The Preacher's Gun

Note: Dedicated to the late Jim Denison, The Preacher's Gun was written in 2011, before I took up the bow and hung up the guns for good.

I shouldn’t have gone hunting today. But it’s the final day of the season, and I have one last tag I want to fill. Still, it looked like a bad idea right from the start. They were calling for a snowstorm last night, and by 5:00 this morning, there were a few inches down with more piling on by the second, coming in sideways too. It didn’t even look like a great day to be out on the roads, let alone in the woods.

The freeways were clear of everything but snowplows, and the gravel roads were trackless drifts. The crosswinds were strong, every gust feeling like a tug on my steering wheel. The place where I parked is just a dirt pad, maybe twenty yards square at the base of a little incline. As I pulled in, I realized that I might not even be able to get back on the road once a little more snow fell. Strange as it sounds, I’m a hunter without a truck. My animals go onto a tarp in the trunk of a Honda Accord.

I turned off the engine and just sat for a minute. I unwrapped a lozenge and tucked it in my cheek back by my molars. I don’t know if I’m sick, but I’m not precisely well. I had a nagging sore throat since last night, and it seemed to be setting up shop this morning. It was another good reason to not go out, but the last day of the season trumps sickness.

I sat until my dome light shut off. It was utterly black. I couldn’t even see the snow hitting the windshield. Full dark, no stars.

I confess that I am afraid of the woods. I’m not talking about a healthy respect that leads a man to carry a compass, tinderbox, and knife. I’m talking about an irrational, paralysing dread that makes me want to shut off the alarm, or not pull out of the garage, or look at the falling snow and start the car up again. It doesn’t make any sense. I grew up hunting and fishing the Alberta Rockies with my dad since I was four. I’ve never gotten lost, I can start a fire lickety-split, and I know that bears and cougars generally steer clear of humans. But I get freaked out anyway, and when that interior light went off, and I couldn’t even see the hood of the car, I nearly called it a day right there.

The situation didn’t get any better once I got into my cold weather gear, strapped on my headlamp, and trudged off down the path. With my light on, all I could see was a five-yard radius of falling snow, like driving through a blizzard with your brights on. Thankfully, I’ve hunted that area about a half dozen times, and I know the terrain well. It was about a two and a half mile hike to where I’ve seen scores of Whitetails, and that’s what I needed to find: a Whitetail doe. I know, not exactly a trophy, but I’d hate to think that I didn’t do everything I could to fill that tag. And I admit that I still get excited about hunting any animal. Whether I’m looking through a scope or a peep-site, my heart starts thumping, and it doesn’t matter what I’m drawing a bead on. So despite the storm and my persistent paranoia, I bundled up, hunched over, and plodded out to the hunting grounds.

I should say that my irrational fears were at least somewhat justified on this occasion. I had a minor bear encounter on my last trip to this spot. It came after I’d popped a little four by four Whitetail. I dropped him at 9:06am, and I had an appointment in downtown Calgary at 1:00pm. Once I got him dressed, I had about two hours to get him into my trunk. That’s two point five miles over rough terrain, covered with deadfall, crossing a swamp, two creeks, and one beaverdam, all while dragging that buck. He was one of our typical mountain deer too: teeny antlers, big heavy body. I got a rope around his modest rack and started dragging. I only made it halfway before I realized I’d need to ditch him and come back later.

By the way, this is what makes Calgary a hunter’s Mecca. It’s a city of a million people, but you can be in the foothills in thirty minutes, and in the mountains in under sixty. Within an hour of concealing this buck under some deadfall, I was wearing a sharp, gray suit, pitching a mining investment to one of my clients downtown, and I was back with my deer two hours after that. I took dad along on the return trip both because he could help with the last half of the haul and because we always hang the deer at his place anyway.

As we approached the area where I stowed the deer, I saw droves of crows up in the trees. Dad said, “Well, you can be sure they made a mess of it.”  He was wrong about that. When we came around a bend in the path, a scant forty yards from the deer, I saw a big black stump that I didn’t remember seeing before. Of course, my brain said, “That’s a stump,” because that’s what a person is seeing about ninety-nine percent of the time they think they’re seeing a bear. This was a one percent occasion, and I was too stunned to utter full thoughts.

I only managed a strained, “Dad,” as I shouldered my rifle and flicked the safety. The bear didn’t see us. He was on my kill, head down, butt up.

“Do you want to take him?” Dad asked.

“I don’t have a tag. Do you?”

“Yeah, but not with me.” 

A quick note about hunting regulations: though dad had a tag for that Blackbear, it wouldn’t have been legal to shoot it. You need to have a tag with you. Even though dad would have happily gone straight home, brought back the tag, and put it on the bear, that’d be considered straight-up poaching. Still… I had such a great shot at him. He was facing us, but with his head down on my kill, and his rear up in the air, I was looking at his back as if I were directly above him. I put the crosshairs right between his shoulder blades which were churning away as he worked with his forepaws. That’s an easy shot right into the vitals. I touched the trigger, but I didn’t squeeze it.

He must have scented us because he looked up and bolted in the other direction, which was a relief, since a bear covers forty yards awfully fast. That’s when we got a good look at him. Fleeting as it was, I can still see it. He was big, three or four hundred pounds at least. We don’t usually see bears that size so close to civilization. Not only was Calgary just thirty minutes away, but the town of Bragg Creek was a mere four miles north. His coat was jet black and glossy as wet paint. He was thick in the body, heavy with winter-fat that rippled his hide when he ran. But it was his face that really caught my attention. It’s been my experience that the younger Blackbears have a more tapered head, an almost cute, endearing face. The older ones get a little more square through the head like a Grizzly. This bear’s head was as blunt and mean-looking as a twelve-gauge slug. I immediately regretted not shooting him.

In thirty-five years of hunting, we’ve never seen this, and it’s not like we haven’t had to leave a kill for a few hours before. Shoot an animal at twilight and you’re going to need to yank the guts and come back the next day, especially if it’s an elk or moose far from the nearest road access. Dad had a Grizz make off with a big Mulie buck a few years ago (biggest Mulie he’s ever seen as he tells it), but he didn’t actually see the bear, only evidence. He had it tied to a tree to dress it out because he was in some very steep terrain. In the morning, there was no buck and a snapped rope. There’s only one animal in the woods that wants a dead deer and has the power to snap a half inch of poly fibre. This was about fifty miles west of Pincher Creek, Alberta, a piece of real estate that is positively thick with Grizzly Bears. But it also happens to be the middle of nowhere. To see a bear on my kill just a few miles out of Bragg Creek was a little unnerving.

Once he took off, I approached the deer to see what kind of damage old Bullethead had done. It turns out that he’d been putting my buck in his larder. There were no teeth marks to be seen, but it was half-covered in dirt and rotten leaves. So I reclaimed him. He’s now in my larder in neat little parcels, double wrapped in butcher-paper.

This was thirty-four days ago, so Bullethead had a very recent memory of pairing human beings with food. He may not have had much venison (he did get a couple bites out of the rump which only came to light once the hide came off), but I’d bet my last dollar he found the gut-pile and ate every protein-rich scrap. Tramping through the bush this morning, both blind and deaf from the snow and wind, it occurred to me that I too was a great source of protein, fairly reeking of the stuff. I felt especially skittish when I got close to the area where I stashed my buck one month ago.

As though I needed more reason to feel unsure of myself, I misjudged where I needed to come out of the woods to cross the beaverdam. This is very easy to do when you’ve got no trail to work with, and it’s even easier when it’s still dark. I came out into an opening, expecting to see the beaverdam, but instead I saw a reed-choked streambed with a few frozen pools. Looking up and down the streambed, I realized I was downstream of the dam. But it had been quite cold for the last few weeks, and the shallow pools were frozen solid. I decided to cross them and adjust my heading once I was on the other side.

Dark as it was, I misjudged the distance to step down onto the ice and landed hard. The rifle bounced against my side, and I thought I heard something hit the ice. I turned and saw a .270 shell sitting on the frozen pool. Then I spotted a few more and realized they were mine. The magazine on my rifle had popped open and spewed my shells all over the place. I stared at them in disbelief. I was in a zero-visibility blizzard, off course on my hike, and I’d just about lost all my ammo. Truly amateur night with Adam Schnell.

I picked up all my shells, methodically drying each one while hunching over it to prevent more snow collecting on it, and slid them back into the magazine. Then I double and triple checked that the mechanism holding them in place was latched. It’s an old gun, and I knew that the magazine had a habit of releasing, and I cursed myself for not thinking of that when I loaded it at the car.

Frustrated as I was, I pressed on, and all was well. In fact, once I crossed the series of pools, that’s when everything started falling into place. I climbed over a small ridge that cut off most of the wind. The snow was still coming down hard, whirling around wildly, but all the howl and moan had gone out of it. I was in a mixture of spruce and aspen forest, and the only sounds were the infrequent creaks of the trees. I took it as a good omen. Deer don’t like being deaf and blind either, and they tend to hunker down in high winds. But in this case, that would be false security. There is nothing like fresh snow for silent stalking; I could barely hear my own footfalls. I walked the last five hundred yards to my spot feeling pretty impressed with my silent passage, though I think three hundred head of elk could have been just as quiet in that snow.

This particular honey-hole is at the north end of a meadow running roughly north and south. It’s about three hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide from east to west. I always set up at the north end because it affords a view of the entire meadow, plus a thin arm of clearing that extends to the northwest. I call it a meadow, but it’s really some hybrid between a field, a marsh, and a creek. The clearing is spotted with clumps of alder brush, and the odd stunted evergreen, but the rest of the foliage is high grass. While one can walk across it, there is a steady flow of water moving along underground. The meadow is slightly canted downward from north to south, and it gets very boggy at the low end.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Whitetails are constantly congregating in the north. I think I’ve narrowed down their bedding area to a spot about fifty yards square, right at the border between forest and clearing. They get up and walk around in the open at dawn quite reliably. That’s how I filled my buck tag, and that’s how I hoped to kill a doe this morning.

I was on the western border of the clearing, creeping north, only seventy steps from my pillbox when I saw a shadow flit by up ahead. It was still quite dark, twenty minutes till sunrise. I knew instantly that it was Bullethead. He wasn’t about to come at me straight across the meadow, too smart for that. No, he would flank me, come barreling out of the dark forest to my left in a nightmare flurry of teeth and claws.

When I wasn’t killed in ghastly fashion, I concluded that it was probably a deer. I stood stock still, looking not for shapes, only movement. With the lingering dark and skirling snow, it was still hard to tell one tree from another. Nevertheless, the deer must have heard or seen me. Sure enough, I saw one move, and I was just able to pick out its black shape on the white snow. From its silhouette, I could see two ears pointing right at me. So I’d been made. Despite the dark, the silence, the wind taking away my scent, I’d been made. But they would be more spooked if they were sure I was a human. I pulled my doe can out of my pocket and turned it a few times. It’s a little late in the year for the plaintive mmblaaaaaaaanh of an estrus bleat, but it’s better than nothing. It seemed to calm them.

I say “them” because… well, I’m not sure that it can be articulated. I think that as hunters our senses take in more than our brains consciously register. I only saw one flitting shadow that resolved into an outline on the snow, and I have seen lone deer there before. My buck last month was all alone. Yet, I was certain that there were more deer around, and I’ve since confirmed that there were at least three others.

The one I could see at the time put its head down to feed, and I slowly stepped to my left to put a twelve-foot evergreen between us. I didn’t like losing sight of it for even a second, but my cold weather gear is Mossy Oak, and the high grass was corn-yellow; I needed to be surrounded by green when the lights came up. I crept toward the tree and actually steered myself right in between its branches, resting the stock of my rifle in a crotch against the trunk. I found the deer again and saw that it was standing directly in line with the tree I’d intended as my sniper’s nest, the very same tree I’d rested on as I plugged that buck last month. They sure do like that area.

I checked the time: 7:05am. I knew from a hunt yesterday that shooting light should arrive at about 7:15am, so I waited. I lost sight of the deer a few times, but I felt sure they were right there. I hit the doe can a couple of times every five minutes or so because I knew that they hadn’t forgotten that there was something over here, and they were probably staring at my tree quite intently.

The minutes dragged on like hours, and at 7:25am, there was still very little light. The snow was still coming steadily, and if I didn’t know which way east was, the sun wouldn’t have given me any clues. I started to feel panicky, realizing that I might not have enough light to shoot for an hour or more, and a Whitetail will not accept an unknown in its environment for that long. I was surprised they hadn’t taken off already. By 7:30am, all I could confirm was that there were at least two deer about sixty yards from me. I still had virtually no visibility through my scope, which had accumulated a good deal of snow and ice on both ends. I carefully wiped all the moisture away and looked for the deer through the scope, but I’d have had the same view peering down my kitchen sink. I know, I should invest in a lens cover, but it’s not my gun, and I’ve not yet accessorized it.

See, in addition to not owning a truck, I don’t own a gun either. While I grew up in Alberta rifle-hunting, I spent most of my adult life in Michigan, and it was only in the last few years out there that I picked up hunting again. And in Jackson County, Michigan, bow-hunting is the only way to go. Once the guns come out, the countryside is about as safe as the Ho Chi Minh Trail in ’67. It rains lead from dawn on November 15th till dusk on New Year’s Eve, and in that time, I wouldn’t stop the car to change a flat in any remotely rural area. Because this is when I came of age as a hunter, I own a bow, but no guns.

This morning, I was toting a .270 Winchester magnum that belonged to a preacherman from Pasadena. He lived in Calgary during the eighties and nineties, and the gun is a family heirloom. He asked dad to store it for him when he moved back down south, and he’s never reclaimed it. I emailed him to ask if I might perform a redemptive work in the life of this weapon, for it was crafted to collect venison, not dust. He was in full agreement. I sent him a picture of the buck I killed earlier in the season, and he was quite pleased to receive it. I aimed to send him another today.

October 28, 2011, very warm for that time of year, not a bit of snow or frost.

But by 7:45, I was reasonably sure that this was the day the sun wouldn’t rise. Yesterday, I could have taken a three hundred yard shot by that time. Today, I couldn’t even be sure I was looking at Whitetails instead of Mulies, let alone confirm a lack of antlers. Worse yet, the deer finally began a concerted effort to determine exactly what I was.

The wind was steady and still in my favour. But one of the deer broke off from the others and began to move purposefully down the wind to the east of me. Any experienced Whitetail hunter will recognize this move. It was as though she was on a sixty-yard leash with one end tied to the tree I hid behind. She cautiously but steadily described that arc until she was due east instead of north. Of course, her next move would be to quarter the compass again, where she’d be sixty yards south of me: downwind. This wouldn’t have been much of a problem if I didn’t get so lazy when I’m rifle-hunting. I am fanatical about scent control when I’ve got a bow in my hand. I shower with Scent-Away, keep my gear in air-tight bins with Fresh-Earth scent wafers, use the special deodorant, the whole nine yards. I get careless when I can shoot over three hundred yards, and my clothes probably smelled of car exhaust and campfires. The doe would surely bolt once she got a whiff of me.

I was never very concerned about scent until I took up bow-hunting in Michigan. The deer down there are plentiful, but I’m not certain they outnumber the hunters. If you were to walk up to a random stranger anywhere in Jackson County, and forego socially accepted introductions and simply say, “I don’t hunt deer.”  You wouldn’t be questioned for your outlandish behaviour. You’d be asked, “Why not?”  Consequently, the deer are heavily pressured, wise to hunters, and jumpy as meth-heads. They scan the trees for deer-stands, bolt at the faintest scent of humans, and go virtually nocturnal during the season. It’d be easier to shoot and tag a Navy SEAL. This is why I say that I came of age as a hunter down there. Bagging a Whitetail in southern Michigan is no mean feat. By comparison, these Alberta deer don’t seem so cagey. Still, I doubt this doe is going to hang around once she smells me.

I call her a doe because she moved like one. Bucks have a cocky, swaggering gait, and they put their noses to the ground like a bloodhound when they’re on the alert. I also thought she looked a little light in the front quarter to be a buck. But I didn’t feel like this was enough evidence to shoot. Believe me, I wanted to. She was east of me at about 7:50am, and I could finally see her outline through the scope. Out there in the open meadow, there was good snow accumulation, giving me her silhouette. I had the preacher’s gun leveled on her: crosshairs on her vitals, safety off. But with the high grass sticking up out of the snow, her shape was fuzzy in the low-light, making it impossible to confirm a lack of antlers. And at the end of the day, the tag reads “Antlerless Whitetail.”  It gives no qualifications such as “Must move like a doe,” or “Light in the front quarter.”

I let her walk.

Ninety percent sure just isn’t good enough. If you walk up to what was supposed to be a doe and find a little set of antlers on her, you’ve got two very disagreeable options. You can walk away and feel like a greasy turd for wasting a perfectly good animal, or you can take it and run the risk that that’s the day you run amok of Ranger Rick. And it will be that day. Oh yes, that’s the day he’ll find you. Rick will definitely issue a fine, perhaps suspend hunting privileges, and maybe confiscate the gun, depends on his mood. Contemplating the choices, staring down at that illegal kill… that’s a bad place to be. I’m not going to say I’ve ever been in that spot, not in print anyway. But it happens, even to good hunters.

As she continued her progression downwind, another deer broke off from the group and started following in her footsteps, her exact footsteps by the look of it. Probably a buck following her scent, I thought. He stopped before emerging from behind one of the alder clumps to my east in the meadow. The doe had quickly walked by it and gawked at me from the open. But this guy was staying concealed, looking at me through some branches, not taking the two last steps required for him to be in the open.

I knew that it had to be getting imperceptibly brighter out there with every passing second, but I still couldn’t get a good look through the scope. I’d look at the shape amongst the branches that I knew was a deer, note the specific tree, find it in my scope, and I still couldn’t find the deer in the mess of branches.

I lost sight of the doe heading south, and I knew she’d probably blow the alarm at any moment. I couldn’t see any more deer to the north where they’d both started out, and after a few minutes, I couldn’t be sure where this deer was hiding in the branches anymore. I could still see that shape that was so recently a deer, but it wasn’t moving. I should have been able to see a head bob or tail flick, but I was seeing nothing. I forced myself to watch that spot, that little lump in the bushes until my eyes watered. When I was sure that I’d been mistaken, his head swiveled. Then I could see why I was having such trouble finding him; he’d acquired a fairly thick coat of snow. His back, his ears, even the top of his head had an inch of snow covering it. I tried the scope again, only to find him, and then see him turn around and disappear behind the brush. Even though I suspected he was a buck, I positioned myself so that I’d have a clear shot at him when he reemerged from behind the island of alders, bracing the stock of the rifle against the tree and wiping the scope again.

It took too long for him to come back into view, and I realized it was because he was moving away from me, heading east as well as north, keeping the stand of alders between us. I knew I’d probably be looking at his butt when I saw him again. That’s not an ideal shot, but it can still work out. That buck last month was working away from me too. I just gave out my own version of a buck grunt so that he turned his head in my direction. Looking backward reoriented his shoulders just enough so that I could see his front left quarter around his rump. My bullet probably ruffled the fur on his butt before it squeaked in behind his front leg, but he still landed in the freezer.

I didn’t think I’d have any problem killing the deer. I figured the problem would be seeing antlers instead of a bald head. When he did reappear, I was looking at his rump, and the light was finally good enough to determine that I was in the presence of Whitetails, not Mulies. I was gazing at him with the naked eye, feeling a terrible itch in my trigger finger when something truly remarkable happened.

When you’re hunting, at least one or two things usually go wrong. The wrong animal shows up, it stays out of range, it sees you first, your gun or bow is out of position, you don’t have a quality shot, you miss, the list is endless. That’s why we hunt far more often than we kill. But as I eyed that deer over the top of my scope, in the space of one second, everything went right.

While crossing a bright patch of snow, he turned broadside, lifted his head, and turned into a doe. There was no mistaking it. I had my rifle trained on an Antlerless Whitetail, the only tag I had, on the last day of the season, and it was giving me a perfect killshot at seventy yards. And because I had been watching deer for an hour, my heart wasn’t hammering out of my chest anymore; I felt rock-steady. I simply lowered my gaze to the scope, where the deer was already centred, and squeezed off a round. Ka-pow.

She went two yards before dropping.

The woods exploded into life, pounding hooves, crashing branches. As I’d suspected, I was virtually surrounded by Whitetails. North, east, and south, I saw bushy tails held banner-high, disappearing into the bush. But I was concerned with only one deer, and she was breathing her last just seventy steps away.

I’m glad that I had noted exactly what line I took when I shot and walked as straight along the path of my bullet as I could because I still barely found her. Yes, she was in the open, but the grass was knee-high, and the snow was still coming down in heaps. Though it was at least forty minutes past dawn, the lighting was still no better than that of a fancy steak house. She was just a small, gray lump nestled in the grass. Her chest rose and fell a couple of times, and I considered a killshot in the neck, but her chest stopped moving even as I debated it.

A part of me was hoping to follow a blood-trail for a while. It’s better to drop them right where they stand, but there are few endeavours that build anticipation like following a fresh blood-trail, and it’s all the more vivid on snow. I found the precise spot she’d been standing, and realized that even this minute-old, two-yard trail was quickly disappearing under the snow. It’s definitely best to drop them fast. I didn’t see an entry wound, and I rolled her over to see if there was an exit. There was. It looked like a golf ball had blasted out of her shoulder. Considering that a .270 bullet is pencil-thin, that’s impressive expansion. Dad will be pleased. He loaded these shells for me, using partition Noslers. They’re expensive, but they delivered the wallop they’d promised.

I always get a little flustered when I’ve got an animal down. I don’t know if it’s something to do with the massive release of tension, but my thought processes are completely jumbled, and I become extremely inefficient. Today, I took off my pack, looked for my tag, took it out, ate a snack, took out my knife, snapped a picture, looked for the tag again (it was in my hand), searched for the knife again (it was laying on the deer), tagged the deer, misplaced the knife again, etc. I did this for a good twenty minutes before I started field-dressing the deer. It happens every time. I don’t know why.

Not a great pic (I still had a Blackberry back then), but you can see that the hide was collecting snow.

When I finally got my act together, I got a bit of a surprise. My deer had undergone its second sex change in one day. I rolled her onto her back and found boy parts on her tummy. I checked the head and found little buttons under the fur that would have been antlers next year if I’d only stayed in bed this morning. He would have been a fawn last fall, meaning he’ll be a very tender, tasty deer. And he wasn’t as small as most button-bucks either, about doe-sized.

Once I got started on dressing him, I moved much more quickly. I began to think about Bullethead again. With blood up to my elbows and a reeking gut-pile around my boots, I wondered if he was already on his way. I stood up and turned three hundred and sixty degrees more than once, always confirming that the preacher’s gun was still within reach, but Bullethead didn’t show. I realize that I keep referring to Bullethead as a he. I suppose he could just as easily be a sow. We had a close look at him, but not that close. I just feel like he’s a boar. Everybody in this story is turning out male: the two featured hunters, my buck last month, even this doe I tried to kill turned into a little dude. It all leads me to believe that old Bullethead is packin’ heat.

On a whim, I decided to deprive him of the heart and liver. Dad has a client who seems to be at least as fond of viscera as crows and bears. The lungs were damaged, but both heart and liver were pristine, so I wrapped them up in a plastic grocery bag that had lately held my lunch.

Once I’d finished up the field-dressing, and cleaning my hands and knife on the snow, I stripped down for the work to come. I packed up my parka and vented my bib-alls, knowing I’d be dragging this buck for hours, sweating all the way. I cinched a rope around his neck, tied the other end to an alder branch I’d broken off for a handle, and began the long haul. After only a few yards, I was again surprised by my good fortune. The deer slid along the snow with frictionless ease. I dragged him all the way across the meadow, stopped to catch my breath, and realized I wasn’t winded. With the last deer I dragged out of there, I fought for every inch, stopping every twenty yards. This time, even the hills weren’t much of a challenge, and there was just enough snow to allow my little buck to slip right over top of most deadfall with nary a snag. The beaverdam cooperated too. I scampered along the logs and branches while my companion glided over the ice. Last month, it took me two hours to haul that buck halfway back to the car, and I was half-dead from the effort. This time, I got all the way back to the car in less than two hours, and I was a little sad when I arrived.

The end of hunting season is bittersweet. Hunting (the way I’m doing it out here in Alberta) is hard work and early mornings. I’ll be glad to be getting more sleep. But I know I’ll be out in the woods less often. And all the excitement, anticipation, and thrill… those are gone for another year too. Ending the season on a successful and thoroughly enjoyable hunt makes me feel it all the more poignantly. But at least I had enough sense to not let the moment pass.

The hike out was one of the best hunting experiences I’ve ever had, and I reveled in it all the way. The wind died out entirely while the snow continued to fall. The evergreens were freighted with six inches of light powder. I stopped frequently to watch and listen. The woods were utterly silent, still except for an occasional evergreen branch burdened with one snowflake too many shirking its load and springing back up. I caught myself thinking that the leafless aspens interspersed with the frosted evergreens, seen through a lightly falling snow were so perfect that it was like being in a painting, or maybe a perfectly engineered storefront display on fifth avenue. Of course, that’s backward thinking; it’s the art that resembles life. But that’s what went through my mind.

I almost regressed back into fear after passing the bend in the path where dad and I encountered the bear. I stopped and looked back down the trail, evaluating the drag mark I’d left behind: a two-foot wide depression in the snow with a continuous orange/red streak of blood left of center. I was essentially trolling for Bullethead, and a better chum-line could hardly be wished for. It was over a mile long and getting longer, and if old Bullethead should find it, why you can be sure he’d come marching along double-time. I could see it in my mind: him galloping around that corner, head on a line, eyes forward, me trying to get that rifle strap off my shoulder, fumbling with the safety. Who’d win?  I almost regretted letting him walk.

But the wild isn’t the wild without Bullethead in it. It’s not the wild without snowstorms and the chance of losing your way in them. It’s not the wild if it doesn’t scare you.

I turned around and walked the rest of the way out truly happy for Bullethead and all the other bears who haunt these woods. I was happy for the humble little deer that I dragged behind me. But most of all, I was happy that this morning, against my instincts to play it safe, I got out of the car, strapped on a rifle, and walked into the teeth of a blizzard to see what might happen.