Where does belonging land?

Walking composition

“It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.” —A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher

Hunting season has started in Montana (rifle season, that is; archery season opened ages ago but I am not a bow hunter), which means I’m constantly distracted these days by getting ready to go into the woods, wishing I were in the woods, or being in the woods. Though that last hopefully means I’m being attentive rather than distracted.

I love hunting. Not because I love the potential moment of violence inherent in the process; I love it because the attention required is so achingly slow that it feels like it sinks into the soil with the moss and fallen leaves. It could become part of the earth’s humus if you stayed there long enough. Every step has my attention, every breeze-danced branch from the trees, every hint of tan color around the bend of a hill. The way I breathe, the way my braid brushes my coat if I’ve forgotten to clip up my hair. How cold my hands are, how heavy the rifle is on my shoulder. The twigs and fresh deer poop and carpet of larch needles underfoot. The scolding squirrels and the arrival of winter one slow-falling aspen leaf at a time.

Every now and then I come upon a flock of chickadees twittering and flickering wildly among a clutch of trees, which was what happened on a recent afternoon as I walked in the rain and the light slowly faded from the woods. So I sat on a hillside and watched them fly around until sunset neared with no deer in sight and the wet, chill air sank through my layers and I wished I could stay all night.

Light rainfall in the woods.

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My parents hunted throughout most of my childhood and took my older sister, but never managed to take me out. They had traded a gun shop owner in town: a rifle for Russian lessons, and deer and elk were almost the only meat we had. I can afford other food now, but even before moving back to Montana eight years ago I wanted to learn to hunt. While washing dishes in upstate New York, I’d watch deer wander through the woods a neighbor owned and think about how to become more connected with the life and place my family’s food comes from, whatever that might look like.

Being responsible for my food is part of the lure, but it’s more than that. Even if I don’t get an animal every year—or most years—it’s that slow process of getting to know the lands around me that makes me look forward to walking in the woods. Or maybe it’s the prospect of letting them get to know me. The 50- or 100-something- or 10,000-acre pockets of life tucked behind hills and little ravines, slightly insulated from highway noise and saturated with the kind of silence that isn’t really silence but is instead the sound of a world that is doing its own thing, existing, whether you’re there or not.