Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we finally talk about the hunt.
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Many of you emailed after Wednesday’s newsletter asking whether my husband and I got an elk on our hunting trip, so I thought today would be as good a time as any to tell y’all the story.
On Wednesday, I left off halfway through the first hunt. We were still sitting on the ridge where I saw the lone tree when we decided nothing would come our way there. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on from a dead spot. If you live in a high-elevation state, it probably doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to hike up and down mountain ridges. However, as a Texan who only ever walks the paved roads in my neighborhood, the over 5,000-foot elevation difference made hiking … problematic.
We spent the better part of the next two hours climbing and descending ridges as my body fought to breathe. I was sucking in air, but it didn’t feel like it was making much of a difference. My muscles ached with every step, begging for mercy as my body’s oxygen levels dropped. While I fought this battle inside, I knew I had to stay as quiet as possible.
The whole point of this trip was to fill our freezer with meat, and God willing, mount another trophy on the wall. My father drilled the importance of silent steps into me as a kid when we hunted the mesas of our south Texas property, and I didn’t want to be the reason an elk got spooked. I tried not to focus on the alarm bells ringing in my chest, whining for air. Instead, I charted the path ahead, looking for quiet places to land my feet. I started grading myself by the crunch of the ground; the softer the landing, the better. I tried to avoid thick brush, but when I couldn’t, I pushed through smoothly, trying to emulate gliding through water.
As the afternoon sun heats up, elk tend to hide in the trees to bed down. They want a safe place to cool off. We’d go back to the cabin and do the same. This process repeated itself twice a day for two days. We’d get up early, march up a ridge, wait, move on, find another spot, and then break for lunch before heading back out before sunset.
If you have never played competitive sports or been in a physically taxing environment like the military, it’s hard to describe the mental toughness it takes to push through pain and exhaustion. There is no option to quit. You just have to find the part of you that says, no matter how you feel in this moment, it’s not bad enough to let go.
“This will eventually end. You will lie down in your bed tonight. Your husband will shoot an elk if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other,” I told myself almost robotically. This mantra repeated in my mind over and over.
At one point, we found ourselves on the same ridge we sat on the first day. The one with the lone tree. It was incredible to see it, and I thought about how much had happened between the first time I saw it and now. We had been pushing so hard and coming up empty-handed, hunt after hunt. We had seen some beautiful country filled with wildlife and native plants, but not the bull.
Well, that’s not exactly true. We did see one that kept eluding us. We spotted him on the second hunt of the first day, but he was spooked by something, and we couldn’t get a clean look at him before he trotted off into the woods. Then again, he came out on the second day, but he was too far away and kept pushing farther every time we thought we’d finally gotten close. My husband affectionately named him Houdini because of how many times he disappeared.
We were told that our part of Idaho was expecting inclement weather later in the week. And sure enough, on the second-to-last day of our trip, when we broke for lunch, we realized that if we didn’t get an elk that afternoon, we’d be forced to go out in the cold rain the next day. Faced with this possibility and how tired my body had gotten over the last several days, I had decided that before we got back for dinner that night, we’d get him.
“I’ve got a feeling,” I told my husband.