my time, buried the crosshairs dead center, and exhaled. I tried to “touch it off,” as Kip had said. Through my ear protectors I heard the crack of the shot and its booming echo, and the rifle bucked in my hands.

After I shot three, we all walked up to take a look. I felt some trepidation, but it turned out I was shooting decently: an average grouping, maybe two inches left of center and a little high. As long as the hits are close together, that’s good, because it means the bullets all going the same place. You can adjust the scope and the sights to get you centered up.

Don explained why the group was high.

“The rifle is zeroed for three hundred yards, which means it’s supposed to be dead on at that distance. So at a hundred yards it will be high, and even higher at two hundred yards, because the bullet is still climbing; and then at three hundred it drops back down. I’m going to try and keep you from shooting over three hundred yards, because if you do, then you have to start aiming higher—hold on the top line of the elk’s back. At four hundred yards you’ve dropped maybe six inches, but at five hundred yards, you’ll drop twenty inches. It’s like throwing a ball, the bullet drops in a ballistic curve.”

Don was talking about the basic problem with shooting over long distances—the eye and the scope see in straight lines, like a laser, but the bullet travels like a thrown baseball, in an arc.

I fired maybe twenty or so shots before Don called it a day—he didn’t want me to bruise up my shoulder or develop a flinch. Compared to how much I had been shooting in Alabama, we hadn’t even gotten started. But later that night, my shoulder was bruised up.

—

As opening day of the season approached, Don and I continued to hike up the mountains and glass for elk, right before dawn and right at sunset. Although the midday was unseasonably warm (seventy degrees at times), the nights were in the twenties, and the mornings held onto the icy edge of winter. I still couldn’t quite believe that I was going to do this, hike up there and kill an elk. Don and I talked incessantly as we hiked about hunting, about elk, and about survival.

As we talked, I tried to employ a technique that the SOLO school’s Bill Kane had explained for acclimatizing yourself to high altitude: breathing out through pursed lips to create a little back pressure. I tried it without much success. Acclimatization takes time, and sleeping at altitude acclimatizes you as well as anything. After three days you start to produce more red blood cells in response to the increased demand. When you hike all the way up Everest, your body adjusts gradually, because the ascent takes weeks or even months. But if you landed on top of Everest in a helicopter, you’d be unconscious in three minutes and dead in ten.

Don told me about how the marines’ Combat Hunter program had started. He’d been part of a group that was trying to help marines function better in Iraq, using hunting skills.

“We went down in this big group. There were officers from other countries, inner-city marines who’d been in gangs. They divided us into groups and gave us a scenario: You guys are inserting into the heavy jungle in Panama. Walk to these coordinates at night, set up observation on a hillside near where the bad guys are stashing drugs—just a scenario. Triple-layer canopy jungle, no GPS. I said, ‘Okay, we can do that.’

“But then all the groups met up and discussed it. Every other group says they have to wait until daylight, it’s too dark . . . one of the British guys says, ‘It’s darker than a dog’s gut.’” Don laughed at the turn of phrase.

“Well, this is what I did in Vietnam. I traveled at night with a map and compass and a hundred guys behind me. If I went off a hill and rolled to the bottom, a hundred guys rolled down behind me.

“I told them my group did it, and they gave me a hard time—‘How did you do it? That’s impossible’—until finally I said, ‘I wish you guys had been with my CO in Vietnam and told him that this was impossible to do, because you would have saved me a lot of bruises and cuts . . . we did it all the time, walk all night and hide all day.”

Don shook his head and grinned at how the world works.

He moved on to our more pressing concerns: where to shoot an elk.

“I used to take precision shots to the brain. But you can fuck up and blow their jaw off, and now what do I do? In addition, I found that killing them like that, they don’t bleed. Sometimes, it makes the meat really tough—some spasm, some chemical release. So I try for a lung shot, a double lung shot if I can—it allows them to run and bleeds them out.”

Don was a lifelong hunter for food; he wasn’t hunting for a trophy set of antlers (although he’d done that, as well). One of his paramount concerns was preserving the flesh, the good steaks and the best cuts. With the razor-tipped broad-head arrows, that isn’t a concern, but high-powered rifle bullets can destroy meat.

“You are probably throwing everything away that the bullet hits. The hydrostatic shock blows the layers of muscles apart and it fills with blood, like jelly. It’s all totally blood-shot and just a mess. You end up pitching it. I don’t take three-quarter shots because you end up chucking a shoulder.”

Don wanted me to understand where the organs were inside the animal and envision them in three dimensions as the animal moved. The perfect placement of a shot is right behind the shoulder, at the top of the crease at the back of the foreleg.

“Be patient, don’t take a bad shot, let her turn,” Don counseled. “The bad thing is if you hit the stomach, the first big chamber is where all the food is, and after a night of feeding it’s huge. It’s full of densely packed grass and will stop a bullet. Generally, they’ll run, lay down for a minute and you think, Oh, it’s dead, and then it gets up!

“My policy on elk is, if it stops and it’s still standing, shoot the thing again. Don’t quit shooting until it goes down. If it’s running, let it run. Stay on that animal. If you lose it in the scope, then pick up your head and go over the top. Don’t shoot another animal, that’s how people get in trouble. I’ve seen elk with their hearts and lungs blown out, pumping blood out their sides, run two hundred yards. It’s amazing.”

If I only wounded an elk, Don’s main concern was tracking it. For Don, the ethics of hunting required tracking; but also you are legally required to make a reasonable effort to track the animal. Of course, what that effort means varies from hunter to hunter. Don was full of stories of tracking wounded animals all night, for hunters he was guiding. Tracking until flashlights and headlamps ran out of batteries. Wearing out clients until they were crying, “You take the rifle,” begging to be let off the hook, having tracked miles and thousands of vertical feet.

“Some guys will track for three days, some guys won’t track fifteen minutes,” Don said.

—

I woke in the dead silence of the deep woods, eyes open in the ink black. I could hear Don moving around upstairs, and I knew what that meant. Rise and shine, up and at ’em.

My body flooded with tension, stiff on the bed. We’re going hunting, and I’m going to make the shot. I hit the switch, and yellow light flooded the darkness.

The glass eyes in Kip’s perfectly preserved mountain lion skin stared blindly into space. Kip had gotten that mountain lion at the same age I had been playing Little League baseball.

Don quietly handed a cup of coffee through the door while I dressed. Then he vanished into his preparations. I mentally ran my checklists, gaming various scenarios: I get lost, Don gets hurt, a fast storm. The WEMT daypack guidelines urged supplies for three days. Don, the master, packed light, just a small camouflage hunting fanny pack, so I tried to lighten up too. Just water, a snack, camera, binos, knife. I threw in a rain shell, just in case. We wolfed down a quick breakfast of home-laid eggs and toast.

Wearing headlamps over synthetic Windstopper hats, we darted through the door, out into the cold, clear night. It was six in the morning, with sunrise projected for seven thirty. We needed to be in position before the light came up. Don knew from long experience that the way to hunt this area was to strike surgically. The longer you were up there, the more your scent spread out and contaminated the area.

It was cold and dark in Colorado at nine thousand feet, an hour before dawn. October’s chill was strong in the air. The bright, sparkling moon and stars seemed close, maybe a mile or two off. In full camouflage I followed Don up the trail, clumping in my new boots over the dirt and gravel. He set off at a decent pace, across his property and up into the wilderness.

“It’ll happen fast”: Don’s words rang in my ears. I felt pretty good, all things considered. I used to dread pressure situations; as a little boy, I hated baseball and football for the gnawing fear they inspired. I guess all that self-inflicted stress inoculation over the years had worked, because I was enjoying myself. Also, I was completely reliant on Don, comfortable in the hands of a master.

We stayed on the old trail until it petered out in a dry streambed of boulders and grass. We paused and heard the ghostly bugling right overhead. We were down in a dell, a deep pocket of timber, and above us were the benches. They’re up there.

Don murmured, “I think we can turn off our lights now,” and we hiked in the lightening gloom through the dell. The bugling continued, some of it right up the mountain from us, some of it across the fields to our left. A thrill every time.

Don stopped to mutter, “We’ll come up this way, and be ready, because things can happen quickly. Just cross your fingers that nobody opens fire, because they’re gone if that happens.” He was worried some other outfitters could have come in earlier, or even last night, to ruin our hunt. Apparently, in other parts of Colorado, there are hunters all over each other, blaze-orange behind every tree, gunshots, elk running to and fro, heated arguments about who shot what.

We started up a steeper slope littered with rocks and low grass, and instantly I was panting. Stalking when winded makes for a kind of claustrophobia. You have to take small silent breaths, but what you desperately want is huge noisy gulps of air.

The elk sounded close, right over the next ridge. “Get your heart rate under control,” Don murmured. “This is going to be pretty fast.” We kept climbing, picking our way around boulders and sagebrush. A few hundred yards ahead, I could see the bench level out. The elk were somewhere over that rise.

We were near the top when the rifle (slung over my back and jutting up a few inches over my head) snagged a dead branch on a fir and snapped it loudly. Don looked back quickly, as if to say, Okay, who brought the new guy? He whispered, “You can carry that down now, be ready to shoot.” He watched me chamber a round and flick the safety on, carefully. Could this really be happening so fast?

We carefully peeked over the rise, in good cover of trees, and saw them. Flashes of grayish white, too far away, and already moving back toward the trees.

“C’mon, let’s move,” he whispered, and then he was gone, darting across the open ground crouched low, a small rise shielding him from the elk. I jogged clumsily in his wake, trying to stay low, rifle in hand, backpack jouncing.

“C’mon, Sam,” muttered Don. Move it, dumbass, I thought. We scuttled through a small copse of trees, and I crouched behind Don, bringing my binos up.

“Oh yeah, there they are,” he whispered. “Get some deep breaths, start slowing yourself down, and let’s find a good place to shoot from.”

Oh shit, I thought, I’m not ready to shoot. In my mind, I had imagined elk hunting as a slow, comfortable process—sneaking into some well-hidden spot, setting up a nice prone position with backpacks, carefully picking out the animal at a hundred yards, and making the shot. Don took off his daypack and gestured for me to take it. “Slide it up there,” he said, pointing to a small, rocky rise. “Go out there and make it happen.”

I crawled out of the cover onto the rise, tossed the daypack down, and laid the rifle carefully on it.

“Stay down,” Don hissed from behind me. I awkwardly settled in.

The elk looked large in the scope, but they were all facing away from me. Their heads were down, feeding in the grass. One or two were facing sideways, but I couldn’t tell what they were: spikes (young males) or cows?

We held a whispered conference, Don invisible behind me and glassing the same herd. He floated over me like my conscience. I felt a little desperate—this shot was far, on the edge of my abilities. We talked about a big bull sitting regally on the grass with his large crown of antlers.

“Don’t shoot that bull.” No problem there.

“The cow all the way at the right, that’s a great cow for sure,” he said. All the way at the right? I looked and saw the one he meant, but she turned away from me. I had no shot, just an ass. She was already almost hull down. They were all dropping out of sight behind grass, and. I felt a twinge of despair.

“Over to your right, there are two cows together. You’ve got a great broadside. Let me affirm that’s a cow . . . you see what I’m talking about?”

I stared down the scope, helpless.

“No, no,” Don hissed. “Way over to your right, way over.” He had come around behind me to check what I was looking at. I pulled off the scope and looked with my naked eye, then reset my whole body, and now I saw what he was talking about. I was too scope focused. You have to pull your head out of the scope and look before you settle in. I hadn’t seen the whole herd. There were three or four elk in broadside—still a long shot for me, but no longer impossible. We discussed, in hushed whispers, which one to target.

I settled in prone and felt decent, not breathing too hard, focused down the scope and across the field. I picked the elk almost at random: that one, you’re mine. Don used his range finder and reported three hundred yards. Which meant I just had to hold my aim perfectly on the elk’s center mass.

I dithered uncertainly. Was now the time? Part of me wanted to quit, to try and sneak around through the woods for a closer shot. This was too risky. This would be my fourth-ever shot at this range.

“We gotta make something happen, we’re running out of time,” Don said—not nervous, but factual. There’s a ticking clock to elk hunting, and he was feeling the seconds stream by.

“I’m gonna cow-call, and she’ll turn. Do you have her?” He had a plastic diaphragm in his mouth already, a piece that could be used to call turkeys or, with a little practice, elk.

Down the scope, the crosshairs drifted, moving with my breath. Did I have her?

“Now, this is a make-or-break move, so they’re going to turn and look, or they’ll go. So check the head for horns, and then forget the head, find your spot, and hold dead on. Three hundred yards.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“Is the safety off?” Don asked.

“Yup,” I answer, and instantly Don cow-called—a high-pitched squeal, almost like a puppy getting its tail stepped on.

A different elk picked up her head, not the one I had in my scope. I waited, and time stretched, elastic and mindless. Don called again. Still my cow didn’t look up.

Then she did. Press. The sight picture disappeared as the rifle leapt in my arms.

“You got her, buddy!” Don’s voice was in my ear. “Nice fucking shot!”

Relief flooded my system, and I laughed and started to stand, without the gun. “Reload,” Don said sternly, and I fell back down and clumsily worked the bolt.

“She’s down . . . okay, she got up,” Don said with a note of tension in his voice. I was blind, just listening to his voice. “She’s running, hang on. Fuck, you knocked her down . . . get up and watch, get ready to shoot again, use your binos.”

I clumsily stood up. I had no idea where she was or what was happening.

“There, she’s stopped. Hit her again.”

I found her in the binos, standing stock still, much farther downfield. I looked around wildly, found a tree stump, and tried to get a steady rest on it, fumbling around with the rifle. I couldn’t get a good rest, and I fiddled and diddled, trying to get an arrangement of bracing that would allow me to make the shot.

Finally, Don said with some heat, “Sam, put the safety on, come around behind me, and go up on top, slither up there and kill her. Go go go, we don’t have all day!” I know he was worried about losing her. If she was wounded only mildly, she might run for a mile, somewhere into the timber, and there was a chance we’d never find her.

I followed orders, slithered up to a perfect spot, and couldn’t find her. “Way to your left, Sam. Look with your eyes and not the scope.”

There she was, and when I got back on the scope, she was perfect in my site picture, a perfect broadside. I carefully took my shot, and this shot rang loudly in my ear. I realized I hadn’t even heard the first one.

“She’s down, buddy. Nice shot.” I worked the bolt, ready to shoot again, but she was down for good.

“You hit her real good that first time, right in the lungs, and if we’d sat here she probably would have gone down, but never trust it—if the elk is standing, shoot it again.”

I stood, a little shaky, and Don hugged me. “You did it, man!” He was laughing.

Don was already glassing the other herds of elk, watching to see what the shot did to them. He was thinking about the other hunters out there, what they might do, based on how the elk were reacting.

Don lowered his binos and looked at me. “Your problem was, you were trying to see everything down the scope. Use your eyes, then the binos, then, after you’ve figured out what’s going on, you get down on the scope.”

Don and I walked over to where I first hit her, then tried to track the blood spots to where she fell. It was extraordinarily difficult. Don only found a few spots of blood, and even with him pointing I could barely see them: faint red dots, maybe a centimeter across, sprinkled on a single aspen leaf the size of a silver dollar.

She hadn’t bled much. Don speculated on the various things that could have happened between the two shots, and he ended on, “Of course, you might have missed her with the second shot, and she just fell down at that exact moment. That’s happened before.”

Finally, we approached the elk, a massive, burly, beautiful animal. Her stomach was as huge and round as a fur-covered barrel, and I walked in amazement around and around, reveling in the touch, the feel, pressing her hooves with my fingers, looking into her eyes, her long velvet ears, her wide mouth. I sat by her and rubbed her fur.

Don showed me how sharp her teeth were. She was a healthy young cow, and we looked at her teats. They were not full of milk, so there wasn’t some calf out there bawling for its mama, which was a salve to my conscience. I snapped some pictures, close-ups, wide angles.

“CSI Colorado,” Don said.

“I suspect foul play,” I replied, and Don laughed.

There was only one bullet hole. A tiny red dot. Maybe a trifle high, but really, a perfect double-lung shot. Was that the first or the second shot? How could I have missed with one of those? But suddenly, I knew with absolute clarity what had happened. That second shot was long—nearly four hundred yards, longer than any shot I had taken before. At four hundred or five hundred yards, you have to aim high. “At four hundred yards I would aim right for the top of her back,” Don had told me earlier, in order for the bullet to drop into the elk’s center mass. But I hadn’t done that.

Don had given me range for the second shot, but it hadn’t sunk in. I made a perfect hundred-yard shot on an animal that was closer to four hundred yards away. The bullet had, probably, passed directly beneath her, a clean miss. And somehow, she’d fallen at the exact same time. Which was great, because I hadn’t spoiled any more meat with bullet mash-up. But I did feel a twinge of failure at not computing that shot, and as I relived the moment over and over, I realized with some small satisfaction that at least I would never make that mistake again.

Don and I talked a little bit about stress. As a combat veteran he was very familiar with the Cooper color code. Condition Red, Condition Black. “Sometimes you have to pull yourself in and out in a firefight—I’ve done it.”

In hunting it’s referred to as buck fever. Both Don and Kip had stories about guiding hunters into perfect spots to make fairly easy, hundred-yard shots on big bull elk, whereupon the hunters get confused, don’t shoot, miss wildly, or wound several animals by accident. “There are guys without experience who go right up into the Red, and that scares them and they can’t function,” Don said. “Tunnel vision, sweaty palms, fast breathing. If you go up too far, and are bouncing on the Black, you just check out. You can’t do anything. Kip sees it all the time, he guides more than me. He sees horrendous misses, stupid misses—easy shots, forty, sixty yards—guys jerk the trigger, they fill the scope with the animal and just start cranking away on the trigger.”

This had all happened so fast, I could see how easily buck fever could grab hold of someone who was unprepared, without a calm voice like Don’s in their ear. I had never taken a shot at four hundred yards before, and when I had to, I missed it clean. The interesting thing, in hindsight, was how impossible it was to “snap out of it,” because I hadn’t even realized I was in it.

Don had mentioned that exact thing happening, a miss and the elk falling simultaneously. He had so much experience he knew what was happening all the time. It seemed like precognition.

I had expected to feel sad—but instead I felt absolutely nothing. Not a twinge of guilt, not sorry for killing this beautiful animal, nothing. A mild, pleasant joy at a job well done, at not disappointing Don or making his life harder; a sense of mild satisfaction and wellbeing. I had felt sad upon seeing other animals killed in the past, but I had no sadness in me now, not a single drop.

Part of the reason, I think, is that in some way I wasn’t really the hunter, Don was. Don made all the decisions, he held my hand and led me around, he pushed and prodded me into the right space. I was just part of the rifle, really. True hunting would be me, alone, making the decisions, trusting my own judgment, finding my own way. This was just training. Don was showing me how to hunt, what a hunt could look like. He sometimes talked about testing oneself, hunting the elk up here on their terms, but this had only been a test for Don. Could he go hunting with this weird rifle that had feet and didn’t shoot that well? This was Don’s kill, Don’s responsibility, and Don’s triumph. I had just been a handicap, like the weight on a race horse.

This was a necessary step, a part of the apprenticeship, but I wouldn’t be a hunter until I did the whole thing on my own. And this wasn’t for sport, this was survival training. If it comes down to me and my family or an elk, then morality and ethics won’t play much of a role. You won’t anthropomorphize Bambi when you’re starving.

Don and I turned to the real work, almost an anticlimax. We had to skin her, get the meat off, and pack it down the mountain. The meat needed to cool, without the hide, quickly. It can sour if the hunter takes too long to properly dress out the animal.

Don talked me through the whole process and made me do most of it. In a real survival scenario, you would eat almost everything, including the guts. Indeed, when we came back a few days later, the spot was picked clean; even the hooves were gone. Don told me that meant that a black bear, getting ready to hibernate, had come around. Nothing gets wasted in survival situations.

Don and I packed out two loads of meat, maybe seventy pounds each, and left the two massive hindquarters in cotton bags to cool under the shade of a fir tree. We went back for them later, in the midafternoon, with empty frame backpacks. We hung the meat to finish cooling in Don’s massive “cool room,” a refrigerator kept at about thirty-five degrees. Don has a large work shed full of freezers, and he usually processes seven or eight elk a season.

Later, Don talked to Kip, who was having a hard time with some clients who had brought their own rifles and weren’t shooting very well with them. One of them couldn’t hit a target at a hundred yards. Don came in and said to me, “I told Kip how you made a double-lung shot at three hundred yards, and he just said, ‘I knew he would.’”

Don smiled. I’ll admit, that was pretty satisfying to hear.

—

Nothing changed for Don. He still went up glassing in the early mornings and evenings to look for elk, to watch what other hunters were doing. I stayed on a few more days and went with him, furthering my education.

It had been seventy degrees at midday on the day I’d shot my elk, and Don and I had gone back up in T-shirts and shorts to pack the hindquarters out. Two days later, as we hiked up the same trail to glass, first there was rain, then sleet. We could barely see anything, but we could hear the elk in the frigid mist, their mysterious, sonorous, squeaking bugles.

“All over Colorado there are guys hunting, and maybe one percent are hearing elk bugle right now. You’re getting spoiled,” Don said.

On the benches the snow and clouds came whispering in, shrouding the landscape, hiding the panorama. The near hills vanished like whales in a misty sea. The wind came squalling, then howling, and biting, and now the snow suddenly, shockingly came down hard and thick. It was a stark reminder of the big wild, the reality of the mountains. In a slightly different situation—if you were up here and expecting it to be like yesterday, seventy degrees and sunny—then this surprise could be deadly.

The elk appeared out of the woods like ghosts, somehow surreal yet wholly natural. There was an empty field; then, for a strange, hushed moment, there were elk; then, as the light changed, the field was empty again. All in silence, broken only by that mysterious singing, the keening bugle.

Part of the attraction of hunting elk is that they touch us with the wild, reminding us of the mystery and magic and bigness of the open spaces. Just like dolphins for a sailor. The dolphins always remind me of the vast blue sea, the unknowable spaces underneath me. I have seen dolphins come play in the bow wave hundreds of times, and yet every time comes the rush—the sea is huge, and I perceive so little.

—

On my last morning, I left with Don early, for one last glass. We went up the hill in the dark, as always. It was cold, but the ice and snow of the previous morning had melted and the storm felt like a dream. I had finally begun to be acclimated, my respiration loud but normal, and Don took me on a hike all over creation.

It was eerily quiet that morning. I felt, in my bones, that the elk were gone. The landscape felt empty, vast and still. The silence was overpowering.

“I think they’re gone,” I said to Don.

“Sometimes they move on, just like that,” Don said thoughtfully. But he wasn’t convinced. He thought they might still be around here somewhere. As usual, Don’s instincts were right.

We walked back into the canyon, into a hidden, dense area of aspen that Don had nicknamed Oz. We followed a game trail, easy hiking up to the top, then wound our way back into the deeper, higher canyon, a turn that had been invisible to me at lower altitudes. We were on one wall, and across the open stretch of air to the other side was a massive aspen grove, acres and acres of trees. And now we could hear the elk bugling, lowing, moving through that timber. We couldn’t see them, but we heard them as they moved higher, toward a spring that Don knew.

Don and I stood there, stomachs growling after a long hike before breakfast. It was cold, our breath fogged the air, and we waited for a long moment in our camouflage, listening. Twigs cracked, elks bugled, the unseen crowd moved upward.

Don grinned at me. The trip was over.

The crack echoes off the hills, then again, like distant thunder. I’m not too worried about the sound; it’s been months since we’ve seen another person. Still, if there are people out there, this might bring them. Can’t be helped.

The elk herd vanishes, darting into the woods, but one is left behind, running, limping, plunging to earth.

“Nice shot, honey,” I tell my wife. She smiles as she works the bolt. I pick up the brass; we won’t leave anything out here. My son is already running into the field, his sturdy little legs pumping. He loves this part. He’s going to hurl himself on the elk and act as if he killed it himself.

We’ve been killing and processing an elk a week, making pemmican. I had fashioned a kind of half-ass cold cellar that seemed to do a little bit in the way of refrigeration. Of course, if the snow stays we won’t have any problems keeping things frozen. I just hope that the elk stay long enough, too. Pretty soon we’ll be buried in snow, and we’ll start the long, slow race against starvation until spring.

As my son karate-chops the dead elk, my wife and I begin to quickly and efficiently lay out our tools for butchery. But only one of us will work; the other will stand watch with a loaded rifle.

The gray winter sky threatens more snow. A lot more.