There’s something about the wild.
I think it sets him free.
I think it’s in his blood.
I think it’s working its way into me.
I’ve been feeling a sixth sense, a magic.
A sense where time is unattended. Clocks do not exist.
Only the sun and her skies, and she decides.
It feels good to be on no one’s agenda but nature’s.
I think that sense is called freedom.
We’re hiking our way through the black spruce, and I’m a few steps behind my husband. The sun is tucked under an overcast sky, and a yellow glow lights the horizon at noon. It’s Halloween in Interior Alaska, but an arctic blast recently shocked us with powder. He points out prints in the snow. Grouse. We both set up to shoot. Minutes later, two shots ring out from his gun, but I am still shooting, adrenaline spiking. The shutter releases on my camera and my other half walks to pick up his dead prizes from the forest floor: two beautiful spruce grouse. I continue to shoot.
I don’t know a lot about hunting, and I grew up thinking hunting was for men. Not because anyone told me so, but because I didn’t know any women that hunted. I shot a gun for the first time last year. And then I married a hunter, one who grew up on 60 acres of white pine in the Wisconsin woods, who despite his athletic talent declined to play football each fall in order to hunt, who even skipped his high school homecoming to bow hunt whitetail deer with his mom. These grouse are the first animals I’ve ever seen killed in the wild. It feels sacred; a way to connect to life and our ecosystem in a way I never expected. It parallels
