In 2017, I sat down and wrote 30,000 words in a week. I was on Christmas break from my gig at Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, and I was pressing towards a dream I had of becoming a published author.

My goal was to write a short book designed for urbanites to feel more at peace with heading into the woods. After all, I had been a corporate gal living and working in downtown Denver for five years prior to moving to Montana, where my world suddenly shifted from city life, to small town life, to my first forays into Montana’s great wild places. For me, the transformation demolished the concrete under my feet to the point that it all but disappeared.

I worked hard to try and find an agent for that book, and it gathered dust for awhile. Then, last year, I picked it up again with seven more years of experience, professional outdoor writing, gear testing, and adventures under my belt. Again, finding an agent proved to be difficult. When one agent did show interest, she told me she hated hunting and didn’t know how she could support the book with that side of natural participation attached to it. That, for me, became a dream deferred. I couldn’t work with someone who felt that way.

So, I’ve decided to pivot. I’m adapting once more, and I’m going to share much of what I’ve written here, in the hopes that maybe some folks do read it and begin feeling a bit more confident about their ability to connect with nature. This is not the 2017 iteration, nor is it the 2025 iteration in its original format, but one that I’m still building, adapting, and hoping to change a few lives with.

I’ll follow up with the next installation in just a few days.

The Black Bear

I sat high on the rocks below the waterfall, surrounded in all directions by glacial mountains with pale turquoise waters at their planted feet. But I wasn’t looking at the majestic vista. Instead, I focused on a single patch of wildflowers, lined by tall pines on one side and dipping down into the curve of the valley on the other.

In the wildflowers, a young black bear rolled onto her back, grabbing her toes like an infant. I’d terrified myself a few minutes earlier when we came nearly face to face in a thick bramble of berries. At first, I wondered what an off-leash dog was doing in the woods alone, but then her shape shifted into a frank reality. She turned, sat, perked her ears, and woofed at me softly. My phone was already out. I’d been taking pics of wildflowers up the trail as I popped sun-warm berries into my mouth. I snapped a pic of her as I backed up. Once out of sight, I quickly hiked up the trail above THE BEAR. My first bear! In real life! This — the most terrifying animal I could possibly run into! How would I get back down past her? Fear and uncertainty flooded the moment.

But, I took a deep breath and climbed to a red rock vantage point to see if I could spot her again. And yes, there she was. She emerged — yawning and waddling — from the line of pine trees where we’d met. Stuffed with an abundance of sweet huckleberries, she rolled around in crimson sticky paintbrush, lavender lupines, and glacier lilies in a state of pure bliss. She reached for her toes and began somersaulting down the low grade of hill, gaining speed as she went. I stifled my laughter against my adrenal surge of awe.

At the bottom of the hill ran a creek I could cross in two steps down. The heat of the summer day hung heavy. Dressed in a glossy coal black coat; she splashed and played in the small water, causing a big scene for me and only me. She stomped and jumped and leapt to her heart content. She made a big cannonball move in a creek eddy, then fell hard into soft grasses with absolute ecstasy, then leapt back into the water.

Once cooled off, she curled into a thicket of grasses so thick you could only see a small glimpse of her hide and fell asleep. I watched the thin strip of hide rise and fall in big breaths. She went from joy full steam to rest full stop in an instant. You could walk by her and barely see her. You likely wouldn’t even rouse her, so deep in her afternoon nap. And there she was, safe in cover, fat and sassy and — very clearly — happy.

This — my greatest fear, my primary perceived predator of the woods! This! This joyful, blissful, glorious little being! She gave me the greatest gift that day, and perhaps she knew it. Her soft woof was a small worry against my gargantuan one. And yet, she turned away from me not out of fear, but with the determination to play, to not let a two-legged being riddled with anxiety ruin her perfect summer day.

And in her easy way of going, she changed me. The mountain soil shifted under my feet. I knew I’d found a place in the world, where I could grow, play, change, and be — like her — wholly myself.

That was the day I decided that, yes, perhaps I was more outdoorsy than I thought.

Becoming an Outdoorswoman

I met the bear in the summer of 2013, on the outskirts of Glacier National Park, on my very first solo car camping trip. I’d taken four days off from my job bartending in town to explore what it might mean to camp alone, to hike in big mountains during the day, and then come back to the walls of a tent rather than the walls of my in-town apartment.

Of course, I’d camped before. My family wasn’t so outdoorsy, but my friends’ parents often toted me along on family adventures, and I was exposed to all sorts of outdoor activities that way. In high school, our parents allowed four teenage girls to head out sans adults into the backcountry of Rocky Mountain National Park for three days. We camped high in the alpine, giggling and eating trail mix in our tents during a storm, then frightening ourselves with ghost stories.

In college, my clan of rowdy friends camped to escape the ‘Minor in Possession’ tickets handed out by local cops. Up the Cache le Poudre canyon, we’d drink crappy beer then sleep without pads on cold ground like the noobs we were. I thought camping was uncomfortable. And, in the way that we did it, it was. (A decent sleeping pad, my friends, is an absolute must.) I also worked at east coast sleepaway camps as a counselor all through college, where we played sports, swam, and lived a dreamy sort of bubble life for eight weeks. Camp life was outdoorsy in that it was outdoors, but I wouldn’t describe it as rugged.

As my twenties stretched on, I headed towards cities, leaving Colorado State University and a rural-adjacent life behind. I served a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a therapeutic horseback riding center outside of Boston, living in Allston-Brighton. Then, I went back to Colorado and tucked myself into downtown Denver, where my hobbies were corporate life, stand-up comedy, and riding horses.

If you would have told me that in the next decade I’d become an outdoor writer with a bent towards hunting, fishing, and backpacking, I’d have laughed you out of the room. But, that’s how the Clif bar crumbled, and the solo adventure to Glacier opened Pandora’s box.

I climbed to the top of that red rock waterfall, tucked into the cliffs of a glacial valley, and walked toward a new life on the hike down.

Getting Prepared, From the Inside Out

There are so many incredible tomes of experiential knowledge, and yet, I find that the biggest barrier to getting out into wild places actually starts with navigating our worries, the amount of confidence we bring to the adventure, and — most importantly — our fear.

So, I’m dedicating the first part of this series not to the actual bear on the mountain, but to the imaginary one we carry in the pit of our stomach. That, in my experience, is the scariest bear of all.

Let’s get after it.

Part I: The Somatics of Being Outdoors

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training” - Archilochus, Greek Philosopher

The biggest obstacles I faced as a new outdoorswoman had little to do with gear, skill acquisition, or even basic knowledge. They were — drumroll, please — internal.

Montana offers up a lot of things to think about, and I thought about all of them. I was wildly, hilariously, dramatically worried about bears, and yet I was equally curious about them. I worried about not knowing what I knew I didn’t know and how that lack of knowledge might get me into preventable trouble. I thought about mountain lions, creepy people, and what I’d do if I got lost. I worried about crazy weather, lightning, and flash floods. Trees could fall! What if I upset a moose? I am occasionally clumsy and inelegant! I could fall!

If you can think of it, I thought of it first, I promise you.

There are both safety measures you can take and gear that you can carry that will inevitably quiet some of your fears. That comes later.

For now, I want us to take a deep breath, consider what might go wrong, and understand that it would be a hell of a lot weirder if you went into the woods with zero trepidation at all. I’d consider it a red flag if you weren’t worried. There are absolutely things to worry about outside, but miles + time normalizes life in the woods. Another way forward simply doesn’t exist. You must go, and you must experience, and those two things put together will slowly build out your ever- evolving level of comfort.

Discomfort is the precursor to growth. We can minimize our discomfort and maximize fun by changing and increasing our level of exposure. I’ve designed the series in this way, so that you can move through it, part by part, and see how we can increase the capacity for emotional load outside, while also developing multiple levels of competencies.

This is the easy way. If you’re like me, you’ll read this and jump off the deep end into something much harder than you’re prepared for. That’s my kind of fun. If you do that, things might feel and/or get pretty intense. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ll do my best to help out.

I want to address the normalcy of fear, including our base instincts as well as our intuition. I talk about how we manage these feelings to get to a state of attunement with our surroundings, the science that backs up our connection to natural landscapes, the three types of fun and why they’re important, the art of mental preparation, and the paths we might choose to better connect to the land.

These are all basic entry points to preparing our brain to have a holistic understanding of what you might face in your mind, body, and spirit as you choose to engage with wild places. Whole books could be written on any of these topics, but here, we are simply adding mental bullet points to prepare ourselves when difficult feelings arise. They will. That’s okay. That opens the door to an honest and fulfilling experience. That also opens the door to building a deep sense of resilience, both inside and out.

Fear is Normal

I camped alone for the first time this year a few days ago. With all you now know about me, you might be surprised that I prepared myself to feel afraid.

I was, by all accounts, absolutely safe. I slept in my truck camper, which sits about nine feet above ground. Tucked into the pop-up tent with the window open to the stars, I was beyond comfortable on my cush mattress with blankets, a pillow, and a sleeping bag way warmer than the night called for. Both of my canine alarm systems hung out in the compartment below me, on their tempurpedic dog beds with water at the ready. I wasn’t even that far from other humans. Another camp was just a few hundred yards away. I could call out if something happened, easily.

And yet, I knew that I was camped in a spot where grizzlies and wolves run thick. Whitetails, moose, and elk abound. Birds hollered and sang all around while the sun shone, and bees buzzed in the thick vegetation so loudly a slight hum hung in the air. This particular piece of land is a game range, where preservation of the ecosystem is kept at a premium and the wildlife reacts in kind.

Throughout the night, I woke to every sound in camp, to every rocking movement of my dogs below me. At the crepuscular hour right before the light of dawn, a large animal ran through my camp, likely ambling until it caught my scent, then ran like hell to get out of dodge.

That’s the thing about fear: it goes both ways. It is woven into the experience, for humans and wildlife alike.

There are seasons I gravitate toward outdoor living. Montana winters are long, and I don’t really want to be camping when it reaches into the negatives. I get comfortable in four walls, with windows that look out on my horses and elk herds and, currently, the lambing sheep of my neighbors. The lambs are an indicator that it’s time to make the shift from indoor to out. My horses are shedding their thick coats, getting ready for longer and warmer days. And I too have to shed my initial discomfort, from four walls to thinner walls and — when summer really hits — to no walls at all.

I’ve realized over the years — thanks to the many hundreds of nights I’ve slept outside — that fear always comes first. It attaches itself to the heightened awareness and sense of presence I get when I do finally make the switch. I don’t necessarily feel it when I hike, fish, or even hunt, but I always feel it in the first few nights I sleep outside each year. It shakes me awake, and it can feel absolutely paralytic. It’s frozen my physical body even when my more rational sense of curiosity wants to turn over and see what is happening.

Roll over and peek out the window, I say to my body when the animal runs through camp. Move! I demand, and it doesn’t. My curiosity sighs and yields to its dramatics. The reality is my autonomic system kicks my sympathetic nervous reaction into overdrive, and there is no override button other than breath and time. I have to wait it out, get back into my somatic nervous system, and breathe myself into my parasympathetic nervous system to go back to sleep. And, on the first few nights out, it usually happens at least once.

Yawn, you guys. The next day isn’t always the easiest. It’s a lot. But, I can assure you that it also gets better.

The more nights I spend out, the fear quickly fades instead to a light sense of presence. I hear strange noises without freezing. I become attuned without feeling overwhelmed. I eventually sleep deeply with the understanding that my mind, spirit, and body are connected enough to protect me, should the need arise to wake up. Our ears, my friends, are always listening. My nervous system becomes more in sync with the new normal of outdoor living, in grizzly country and beyond. It doesn’t unnecessarily panic, but it also never turns off.

What we assume, going into our first bouts of outdoor exploration, is that fear is a real and timely alarm that should be heeded. We also assume it’s an alarm that will always be there when we’re outdoors. Like, it’s not going away. Both are false assumptions.

In our daily human lives, anxiety might abound, but true fear typically does not. (Or I hope it doesn’t for your sake, my friend.) In my own definition, fear is a state of absolute presence to what your mind, body, and/or spirit perceives as a dangerous and imminent threat. It is your fight, flight, freeze response — that being, your actual nervous system switching into an autonomic mode.

This is a good thing. It means your trifecta of awareness isn’t entirely broken by the weird demands of our wired lives. Your natural instincts remain intact and they are doing their damndest with the information they have to keep you safe, whether the circumstances call for it or not. For me, this sense of presence pulls me back into my body — which is uncomfortable at first — but ultimately, it resets my internal rhythms, grounds me into the electric current of the landscape, and allows me to function at what I believe is my most spectacular form.

Fear is, indubitably, the first step to attunement. It is your instinctual shock treatment opening the door to deeper connection. It is absolutely normal to be afraid when you are exposed to a new environment and all the strange goings-on within it. It’s easier for me to see these responses as my internal bodyguards. Their job is to stay awake while I sleep, to elbow each other and keep a lookout from the high mast of the energy field, and to decide together when they need to wake me up. They are, at first, overdramatic. But, if you can tolerate the discomfort of their dramatics, they eventually calm down.

Soon, you’re able to hear the soft footfalls of a cow moose outside of your tent as she walks down to the lake without so much as a shiver. You catch the feathered motion of a Great Grey Owl that almost silently flies over you, curious at the new form on the ground. You might even catch the grunts of a black bear sow grunting at the cubs nosing you through the silnylon because you’re the first human they’ve encountered up close. When mom keeps going, they turn to follow, ever on her heels. You might feel a wild sense of awareness, a sense of being close to perceived danger, but you also are able to softly say “hey, bears, this isn’t about you” and let the cubs know this is uncool behavior. You don’t want them to get the wrong idea.

The stories change as your fear diminishes. Your curiosity gains control of your body. Moments that once would have scared the shit out of you become colored by a different sort of reality. The outdoor landscape responds in kind and — for the great great majority of time — in a curious and benign sort of kindness.

Coming Up Next Week: The Importance of Instinct, Intuition, and Attunement

The past two years have been humbling, educational, inspiring, and — even more strangely — the only way the path could shake out into what might be my true ‘calling’ in this big adventure of life.

What I’ve Been Doing

I now go by ‘Miss Q’ as an English teacher at my local high school, and I’ve taken to it as an elk takes to north-facing slopes. I have 113 students in grades 8-12. I teach three junior-level English classes, two eighth-grade English classes, and one Creative Writing class that most of my students took because it was the only elective left.

We are what’s called a Title I school; nearly 70% of my students face poverty-related issues daily. It’s a high-trauma, high-needs, free breakfast and lunch and “hey do you need to take food home because we will shove it into your backpack if you do” kind of school. I’ve been sworn at, stormed out on, made fun of, and outright ignored. And I love it.

Bring it on, little babies! I can match your energy with respect, fire, and passion. That, too, is paying off. My students are skipping less, coming to me for help, and trusting in their small hope that I’ll at least stay until the end of the semester. Prior to me coming, they’d cycled through three teachers in their English classroom this year.

All that said, I’m also receiving this sort of feedback. This is how a student answered the question “Where do you feel most supported?” in another class:

Of course, I’m staying. Of course, I am. I’m having a ball. I’m built for this.

Bringing It Back to The Westrn

But that also brings me back here, to The Westrn. To this little place that we’ve cultivated together. Some of you have worked with me, some have written for me and the other folks who built this up, many of you have financially committed to us through Substack.

And I’ll be honest, I feel like I haven’t lived up to expectations 100% of the time. I’m sure I’ve missed mailing out some issues to folks, I’ve certainly not written as much as I’ve promised to this in the past three months, and though I did talk about pausing print a while ago, some of you might have missed that.

For now, it looks like print is on pause for the long haul. Initially, when folks started subscribing to Substack, we promised just two long reads online for the price of $50. We didn’t change that price when we went to print — that was probably a mistake.

We ended up insanely upside down on our second print issue. The learning curve of DIY print is high and immediate, and yet I know Kestrel, L, and I are all still really proud of what we accomplished. But, we were also funding a LOT of what we did ourselves and we weren’t able to bring it together.

We Really Did Accomplish So Much

I’m proud of the countless hours put in by everyone who has put time into this experiment. Maggie Slepian, Gabriela Zaldumbide, Katie Hill, and Kestrel Keller all took a mega chance on something, and they put countless hours into giving it a college try. It was imperfect, it was educational, and it was — and still is — one of the better professional educations I’ve had.

Additionally, we were able to hire over a dozen writers, work with them to put out something we believed in, and put it on paper. We became an award-winning publication online, and I know some of our writers have put in for multiple contests this year. I’m excited to see the results.

We have also been a top 50 Environmental Substack for most of our time here. I’ve seen The Westrn sidle up to some of the biggest names in Environmental Writing right now, including Bill McKibben. Insanity. In. San. Ity.

A Deserved ‘Mea Culpa’ and Making Things Right

If you’ve been wondering what’s going on around here, don’t worry. I have to. I’ve been sitting with it for a hot minute, and I put it on pause while I settled into a routine that I haven’t been in since the year 2002.

Add being in front of the classroom instead of in it, and I’ve had many days where I came home and literally crawled into bed after sheer energetic exhaustion and/or my immune system getting hammered by literally every sickness that runs through the school. (Seven years of remote work isn’t a grade A recipe for immune strength.)

Frankly, I’ve been behind on The Westrn since December. I’ve been fighting for my life a bit, so I have some catching up to do. I also tell my kids that excuses are like thumbs — everyone has two of them, and I give both thumbs down to that.

I deserve a taste of my own medicine.

We’re Back to a Substack

Long live print, but yes — print is dead.

And ‘we’ is now me. Kestrel might stop in every once in awhile with an update, or a story, or a musing. But they have been sitting on a potential book deal that will discuss queerness in the hunting sphere and my dream for them is that I get to hold that damn book in my hands sooner rather than later. Katie started her own Substack up, and I suggest you go give it a ‘Subscribe’.

We’re back to where we started. We didn’t change the price when we went to print, and I won’t change it now. I will stick with two long reads a month, and I will catch up on the fact that I owe you all four long reads. I’ll make them up over the next three months.

After settling into teaching, I’m excited to write again. I’m also thinking about how I can integrate some of my past gear review work more into The Westrn, how I could write about my teaching experiences, and how I can offer more educational content on the outdoors and beyond on my own. I’ve wanted to write more about my horses and donkeys, and the kids have asked me to help them start a high school rodeo team. So, adventures are afoot.

And if you missed my most recent long read, you can find it below:

I Probably Owe Some of You A Few Things

Did You Pre-Purchase ‘The Hunting Issue’?

We started a small campaign for ‘The Hunting Issue’ a while back. Many of you contributed $15 toward that effort. I will add a free year-long subscription to this Substack for those of you who did that. Thank you for believing in us.

Are You Missing Either a ‘Spring 2025’ or ‘Summer 2025’ Issue?

Please send me a direct email to qualtieri.nicole@gmail.com with your shipping address, and I will mail them out over my ‘spring break’ the week after next.

Do You Need Something Else in a ‘Customer Service’ type situation?

Please just reach out to qualtieri.nicole@gmail.com and I’ll help get it figured out.

More than Anything, Thank You

I’ve been ore in the smelter for the past two years. It’s a fitting anecdote, living on the outskirts of Anaconda, Mont.

It’s an odd thing to go so quickly from chasing my own dreams to being the fuel that lights the fire of the future. I’ve wrestled with it. Becoming a teacher means starting over, going back to school myself, attending college while teaching full-time, and pursuing a Masters in order to make a salary that is, in my case, slightly frightening even at the higher levels.

But I’m charging ahead and doing my best to keep the scarcity mindset six feet under. I come from a working-class background, and it looks like I’m staying here — but it also feels like the universe split some freakin’ hairs for a reason.

I’m excited to write again, I’m excited to teach these kids how to write, and I hope you decide to stick around for the journey.

With grit, guts, and determination —

Miss Q

And P.S. I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to comment or send an email. As I tell my classroom, give me three answers and then we’ll move on to the next thing.

My alarm goes off now at 6:45 each morning. This, to me, is an anomaly. Me, of skipped 8 am classes in college. Me, of the truly 9-5 remote work world. Me, of a lifetime of midnight bedtimes. Night owl is what they call me; I left all the worms for the early birds.

The night owl in me respectively prepares the forced early bird for her days. The coffee machine is set up, requiring only the press of a button. I set my truck keys next to my daily wash of vitamins, and I hit the remote start button to ensure warmth upon forthcoming entry. My outfit for the day is picked out. I wear my watch to time things out as best as my certified ADHD time blindness allows me, too. I begin to play music on my phone as the morning glaze ensures that I will set it down and forget about it, lest it sing songs from its unlikely perch. I curse my died-in-the-wool permanent circadian rhythm. It never truly catches up with this schedule, but over the past few weeks, it’s gotten a little more normal. I try to stay within its bounds on weekends. I’m working to make it work.

If there’s a gift in any of this, it’s that I am partial to sunrises. Becoming a hunter gave me something to woo over in the pursuit’s prescribed early mornings. The dull eyes grow a little shine when trained on the stretch of sun over a horizon, warm colors seeping into inky blues slowly blotting out the stars. My morning drive is magnificent. The Anaconda-Pintler range takes up most of the scene, with gripping pinks, golds, silvery-blues, the reflection of snowfields, and the majesty of purple mountains. This commute is not a city one, drenched in towers and concrete, but one dripping with mountains and the sizable elk herd that I now know like the palm of my hand. Here is where they cross over, there they are as tiny dots on the ARCO fields, grazing upon the buried Superfund waste of Anaconda’s once active smelter, now to my left. It looms over this little town, and its effects are long from forgotten.

My drive takes me directly to the combined junior/senior high school, situated on one of the prettiest streets in Montana. Upon parking, I slip my badge on, grab my packed bag, and head inside.

Each day begins at 8:11, but the school’s clock is 3-4 minutes fast. I have to remind myself of this against all that time blindness of my morning. I get there by 8 am. Set up my computer, slides crisp in the front of the room. I teach two classes of juniors first, then a creative writing class, then an eighth-grade class, another junior class, and I finish with a tidy and small class of eighth graders. In the span of a few weeks, I’ve stepped incompletely out of the role of writer and into the role of long-term substitute English teacher. They call me Miss Q, not to be confused with “miscue,” though it’s likely something I’m doing way too often at the moment.

Most of my juniors come in weary-eyed to that dreaded first period. I see them as kindreds; we’ll get through this together. Each class that switches in and out of the room takes on its own personality. There are a few that are rowdy brigades of jovial mischief. Others are quiet and studious, and there are always one or two a day that seem to stretch into the world of an energetic tug of war. If I view these 50-minute periods as a game, it is far less treacherous, and so that I do. Framing and reframing are constant when working with kids, as is Oscar-worthy acting necessary through the hardest moments, or the moments in which my opinion is on their side; however, from a teaching perspective, my job is to hide that opinion so thoroughly that they choose to do the thing that none of us want to be doing in the first place. I am not without a well-developed skillset in this eternal tradition of adult-pupil performance. Though I am starkly new to the educational side, crowd management with children is baked into my blood from many years of working in after-school programs, reading programs, youth sports, day camps, and sleepaway camps. I can, at the very least, quiet a room of rowdy 13-year-olds with a single clap of the hand. Or two. Or three. (They respond to each of my claps with two claps. It does, occasionally, take a while.)

This interesting switch of employment, thankfully, isn’t without mentorship. A highly experienced English teacher scaffolds my days with slides, projects, and support. I mostly get through them, though lenience might be a weak point. The editor in me offers revisions, comments upon comments, and multiple chances to get assignments just a little more correct. Sure, I’ll extend this deadline. Give a little more padding. This got to the point where the kids told me enough is enough, just give us the due date, and I realized the folly of my error.

'“You’ve been super fair and given us more than enough time,” one junior told me, the class adding a muttered and nodding collective agreement as she spoke. “If we haven’t gotten it done at this point, it’s not because of your timeline.” I recognized in that very moment that I could be a little more black-and-white with them, and that they could even help me set that standard. Being overly fair could also be interpreted as coddling, and I needed to quickly cross that verb off my list of duties.

Coming into the classroom in late January, I was far removed from the years I spent working with children. The last kid-centric job I held was in 2008-09, when I served a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a therapeutic recreational center for kids with disabilities just south of Boston, MA.

Is it an American pastime to speak ill of children, and how whatever modern technology of the time is ruining their lives? It must be. I didn’t know what to expect from this group — the closing runners of Gen Z’s generational relay, with Gen Alpha close behind and six-sevening on their heels.

I remember that cable television and the rise of the chat room were the black stains on my Millennial childhood, and how the long sign-on sound indicating the hijacking of the family telephone line signaled that I was about to jump into the depths of a perverse internet, willing and ready to murder me at every moment. I have borne witness to the rise of fabulous kids, smart kids, empathetic kids who, under Millennial parents, seemed to have a therapied and parentally-informed adjusted sense of the world that was never offered to me, simply because it’s a newer development. I figured this experience would sit somewhere in the middle, and I was not wrong.

The reality is, I walked into the school with curiosity stuck to the bottom of my Adidas Sambas, trailing me like toilet paper a few squares behind, leaving me vulnerable to the reality of the kids in my classroom. All 112 of them.

Anaconda is not, as one might guess from our rising house costs, a town of historic means. Many of my students are living through childhoods with truly adult problems at the center of their young lives. In my first few weeks, they’ve trusted me with secret stories that have inspired the mama grizzly in me to rise on her hind legs, claws sharp, to tell them to get behind me, that I would take on the front line of their life — if only I could.

But, I can’t do that. They are, if nothing else, on the front lines of their own lives, as I was when I lost my dad to cancer my sophomore year of high school, then moved from Ohio to Colorado in my junior year, so my mom could take on a bigger job to support two teenage girls.

I got through it, I tell them. So can you. And I believe it when I tell them that they can, even if my grizzled hackles are standing up through the wool knit of my teacher-appropriate sweater.

They all have phones. Phones full of games, Snap, TikTok, the ‘gram, ChatGPTizzle. They are phone geniuses. They are phone acolytes. I was worried about phones coming into the classroom, and rarely are phones an issue at all.

Let me repeat that: phones really aren’t the issue they’re made to be. The kids are well-behaved with them, and routines are established that have prevented them from being an issue in my classroom.

Every Friday morning, the school reserves a half hour for what is called Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Personally, I love it. And because I love it, the kids get into it. This past week, we played a game of “Would You Rather” to talk about attitudes. Would you rather have unlimited sushi or tacos for the rest of your life? Would you rather always hit a green light or never stand in line again? Would you rather give up all forms of social media or Google search & AI?

The last one astounded me. Only one kid joined me in giving up social media.

Really? I said. Doesn’t social media bum you out? (I say this after deactivating my Facebook for the first time in 2005, and feeling only a sense of ‘good riddance’ in the aftermath.)

It’s how we stay in touch, they told me. Plus, they still have AI and search capabilities within social media, ‘experts’ who can tell them what’s what, and the ability to learn from each other’s opinions, rather than the garbage internet. Point taken. But also, really? I stand by my reaction. I’m still flummoxed by theirs.

After this exchange, I thought back to my time in high school, the elaborate efforts my friends and I made to stay in touch between periods. We’d write decorative letters in gel pens, fold them into neat origami patterns, and slip them into hands as we passed each other in the hallway. In the notes lay secret codes that couldn’t be deciphered, drawings, dreams, drama, crushes, rivalries. Shakespearean worlds we made, and we made them together. Social media seems to fill this gap, I think to myself. And in that, I rectify the situation.

On my first day of teaching, I made a fill-in-the-blank profile for each student to fill out, to get to know them, and to get a sense of who they were. It had basics like name, birthday, what period I had them, and then a bit about futures and dreams. If you could be an expert in anything, what would it be? What is your dream job? Is there something that I should know about you? I made the last question optional.

Dreams of expertise made me laugh. Most kids just wanted to be good at the school subject that was most difficult for them. Math! So many of them said math. Science. The STEMs. They are firmly planted in their present. They would like that part of life to be easier. I love that for them.

If I were to listen to the powers that be, the ones that inspire anxiety on the half of this iPhone generation, they’d probably tell me that kids just want to be influencers, content creators, famous on the TikTok algo. Only one kid out of 100 said they’d like to create content, and I’ll tell you it’s a kid that might be good at that game of numbers.

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, I read through a cadre of dream jobs that seem to remain unchanged since my own version of time immemorial. Marine biologists. Dolphin trainer. Criminal psychologists. Veterinarians.

Veterinarians!

Others wrote that they wanted to be welders, linemen, and diesel mechanics. A few standouts said they’d like to be a neonatal nurse, a quantum physicist, or a rodeo athlete at the NFR.

I almost wept as I read of these dreams. They are so tangible and childlike, so close to my own childhood dreams. These are jobs that make us feel like we’re helping, we’re having adventures, we have the answers to the problems of the innocent. These are the comfort food the pile of cloud-like mashed potatoes of dream jobs. The kids are all right, I said to myself. Amidst everything, they are still just kids. And they’re all right.

In spite of everything. In the optional question, I saw answers that ran the gamut. Some kids were brave enough to tell me that they’re dyslexic, that they might need extra help in my class. One girl told me to try not to get too close to her, she didn’t like when strangers wanted to be her friend. Another told me she that she too loved horses. Others talked about their hobbies, and still others told me things far more serious to note here. Most simply answered no or left it blank. Some of them have since opened up to me, told me secrets that I carry like a gift in my heart for them, secrets that the whole town knows, but I am able to see them without those secrets until they, in their own quiet moment, decide to impart them with faith to me.

There is such a great uncertainty wrapping around many things we assumed were solid as cement, were agreed upon solidities. Substack is thick with people who have opinions, light-shedding abilities, crackin’ headlines that will pull you in and make you hit subscribe only because you so vehemently agree with those opinions. The body politic seems to be shedding parts and rearranging into a monstrosity of odd proportions.

What hope? We say to ourselves, what is there to hold onto?

I’m here to ask you to shed the skin that once told you that iPhones are ruining the brains of the next generation. They are, as this MTV brat will tell you, not a monolith. They are filled with rainbows and big dreams, reaching toward the future with bright eyes, trying to figure out the basics of sentence structure like we all once did, and reminding me that I can hold them accountable to deadlines, even when they’re struggling.

And then, a few days ago, I saw an exchange that tugged the strings of my heart, which then fell to pieces on the floor. Two girls, in the hallway, exchanging a perfectly folded origami note, with colorful writing on the outer shell of the paper, with a nod and a knowing smile, with no words exchanged. I nearly gasped with delight. I nearly fell over in a spell of nostalgia. If I had a chair, I might have fallen out of it.

The kids are all right. By God, they are.

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Westrn. She’s worked in outdoor media for a decade, with brands ranging from MeatEater to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers to acting as the long-time Hunt & Fish Editor at GearJunkie. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Modern Huntsman, the Backcountry Journal, and more.

I hold the moose calf’s unsteady gait as a rhythm against my own beating heart.

The knees seem like the biggest parts of that little body, her hocks pumping to try and keep up with a mother so long-legged she seemed above the landscape, a potential for flight if the matriarch decides to leap into the sky.

I was running. Uphill. Stopped in an instant by the crashing through the brush, and less than ten yards from the pair. There was no acknowledgment. Just leaving, running past me. Keep up, the long-legged mother seemed to say, keep up keep up keep up. Brand new. Her tufts of unfolding fur finding the pockets of sun in the canyon, drying for the first time, licked into waves by her mother. How the two dogs free and bounding never saw them I don’t know but they didn’t.

I have known this cow for a few years now. She has always been different. Taller, shorter-coupled, lean in the way of a dancer. I’ve seen her as a two-year-old, now likely three, or is it four? This drainage is her home. I think I know the place somewhat but she knows it even more than I could ever. She knows it through four seasons, through the windstorms that rip trees from their roots. She knows the curves that make for easy walking, the pockets of rose hips and thimbleberries, the easiest way through the scree up high and down low.

Though she is likely the most dangerous animal in the area, especially with a newborn at her own knees, I have felt the energy come off of her in waves and it’s curious, it’s soft, it’s something else. I’ve made a promise to this drainage: I come in peace and for peace. I carry no gun. I walk to walk. I know where the spruce grouse lives, where the bachelor bulls bed, where they come down for water, where the mother moose sometimes sleeps off the trail with tall grass curling around her body. I also know the drainage where the bull moose, a likely father, lives. It’s about a mile as the crow flies.

I hold my own energy out like either an offering or a gift. When things seem overwhelming, I go there and it lifts from my shoulders. I think maybe I’ll only walk this far and then I keep going, called forward, by the pair of moose tracks, by the birdsong, by the coolness against summer heat. There’s always a reason to stay longer. To relish the place.

A creek ripples through its narrow confines, and there are spots where the trout fry cut through the water, jump, and hide. They are fingerlings, safe in the glacial cold, tumbling through sun and shade. My dogs know the deep spots where they wet bellies and tongues, and in most places it’s crossable by a single big step. If you so choose to walk all the way through the canyon, you’ll find the chimney of an old homestead, still usable and intact. People camp there, building fires, pulling trout from the old homemade dammed pond below. The only things I consume are rose hips and berries. The trout rise and I let them.

At one point, this spring, a very old pine ripped from its roots and crossed half the width of the canyon. Storms had whipped through and the idea of being caught in the mire sent shivers up my spine. Wind events, we call them in Montana. You’ll come to a spot in the trail where it looks as if God pressed him palm down unrelentingly, flattening dozens of trees to the ground. I had to climb through the creek and around the brush to keep going, until someone took a chainsaw to the huge trunk in the trail.

Things change. Sometimes we are a part of that change, whether we want to be or not.

Perhaps my peace treaty of keeping my hunting adventures elsewhere is my effort to avoid changing a place that has so often been bothered by human touch that irreversible damage lines its boundaries. Mining tailings. So many of them. The piles of rock are tell-tale. Sometimes I catch glimpse of a hazy figure out of the corner of my eye, walking in the trees. These are the things I tell no one. But I’ve seen him, more than a few times. Walking, like I am. This has happened to me since I was a child, and whenever I learn more about the figures, I learn of untimely deaths. This area had a plethora of deaths, mining and otherwise. But if this is where his spirit walks, I can only assume that heaven is here in its own right. Believe it. Don’t believe it. But it’s happened. It’s happening. This small canyon speaks to me, shows me, and sometimes it calls me.

It called to me, weeks ago. I was already driving somewhere else, with my dogs, taking off for country that I hadn’t seen in some time. I ran an errand, got in my truck, and then turned around. Pulled toward the canyon. I’d driven a half hour into town and drove back past my house, down the two-lane highway, and then climbed the dirt road toward the path through pines and scree I’d taken so many times.

I saw her crumpled form when I pulled past the campsite. Saw her and felt my heart sink into my feet. She was still. She shouldn’t be still. No. No no no. The dogs were already whining with anticipation and when I kept them shut in the car, they whined some more. I walked up to her, slowly talking. I had yet to see her eye, newly bluing.

“Hey girl, hey girly,” I sang to her nervously, but I knew. The calf, now a year old, had a front and back leg diagonally caught in the barbed wire. Thrown on her side by the violence of struggle, she had died a brutally unfair and unspeakable death. Impossibly caught. Nausea rose in my stomach. I kneeled by her body and placed a hand on her neck, not warm but hot to the touch. I just missed saving her. Just missed it. Tears fell on her winter-thickening, tawny coat. I whispered expletives, then pulled my knees into my body and sat with her, apologizing.

But I also understood the offering. The call. I had made a promise to this place, and in return it offered nourishment. Newly dead, the moose calf could be salvaged.

I placed a final bite of grass in her mouth. My truck held all my hunting gear, my sharp knives, my game bags, headlamps, and my beloved Silky saw. A cool silence fell over me in a shroud, and I began methodically pulling her hide back, began breaking apart her carbon copy short-coupled long-legged body inherited from her mother.

Her mother.

There is a point in the day where dusk hits a tipping point. For the crepuscular among us, it’s when the long shadows of the sun no longer give away locations, and shade covers the earth. When you hunt, it’s a clear moment, one in which restless animals finally choose to move, one in which you too can cover country once those animals make themselves known.

I wasn’t paying perfect attention to the turnover. But her mother was. Against the working silence of my effort, hooves hit dirt hard and fast in a trotting rhythm. Initially I thought someone was trotting a horse down the road, but when I turned, her mother stood, head high, staring from forty yards away.

Her mother. Her worried and restless ballerina of a mother. My friend, my canyon companion, of many years. My hands are holding my knife, both covered in blood. A hindquarter rests in a red-stained game bag against the fence.

She is not human. There is no weeping or wailing, no flinging down of her elegant body. Internally, I am the one feeling all of this things, feeling as if somehow this is my loss as much as hers. She turns and trots twenty yards to try and get a different look. I am talking to her the entire time. She’s gone, I tell her. She was gone when I got here. I’m taking her with me. I’m…

As I talk, her ears wheel back and forth like motors. Later, a friend asked if I was scared, as if she was going to think I was the predator and come after me. No, that didn’t cross my mind. Not at all. And anyway, I was right.

I don’t know how long I stood in silence with her after the explanation but I knew to not break the moment of solidarity. She stood a long while. Then, with a flick of a tail and a shake of her head, she turned and walked into the pines. Away from her daughter. Away from me.

I turned back to the work of making meat from a life.

All fall I had been hunting with my bow in hand, carrying small disks that fit into the upper palate of my mouth, adjusting my breath and tongue pressure to create bugles, mews, and the many sounds of elk. Say the curious and correct thing, and a bull will come screaming from the forest at full tilt, filling the air with both sound and fury. The season of the rut had turned over by this point, meaning that bugles were waning. Still, as dusk lengthened into nightfall, a bugle rose, restless and unsure, from the bench where I knew the bulls to sit during daylight hours.

It’s a perfect spot. The wind swirls and whisks itself around the mountain, deadfall rises to the edges of the mountain bench, the bulls are road-adjacent and are offered the scent of the trail throughout most of the day. They are all-knowing. Curved getaways cut into the mountain offer funnels into timber so thick it can feel like evening in the middle of the day when you climb into the foliage. Anyone trying to get to or at them is gambling, but they are in their house, and the house always wins.

As hard as I’d hunted, I had yet to fill a tag with my bow, and I held no such tag for a moose. Getting a legal moose tag is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure for most of us, but Montana’s game laws offer some respite. Game wardens can issue tags that allow us the prevent the ‘wanton waste’ of meat in circumstances where an animal is killed by car, or caught by a barbed wire fence.

The word ‘waste’ sticks like a splinter in my palm. Waste. There is no waste in the natural order of things. I could have left her here and the world she was born into would have taken her back like a gift offering, or a ritual sacrifice. Coyotes, owls, ravens, the magpies already waiting in the trees, the hungry organisms in soil, the dry and desiccating air, the coyotes singing on the edge of it all — she could have contributed back the small amount of life she had taken.

Instead, much of her musculature sat cooling against the barbed wire fence. Her hide, thick with the promise of coming winter, sat folded neatly beneath the quarters. White with fascia, her distended rib cage held a plethora of organs already engaged in the business of turning what was once dust back to it. It swelled with the possibilities.

Managing the emotional structure of the moment felt both obscene and pragmatic. I needed meat. Hunting, though fruitful in both adventure and experiences, was proving fruitless. And much like the entanglement of pasterns and barbed wire, my professional situation kept pressing me one way, then another, then offering up a promising possibility, then taking it away. The barbs of life were in my own ankles, the obvious metaphor of struggle so familiar I couldn’t not know what it meant to be her in the first moments, struggling to survive, struggling so hard that you struggle yourself into the next lifetime.

I had what she didn’t. Opposable thumbs, conscious reasoning, an education that helped me make the most of this loss and then turn it into a gain, and — most audaciously — hope. Cutting through her hind end, I found that she’d separated one femur from the pelvis so much so that she’d done internal damage. Even if I had saved her, she’d gravely injured herself far beyond the wire cuts at her ankles. Even if I had set her free, suffering and a likely death probably awaited and sooner rather than later.

I still don’t know what to make of this, really. I called the game warden and began crying when I told him the story. I told him I had the pictures to document the situation, and he said that he didn’t need them. The salvage tag arrived in my email the next day. A legal moose in the freezer.

A few weeks later, I killed a pronghorn doe in the final hours of the season on a long stretch of BLM land on the Wyoming border. I climbed over a barbed wire fence so quickly that I tore the soft fleshy part of my hand open and made the shot covered in my own gushing blood. The shot was a bit of hail mary, I couldn’t get an accurate read on my range finder, and I sent the bullet with good form and well wishes rather than a force field of defined accuracy. It found its mark.

The rest of the herd left and the doe stood there, woozy. She turned and walked another fifty yards, where she laid her final rest in the sagebrush. I thought maybe I’d hit her in the gut, maybe I’d taken a bad shot. I sat sick with that misguided belief, with prior experiences haunting me. It took more than thirty minutes for her to die, and when I walked up to stillness once more, I noted that the shot was so perfect that it felt impossible for her to have lasted so long. To have held onto life so calmly and purposefully. At the edge of my knife, she transformed from animal to meat, from form to function. I told her how strong she was, that I admired her strength and would embody it. I am doing my best to keep that promise.

But across the board, this season hit me like a brick wall. There are seasons that I’ve barely hunted, when my own constitution wasn’t up to the task of determining life and death. Sometimes, I yearn to be back in the ease of my prior life, a life before hunting, when a warm and sunny fall meant more long hikes in the golden arches of aspen and larch trees, or cardigan-and-sundress brunches filled with champagne and laughter, or riding a horse in the outdoor arena rather than the indoor. Back then, just seeing a moose was the pinnacle of excitement. I’d catch a glimpse into a wild life for just a moment. That was as far as I thought it would all go. I was wrong.

After years of living close to the land, I have traded the ease of enjoyment for the intimacy of the familiar. I became so curious about knowing a place that the place, in turn, began to know me. If anything, that must be progress. That must be what humans are meant to do, how our ancestors made it all work.

But I’m still grieving that little moose. I have been for weeks, and I’m not sure how to shake that grief from my bones. Perhaps it’ll fade when the long winter begins to turn over, when the days get longer and longer, reaching towards spring renewal. Or perhaps it’s something I’ll just carry with me, from the inside out, until I adjust to the weight of it.

And, perhaps next spring, I’ll once again run into the long-legged mother, with a new life tottering at her knees, fresh and ready, doe-eyed and curious, as long-legged and innocent as every calf before her as ever been.

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Westrn. She’s worked in outdoor media for a decade, with brands ranging from MeatEater to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers to acting as the long-time Hunt & Fish Editor at GearJunkie. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Modern Huntsman, the Backcountry Journal, and more.

I’m in the back seat of the drift boat, again. It's late April in Montana, 28 degrees, and snowing sideways. My brother-in-law Jeremiah, our guide Slade, and I sit in the only boat in sight on the Madison River. We won’t see another boat all day.

I just watched Jeremiah catch the biggest trout of his life. Candidly, the 24-inch long, battle-worn rainbow would have been my personal best as well.

I’m shaking. Partly from the cold, but mainly because sitting two seats from a friend landing their biggest fish is pretty exciting. It’s similar to the feeling of watching a buddy kill his or her first elk; it is exhilarating, you’re just not the one holding the rod or the bow.

The bend in the rod — and the large flash when the fish went to run — told me that it was big. But I would have missed out on much of the fight if my back was turned to the action, and I had instead kept fishing for myself. I would have missed Jeremiah’s reactions, the tense moment when the fish raced toward a fallen tree, and the nuance in the guide’s movements that said, “this fish is different.” I wouldn’t have seen that personal best until it was in the guide’s net.

Sure, from the back seat certain thoughts do go through your head. If I was in the front seat, would I have a new personal best? Unknown. If I was in the front seat, with Jeremiah in the back, and he still caught this fish, would my perspective be the same? Would I still be shaking?

I’ve never fished from the front seat of a drift boat. While I’m a competitive person, the number of fish I catch doesn’t matter to me — unless someone else is counting. That made my first couple of trips in the back seat a little frustrating. Then, I realized that living in Montana affords me the opportunity to take more of these guided trips with friends and family than I could have ever dreamed of prior. Because of this, I’ve learned to appreciate the lens that the back seat of the drift boat — technically the stern — offers.

My love affair with fly fishing began during my childhood summer vacations, when my family traveled to Rocky Mountain National Park. My dad and I would carve out a couple of days to chase brookies, and avoid elk, in the beaver dam-crafted fingers of the Big Thompson River in Moraine Park. When I moved from Texas to Montana, I immediately fell in love with the sheer size of the rivers, the fisheries they support, and the stream access laws that allow all of us to enjoy them.

I don’t own a drift boat — yet. When choosing a place to fish, my wife and I look as much for scenery, solitude, and relaxation as we do for water features that might hold numbers of hungry trout. Our favorite fishing hole is roughly an hour from home. To get there, we drive past dozens of large riffles and pocket waters where we probably have a chance of catching more fish. It certainly isn’t the best spot on the river as far as the fishing goes, but that’s part of why we like it. To us, fly fishing is less about how often we catch fish and more about the entirety of the experience.

People, as I’ve learned from the back of the boat, are a big part of that entirety. One of the benefits of living in a destination state is that your friends and family want to travel to you, even if they’re partly escaping southern summer heat. I try to use each visit as an excuse to book a guided float trip — admittedly as much for me as for my guest. It isn’t a hard sell by any means, but if need be I’ll paint a guided trip as one of the best experiences to be had, which I would argue is the truth. What better way to see Montana and get away from our busy, always connected, day-to-day lives than floating down a river?

In my opinion, the front seat of a drift boat is the most coveted spot — at least if the goal is catching fish. More importantly, it’s also the best place for a less experienced angler to sit. There, the guide has them in full-view, and they can provide instruction from cast-to-cast on what’s going well and what needs to change. So when arriving at the ramp, the natural spot for my visitor is at the bow.

Watching a friend who has little fly fishing experience on their first guided float trip is a microcosm of learning to fly fish over many years. It often starts with a much-needed casting lesson in the boat ramp parking lot, followed by the initial excitement of actually casting a fly to the water. Nervousness and frustration set in over missed opportunities and knotted lines. A slow period occurs where everything seems to be going alright, but the fish just aren’t cooperating.

Perhaps the angler in the back seat actually catches a few fish, while the beginner is left wondering what they did to upset the fish gods. Finally, if the aforementioned gods bestow generosity, there’s the first fish, the photo op, then another, and another. By the end of the day, your friend is casting to and catching fish before the guide tells them where to cast. The view of all this from the back seat is spectacular. It also allows for capturing all of these stages in photographs so you and your fishing partner can later relive the experience together.

Besides having a back row seat to your buddy’s escapade peppered with occasional hilarity (ever watch someone catch a fish on their backcast?), manning the stern offers other benefits. From there, it’s much easier to learn from the guide regarding fly choice, dropper depth, the amount of weight required to reach fish in the current, and why you’re fishing this particular stretch of river or this run versus that one. I would never have seen my favorite guide Slade Fedore, of Slade’s Montana Fly Fishing, tie a clinch knot using only one hand — a task I have requested him to show me over and over, without learning how myself. The view from the stern also allows you to see the guide’s entire process — how they read the water, how they teach different personality types, and their approach when the fish aren’t biting what they were yesterday. The back seat of a drift boat, as a result of its vantage point, might offer more learning opportunities — and more enjoyment — than the mighty bow.

Fly fishing is a teacher. The lesson comes in the entirety of the experience, and not always in the number of fish you catch. Some of my best fishing memories have come from the back seat.

My wife and I recently welcomed our first son, giving us a full boat. He has obviously yet to pick up a rod at one month old, but he’ll likely be a fisherman too, so I’m grateful for the hours I’ve spent learning in the back seat. Until he’s older, I will choose the back of the boat and all that comes with it. At least until I have one of my own.

A new drift boat will make a perfect first birthday gift.

Brian Worthington lives in Bozeman, Montana with his wife, Labrador retriever, and 2-month-old son. An avid gearhead, he leads the brand partnership team at Guidefitter and spends his free time hunting birds and big game, fly fishing, trail running, and showing his Texas-based family all Montana has to offer.

Excuse me, do I have dirt in my teeth? Are you sure? Oh, thank you. Yes, I ate shit once again.

No, I’m not hurt. Not physically, anyway. Well, not too badly I guess. My ego? Yeah, it’s one of those hits that eventually turns yellow, after turning blue, dark purple, perhaps the blood drips under the skin.

You haven’t had that happen? Oh. I guess maybe that’s not normal. Yes, that’s happened to me, more than once. I’ve ground muscle beneath skin into encased human sausage. Once, in high school, I skidded my ass on a literal mountain of hard ice when I was learning to snowboard. I skipped school to go. You could literally see where blood dripped and pooled underneath my skin. Yeah, it was worth it. It’s the day I finally figured out how to carve waves into slopes of ice. Powder became so much easier when the conditions were right. The conditions aren’t always good, you know?

Yeah, you’re right. They weren’t great today either.

Did I try to stay on? Yeah, I always try to stay on. By any means necessary. No shame in my “staying on” game. Cowboys can cowboy, but I ain’t no cowboy and I’m definitely not a cowgirl. I don’t know shit about cows. Apparently, I only know shit about trying to stick it. I played polo. If you don’t stick it, you sometimes have seven horses at a dead run behind you. It’s no place not to stick it, ya know?

A real cowboy would be embarrassed for me, anyway. Why? When she went to bucking, I pulled leather. I’m not ashamed. Pulling leather has saved my ass more than I can count. Not all saddles come with an “oh shit” handle. I rode English for a long time. But I even added an extra strap to my western saddle because I just know that shit happens.

I should tell you, it’s not “Oh, shit!” as in a surprise. It’s short for “Oh, the shit is happening again. Time to pull leather.” God knows I tried. Sometimes, they get you. They really do.

Shame? I guess I don’t have it anymore. Well. I mean. The aftermath always hurts. It really does. The wind gets knocked out of me, and those precious moments where my lungs are so stunned that they refuse to work is truly alarming. It was when it first happened anyway. I’ve gotten used to the wind getting knocked outta me. My lungs are faithful. After a minute or so of feeling stunned, they get back to business. At this point, I just wait it out.

How old was I when it first happened? I was maybe ten? Fourth grade, I think. I illegally rode the zip line in the school gym without the big blue safety pads underneath it. My classmates pulled me up with a rope attached to the handlebars, and I wobbled. I fell ten feet onto my chest. The P.E. teacher was out of the room long enough that I fell, recovered, and criss-cross applesauced my ass into my seat before any grown ups knew. I think I broke a rib. No, I didn’t tell anyone.

Ribs? Honestly, they’ve probably mended so many times they’re stronger now. That’s how it works, right? A broken bone mends stronger in the break than it was prior. If that’s the case, my bones are iron. They shouldn’t break any more at this point.

Honestly, I think this fall broke the ribs of my spirit body. It hurts. It really fucking hurts if I’m being honest. I keep trying, and getting so damn close, and falls can sometimes feel like abject failure. Like, I’m never gonna get it right. My communication is just off, just the tiniest bit.

Then, everything implodes. It’s not an explosion, but an implosion. An explosion bursts out, right? But an implosion bursts inward. The ground hits, and the parts take the beating, but they stay together. So, you’re left, on the ground, taking stock of your imploded parts.

And yes, it does happen in slow motion. This time it happened in ultra-high-definition slow motion. It took forever, really. I saw my personal plane of vision shift first upward, then skyward, and when I have that much time to think, I remember what I’ve learned about falling.

Don’t put your wrists out; they’re not strong enough to take the weight of any fall. Tuck your limbs in, roll with the forward motion. When you stop, scan your body. Don’t get up immediately. Fingers to shoulders, shoulders to mid-body, toes to hips. Then, your head and your neck. You check your vision, your sense of balance, your ability to wiggle everything. Yeah, it’s scary for a second.

I know, I know. I should wear a helmet. But have you felt the wind in your hair? Have you ever felt that sort of freedom, full gallop, no seat belt? When a horse runs, their body flattens out and for some reason that only God must know, they carry us through that gait. At some point, one human felt that for the first time. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, you feel like a goddess. You feel like the wind. You feel a sense of presence that exists nowhere else on earth, that feeling of a full-out run. The spring of energy and sinew and muscle underneath you. The choice the horse makes to take you on the ride.

It’s never the horse’s fault, anyway. Even when they go to bucking, they’ve told you something subtle that you missed. Even when they are completely with you, they can trip, or stumble, or hit a bad spot in the land. They have every right to be scared, or surprised, or to make a decision that they think might save their life. Sometimes, they’re trying to get both of you out of a bad situation and you just can’t get out of it with them. Sometimes, you just lose your damn balance.

The falls don’t always look worse than they are. Sometimes, they’re really bad. Really, really fucking bad. I’m in my forties now, and I don’t bounce like I used to. The trope is common because it’s real. Yes, I’ve gotten more afraid of the consequences. Ok. fine, you keep asking about it. Yeah, shame sometimes follows. I miss that sense of being fearless, when I’d get back on the horse without thinking, without a pause. It’s different now. Falls carry more mental weight.

Am I ashamed? No, it’s not like a shame that is carried, but just — it’s a damn shame when I fall. There’s a difference there. It’s subtle, but there is a difference. It’s more like, this sense of wonder. Will I ever learn? How much resilience is really in there? How many falls do I have to take before we find our rhythm again? That forward sense of rhythmic motion is where life happens, I’m telling you. When you get there, you’ve earned it.

So, I really don’t have dirt in my teeth? Are you sure? I really got a mouthful of dirt on this one. I frickin’ ate it. Did you see the whole thing? No? Just the last part. Ha. You missed out.

Well, it looked worse than it was. Thanks for checking on me. Yeah, I’m gonna get back on. You should stick around. On days like this, the rodeo is never too far away. You might get to see the whole show.

Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Westrn. She’s worked in outdoor media for a decade, with brands ranging from MeatEater to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers to acting as the long-time Hunt & Fish Editor at GearJunkie. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Modern Huntsman, the Backcountry Journal, and more.

I am currently in Year Ten of my hunting adventure, and an adventure it surely has been. I started out hunting in yoga pants from Target, Sorel boots that leaked, and a borrowed hunting jacket from my office — which at the time was MeatEater’s home base.

Back then, I traveled out into the hunting unknown in a little white Chrysler sedan, with my brand new .308 rifle, and a near-zero idea of what I was doing. I’d never owned a gun before, and hunting was as foreign to me as the far corners of the Earth.

Fast forward a decade, I’ve spent the better part of the past month chasing elk around hills with a bugle tube and a bow. I have successfully hunted in multiple states, filled tags for multiple species, packed out multiple big game animals solo, processed dozens of game animals for myself and others, and written hundreds of articles about my time outside. I own and trained my own Boykin Spaniel to hunt birds, and I’m training two wild donkeys to pack game. I’m perhaps maybe a bit of a deep diver into things that I enjoy, if you haven’t figured it out already.

So, if anyone is equipped to tell you how to get started as a hunter, I hate to take the cake, but the cake is mine. In the timeless words of Lil Jon, let’s go.

How to Become a Hunter

The Two Tracks to Becoming a Hunter: Legal vs. Personal

There are really two tracks that I think about when navigating the maze of becoming a hunter.

The first track is what I’d call the legal track. This covers the wide range of educational requirements and hunting regulations that you need to familiarize yourself with in order to legally hunt wild game.

The second track is that of the personal track. This consists of building your outdoor skillset, your emotional skillset, your hunting tool (rifle/bow/shotgun) skillset, and your hunting skillset.

Both tracks, to me, are equally important. I think the latter track doesn’t often get talked about in the way that I experienced it as a woman who came to hunting as an adult. But from personal experience, the legal track is the more confusing track to navigate at first, and it’s obviously highly important for any hunter to stay within the boundaries of the law.

Because of this, I’ll lead with the legal track first, and address the skills track in another episode and article.

In short: Hunting is a highly regulated activity and it not only differs from state to state but on a level of defined ecosystems within each state, often called units. Hunters are generally required to complete hunters education and often an additional bowhunters education if archery is on the table. They’ll also need to develop a deep understanding of hunting regulations, boundaries, tags and licenses, and other state requirements. If hunters plan on hunting out of their own state, they’re tasked with understanding multiple sets of regulations that may highly differ from what they’re used to.

Every state manages their own separate system for hunter education, tag and license allocation, wildlife and hunting regulations, and more. Your requirements and regulations for Maryland differ greatly from requirements and regulations within Wyoming.

Your first task is finding out what name your state management agency goes by.

Here in Montana, we have Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and we colloquially call it ‘FWP’. In Colorado, you’ll need to look up Colorado Parks & Wildlife. In South Carolina, it’s South Carolina Dept. of Natural Resources. The name varies greatly, but their responsibilities in managing fish, game, and recreation generally fall under that specific roof.

Each fish and game department will have resources for you to help get you started. But I’ll do my best to give you a broad generalization of the minutiae that you can expect in the navigational process.

Hunters Education: Time to Get Certified

The first step in becoming a hunter is signing up for your state’s hunter education program. Some states may not require completion, but if you plan on hunting beyond your state at any point, you’ll absolutely need certification. Plus, it’s an amazing resource to connect with local hunters and volunteer teachers that are invested in providing mentorship.

Most courses offer the ability to do most of the course online through and attend a single field day. More than 45 states utilize hunter-ed.com to administer the online portion.

You can find your state’s requirements by clicking on the link below.

Find Your State's Requirements

The course tends to cover a variety of topics. Here’s what Montana covers, for example:

• Four main rules of firearm safety

• The P.R.O.V.E. Method for Firearm Handling

• Key points about landowner relations and hunting ethics

• Selecting a firearm/ammo

• Safe firearm handling, including trail carries, obstacle crossings, loading/unloading firearms from vehicles, handing off firearms

• Basic animal identification

• Shoot/don’t shoot scenarios

• Zones of fire

• Shooting positions

Hunter education mainly focuses on gun safety, learning when to shoot, and awareness around the basic ethical decisions you’ll make as a hunter. Animal identification is especially important in states that have a lot of variability across big game. Being able to distinguish a mule deer from a whitetail is paramount in most Western states, and in some areas, you’ll need to be able to identify a black bear from a grizzly.

Though some states may not require the in-person field day, I suggest attending one. I went with two girlfriends, and we had a blast shooting clays, practicing safe in-field scenarios, and learning from long-time hunters.

Bowhunter Education Adds a Deeper Layer

Even if bowhunting is not on your agenda, I suggest getting your bowhunter education completed. Basic Hunter Education is more general and safety-oriented, but Bowhunter Ed tends to build on the basics of a hunting skillset. You’ll learn things like shot placement on animals, how to blood trail if an animal is wounded, outdoor preparedness, and more.

I really enjoyed my in-field day for Bowhunter Education even more than my initial Hunter Ed requirement. I see it as a great addition to your overall education to becoming a hunter, and if you do decide to pick up a bow, you’ll have your certificate finished and ready to go. (Plus, if you’re in a state with elk opportunity, most archery seasons happen during the best time of year to hunt elk. I highly recommend bowhunting elk during the rut.)

You can find your state’s requirements for bowhunter education via the link above. And most states do offer the same combo of online/field opportunity to become a bowhunter.

Bowhunter Education Opportunities

Learning How to Shoot at a Local Rod & Gun Club

One of the biggest walls I needed to climb in order to become a competent hunter was my lack of familiarity with firearms. With no one in my family to teach me, I turned to friends and co-workers for help. Even then, I found it intimidating. And I’m well aware that not everyone has access to friends, family, or co-workers who are avid shooters.

If you’re in that boat, I have some suggestions. Local rod and gun clubs are one of the best spots to connect with educators and instructors that are in your area. These are typically private ranges that require membership or entrance fees to shoot. If an instructor isn’t available at that club, they’ll likely know someone who offers instruction.

Some ranges might focus on shooting for personal safety, and they might not be able to accommodate shotguns or rifles, but I suggest calling the range anyway and asking where a new shooter interested in hunting might find some help. People generally love helping a potential new hunter into the space. Gun shops, archery shops, and big box stores like Sportsman’s Warehouse also should be able to point you in the right direction.

Find a Range Near You

Take a Hunting-Specific Shooting Course

There are tons of shooting courses out there in the world, but not all of them apply to hunters specifically. You might have to dig, but if you want to invest more deeply in your firearms training, I suggest attending a private course developed for hunters specifically -or- the tool you’re choosing to shoot with. For example, taking a precision scoped rifle course would certainly help someone interested in shooting big game in a state like Montana, or learning how to shoot skeet with a shotgun would give a hunter the basics of shooting upland birds or waterfowl.

Various courses and organizations exist that serve different groups. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of shooting with stranger, use my resources below to connect with a community who might better serve you.

Here are a few options you can check out, in addition to doing your own research.

• Outdoor Solutions Shooting Courses

• Sig Sauer Shooting Academy

• Firearm Training through the NRA

• Swan Mountain Outfitters: 3-day Long Range Precision Course

There are many opportunities out there, at many different price points. Keep at it and you’ll find something that works for you.

Tags vs. Licenses vs. Permits

Across the United States, the terms ‘tags’ and ‘licenses’ can be both interchangeable and confusing. Here’s how I tend to think about it.

A tag most often refers to a single animal, while a license is typically something that you carry that allows you to hunt a certain animal or area for the duration of the season.

Currently, I carry a general tag for a single elk in Montana, and I have a license to hunt upland birds for the 2025 season. But I know in a state like Texas, you buy your deer license, which comes with a number of deer tags as part of the licensing process.

The third word you might hear used interchangeably is a ‘permit’. It’s up to you to determine what each state agency means when it uses the term tag, license, or permit.

If you need help understanding the lingo, I always recommend calling the agency and asking. They’re usually skilled at educating folks in how things work, especially if you’re new to hunting or coming in to hunt from a different state.

Resident vs Non-Resident Hunting

You’re likely a resident hunter in the state that you’ve lived in for the past six months or more, though this might not be true in your state. You’ll need to look up what your state requires from you in order to be a legal ‘resident hunter.’ Residents takes priority within every state, meaning your license and tag opportunities where you live are more numerous and more affordable.

Non-resident opportunities are as big as the United States itself. Want to hunt deer in Texas? That’s pretty simple, given that you have a connection to hunt in a state with mostly private opportunities. Want to hunt caribou in Alaska? That’s a big adventure, with a lot to consider. Interested in hunting moose in Montana? You might have to put in for twenty years or more as a non-resident in order to draw the tag in a lottery.

Your best bet for becoming a hunter is within the state you call home. Look up your own state agency’s hunting information to understand how costly it will be for you to get started hunting. Then, look up a state that has an opportunity you might be interested in one day, like hunting elk in Colorado or hunting turkeys in Florida. It’s a fun exercise in starting to understand how state management can differ greatly from one place to another.

Where Can You Hunt? Private Land, Public Land, and In-State Boundaries

Understanding hunting opportunity where you are is highly dependent on understanding where your opportunities to hunt actually exist. And lack of access is one of the biggest barriers facing modern hunters. If your family owns a 300-acre private farm in whitetail deer country in Ohio, you’re probably set for private access. However, if you live in a place like Wyoming, you have millions of acres of public land in addition to potential private land that you’re able to hunt.

Public land can be state land, national forest, wilderness, or land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Some states allow hunting in state parks, while others don’t. National parks are generally off-limits for hunters, unless you’re in Alaska.

Public opportunity exists in many states, but some more than others. Texas is known as a state with low public access, but it does hold about a million acres of public opportunity. And it also offers mentored hunts on private ranches for new hunters.

Regardless of private or public land, most states delineate regions, units, zones, or boundaries that have regulations specific to those areas. Here in Montana, we have regions and units. Other states might have numbered ‘areas’ or ‘zones’. Each unit has its own regulations of what can and cannot be hunted.

I highly recommend picking up a printed copy of the regulations for the animals you wish to hunt in your state. I keep a printed copy at home, in my truck, and I download a copy to my iPhone so I can always check regulations when I cross regional or unit boundaries while hunting. I might be able to hunt a bull elk in Unit 318, but I cannot hunt a bull elk if I cross over to the 380 boundary. It’s one of the most coveted permits in the state, and you can only hunt there if you draw a permit by lottery. I’d technically be poaching and responsible for a high fine even if I accidentally crossed a boundary and killed an animal that is off-limits in that unit.

My go-to tool for understanding where I am across public, private, and state-defined boundaries is OnX Hunt.

It’s an app that allows me to look up where I stand and delineates all of the boundaries for me. It links out to regulations if I’m in service, and I’m able to download maps for the many times that I’m out of service. I buy the Elite package, and it enables me to turn on OnX for any state that I’m traveling through. Beyond hunting, I use it for camping, travel, hiking, and recreation nationwide. It’s an invaluable tool for hunters, especially in states with a lot of public access.

Other great mapping tools include GOHUNT, Basemap, and Huntstand. Huntstand is a really great tool aimed more at private land hunters in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeastern parts of the U.S.

General Units vs. Limited Draw

I brought this up, and now I must explain it. Across many states, there are hunting opportunities that are only accessed through a lottery drawing. This means that many hunters will apply year after year for a specific hunting tag or permit, and it may take a decade or more to ‘draw’ that particular tag.

This applies to special tags like mountain goat, bighorn sheep, or moose here in Montana. But it can also apply to limited opportunities within particular units for animals like mule deer, elk, or whitetails.

Essentially, you play the lottery for a specific hunt. And like most lotteries, you don’t win very often. But you can play the odds.

My favorite tool for better understanding draw opportunities is GOHUNT Insider.

I mentioned that it also has an excellent mapping tool for hunters. But, my favorite use for GOHUNT is its incredible Insider platform. Using GOHUNT’s filters, you can determine what hunts you might want to apply for, both in the short term and the long term. You can develop plans, build adventures, and keep working towards your aspirations, year after year.

I’ll mention that I’m not paid or affiliate-connected to any of these platforms. I just actually believe in what they do, because I’ve used them myself. I recommend them because they work, and if I can figure out how to use them, anyone can. Promise.

Nonprofit & Agency Mentorship

If this all feels really overwhelming, it should. It’s a lot to digest. It makes a lot more sense when you’re in motion rather than reading a list of convoluted terms and regulatory advice that lacks specificity because every state is different, and etcetera and etcetera and oh my lord, is it all too much?!

No! I promise you, there are resources that can help you navigate all of this! Here are a few resources that I freakin’ love for connecting folks to the hunting community.

• Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA): You probably have a BHA chapter in your state, and BHA’s grassroots community is what it’s all about. BHA focuses on public land advocacy, but its community is really vital to connecting hunters to opportunities locally and beyond. Reach out to your local chapter and connect with a community-oriented group of hunters. This is how I connected with multiple hunting partners back in 2015 — my first year as a hunter.

• BHA also has multiple university-based clubs! If you’re a college student, see if your school has a BHA Collegiate Club here.

• Becoming an Outdoorswoman (BOW): Multiple state agencies use the BOW program to develop specific and safe outlets for women to learn how to hunt. Look up ‘Becoming an Outdoorswoman’ in your state to see if it offers a program. Check out what Montana offers through BOW here.

• Queers & Camo: Co-founded by our own Kestrel Keller, Queers & Camo offers a unique opportunity for LGBTQIA+ hunters to find mentorship and community in both online presence and in-person events on the East Coast (for now). Connect with Q&C through their Instagram.

• Kinfolk Hunting Collective: A New York-based hunting community open to all, but with a special emphasis on creating a welcoming atmosphere for anyone who feels outside of the mainstream hunting culture.

• Hunters of Color (HOC): HOC offers a variety of opportunities for BIPOC folks, and its impact on mentoring, educating, and offering community for BIPOC individuals can’t be understated.

• Boone & Crockett: B&C offers free or low-cost opportunities for women, youth, and college students to come to Montana and learn how to hunt sustainably. Check out their classes here.

Perhaps I’ll do a separate post that compiles a ton of these specific resources soon…TBD! Lmk if you’re interested in that in the comments below. Alternatively, if you know of a resource I haven’t included, please add it in a comment!

Educational Programs & Guided Hunts

You’d think I’d have exhausted all my resources by now, but I absolutely have not. Last but not least in the first part of my resource guide comes the best sort of hand-holding of all: In-field educational and guided opportunities.

If figuring out your own logistics isn’t your best skillset, the best place to get started as a hunter might be through a hunting professional that takes you into the field, on a high success sort of hunt, and then takes you through the process of what happens after an animal is tagged. This is the most expensive route, but it’s also the most in-depth.

My personal favorite course is From Field to Table, led by my friend Greg Ray and his team. I wrote a review of one of Ray’s Texas courses in my GearJunkie days, and I highly recommend reading it for a full understanding of these courses. A few courses are currently open, and hog hunting is a blast. Yes, I think you should go.

Another option is paying for a guided hunt. Outfitters often offer a varied list of opportunities, some being more accessible than others. Decide what you want to hunt, what level of adventure you’re in for, and you can research outfitters individually or be a genius and reach out to the state outfitter association for potential recommendations.

Hunt prices can range drastically, so don’t be discouraged if one outfit only offers $5000 deer hunts. Other outfits might offer entry-level hunts for whitetail does or cow elk at a much lower cost.

There are other opportunities that might exist in your area that seem too good to be true, but in the best sort of way. One such hunt is managed by the AMB West Hunting Program, an elk hunting opportunity near Livingston, Mont. that offers free guided hunts to the public on a lottery system. My friend Elise killed a beautiful bull elk on that hunt, and it was quite an experience.

Final Thought? Your First Hunt is The Hunt to Get Started

The nature of becoming a hunter starts with being curious about the process. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of how to get started. Don’t forget to listen to the accompanying podcast that supports this article wherever you get your pods, and keep your eyes peeled for the next chapter in the series.

In the second installation of our ‘How to Become a Hunter’ series, I’ll go more in-depth into building skillsets, choosing the right tools for the job, developing your outdoors skills, and more.

But for now, I hope this helps you — prospective new hunter — in the first step in donning camo and heading into the Great Wide Open where so many adventures and great meals await.

As ever, please comment and ask questions, add relevant info, or call me out on my BS. Lord knows I have plenty of it to go around.

In the second episode of Western Radio, Nicole Qualtieri shares her experiences at Rabbit Stick, a primitive skills gathering, and discusses the journey of becoming a hunter.

She explores the personal and legal tracks involved in hunting, emphasizing the importance of education, emotional skill sets, and understanding regulations. Nicole also highlights various resources available for new hunters, including Game and Fish organizations and nonprofit programs, while encouraging a community approach to learning and hunting.

Part two in this short series will explore the personal implications of becoming a hunter, from the emotional landscape of taking a life to building the skills you need to hunt successfully.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Rabbit Stick, a Primitive Skills Gathering

02:50 Exploring the Primitive Skills Gathering Experience

09:12 The Journey to Becoming a Hunter

12:37 Navigating the Personal Track of Hunting

17:37 Understanding the Legal Track of Hunting

31:17 Exploring Gun Training and Local Resources

38:07 Understanding Resident vs Non-Resident Hunting

43:13 Public vs Private Land Hunting Dynamics

54:23 Navigating Tags and Licenses

58:20 Resources for New Hunters

01:03:04 Conclusion and Future Insights

Need More Resources?

We’ve got you. We have an entire article devoted to the subject below!

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Ungulate Highways first appeared in Storying Extinction, a multimedia project built by Jack Kredell, Christopher Lamb, and Devin Becker. Kredell worked with The Westrn’s editors to shorten the written piece for our publication. To see the entire project, visit the Storying Extinction website.

My fascination with nonhumans, particularly those who are extinct or out of reach — dinosaurs or abyss-dwelling giant squid — reached a fever pitch when I encountered a being who, until that moment, was known to me only from the pages of my encyclopedia and the museum.

Early one morning, my dad woke me up and carried me, half-asleep, to the bay window in the living room and whispered, “Look.”

All I saw was a blur of glaring light as I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Drenched earlier by my dad’s ritual dawn watering, the grass blazed and shimmered in the early morning sun. Slowly, the front yard took on its familiar shapes — the two sycamores with their fuzzy leaves and pastel trunks, the hedge with its clusters of white, bee-loving flowers. Then I froze (in some far-off world, I am still holding that breath): a long brown neck bent gracefully toward an island of dandelions. An animal — a deer. A deer was standing in the front yard of our suburban San Fernando Valley home.

It was my first time seeing real megafauna outside the articulated skeletons dredged up from the La Brea Tar Pits on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. My pulse quickened and my body ached to get closer. Wanting to see it without the dark-tinted mesh of the window screen, I ran to the front door and stuck a hand through the mail slot to lift the faux-brass door, but as I did, the hinge creaked and the deer bobbed its head, spun, and bounded away up the street. As much of me died in that instant of departure as was made alive by the arrival.

I say “bounded away up the street” but I don’t know where the animal actually went. It disappeared into the landscape as only deer and other ungulates can. They ghost. They get on their ghost highways and vanish. Though suburban deer aren’t too uncommon, it was a miracle to me at that age. It’s also my earliest memory.

I’ve replayed the episode of my dad waking me to see the deer countless times in my head. It’s one of the stories I associate with the San Fernando Valley, and yet, it is just as much a story about a different time and place, infused by later childhood years when I’d stalk white-tailed deer in the hardwood forests of central Pennsylvania.

In that encounter with the deer I was seized. “As we are seized,” write Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose in “Lively Ethography,” “so we bear witness in order that others may be seized: telling stories that draw their audiences into others’ lives in new and consequential ways, stories that cultivate the capacity for response.”

The encounter with the deer is the story of my becoming seized, of bearing witness to a shared world. It is simultaneously the response — unfolding over my lifetime from that moment until now — of ungulate dreams.

II.

I first heard of South Selkirk mountain caribou while driving from New York City to Idaho in search of a different ungulate — elk. I held a nonresident archery elk tag in my pocket and would try to fill it while visiting my grandmother in Donnelly, Idaho. It was late in the summer of 2016 and I’d just quit my job of three and a half years at a tech startup, a job which, in addition to low pay, gave me chronic lower back pain but no health insurance or time off to fix it. I didn’t know or care what was next. I just knew I needed a month of climbing mountains, grand views, shitty coffee, pumping gas, freeze-dried meals, cold nights, tired legs, and missing home, as opposed to standing in crowded subway cars full of bruised and angry rundowns like myself. Most of all, my back needed time off from sitting. The irony wasn’t lost on me either: I would spend the next five days in the driver’s seat.

My snot-green 1998 Jeep Cherokee stereo played a hunting podcast in which the episode’s guest, Bart George, a wildlife biologist for the Kalispell Tribe, discussed the tribe’s effort to save the South Selkirk mountain caribou herd, then estimated to be fewer than 15 individuals. Despite the alarming precarity of their situation, I was awestruck by the thought of caribou actually existing in Idaho and Washington. I became seized by caribou and their otherness with respect to the ungulate scene of the United States, which includes deer, sheep, moose, mountain goats, pronghorn, and elk.

The thought of caribou took me to another era — the Pleistocene epoch of my beloved La Brea Tar Pits. As a child, I longed to be among its extinct dire wolves, short-faced bears, and saber-toothed cats. I came to think of mountain caribou as an ice age phantom, a relic, a ghostly projection from the ancestral Cordilleran ice sheet. Part living, part dead.

In fact, the continent was already full of their ghosts; the recent extirpation of mountain caribou wasn’t a first for caribou in the history of the United States. We’ve witnessed a second death.

Until the mid-19th century, woodland caribou — a boreal forest-dwelling subspecies of North American caribou (Rangifer tarandus) — ranged as far south as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New England. Unlike their migratory Arctic cousins, the barren-ground caribou, these were mostly sedentary animals who for millennia lived and died in the coniferous snow forests of the northern United States.

Today, certain northeastern toponymies bear witness to woodland ghosts. Maine’s Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness, for example, is named after two brothers who shot and killed the area’s last caribou in 1854. With the exception of a few individual animals spotted in northeastern Minnesota during an aerial survey in winter of 1980-81, woodland caribou were all but eliminated in the contiguous United States by the start of the 20th century. However, southern mountain caribou — an ecotype of woodland caribou once also called ‘black’ caribou due to their dark, shadowy appearance — still occupied the northern tip of Idaho's rugged Selkirk Mountains as recently as 2019, though their presence remained tenuous and beleaguered.

The mountain group outlasted its woodland relatives by migrating, not to colder far northern latitudes, but to colder altitudes in the South Selkirks of Idaho and Washington. Here and in other ranges where they lived historically — the Purcells, Cabinets, and to some extent the Bitterroots — mountain caribou adapted to a life of wintry high-country solitude. Now, due to a combination of factors including large 20th-century fires, resource extraction, development, and an increased load of winter recreation, the South Selkirk mountains were no longer an oasis.

In the spring of 2019, news broke that officials airlifted the South Selkirk herd’s remaining three individuals to a captive breeding facility in southern British Columbia, leaving them functionally extirpated. That fall I entered grad school at the University of Idaho where I began asking myself a set of questions: What was their story, I wondered, and how does one even begin to tell the story of extinction? What does their extinction mean to us? What does it mean to the people who knew them through their encounters?

III.

Do you have an Idaho caribou story?

We are a pair of University of Idaho graduate students currently at work on a research project about the recent loss of North Idaho’s South Selkirk mountain caribou herd. We will be traveling to the South Selkirk Mountains and surrounding communities to gather ecological, historical, graphic, and geographical data that will be incorporated into a web-based deep map (multilayered interactive map) documenting ecological/community response to mountain caribou absence in North Idaho. A key component of this project is the collection of oral history from communities surrounding this area. We are seeking volunteers who have stories or encounters pertaining to the former Idaho Mountain Caribou herd for incorporation into the project.

A week after publishing our call for caribou stories in the Spokesman-Review we got a terse email from somebody named Bob Case:

On June 14, 2020, at 2:56 p.m., Bob Case wrote:

I have pictures of a caribou encounter.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy, an AT&T LTE smartphone

We agreed to meet Bob two weeks later in a parking lot. It’s starting to drizzle when he pulls up in a navy-blue Subaru Baja. He’s short, middle-aged, and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses despite it being overcast and rainy. He greets us in a strained, screechy kind of whisper which he informs us is due to a chronic condition called laryngeal dystonia where muscle spasms prevent the voice box from operating properly. Though it seems painful, it’s apparent right away that Bob loves to chat.

Without missing a beat and like some old-fashioned gumshoe, Bob unwinds the string fastener on a manila envelope and begins to narrate as he places a half dozen original photographs of a large mountain caribou bull on the bed cover of his Baja. Despite having used a miniature format 110 camera, the pictures of the massive radio-collared bull standing broadside in a Selkirk boulder field are otherworldly. They communicate both a sense of proximity to and respectful distance from the animal.

We attach the Lavalier mic to his collar, turn on our camera, and witness as Bob sings:

“I’m Bob Case and I took a hike up to Chimney Rock. I want to say it was either ‘93, maybe up to ‘95. Somewhere in there. And when I went up over this ridge, an open rock field, which you can see right in here [points to his photograph of the caribou in a rock field], I came down, I was walking down, and then this caribou stood up. Well, the people told me about being careful with the encounters with the different animals that could charge ya, and I said, well, they never told me about this [points demonstrably to caribou photo ]— what this could do.

“So I stood there and looked for an area where I could dive under the rocks to protect myself and got my camera out and started taking pictures. Then the caribou got up and it walked around just like this [now Bob is doing something with his hands that reminds me of an orbital model of the earth and moon. Bob and caribou are celestial bodies at this point, orbiting one another in the shared gravity of encounter] and it got closer and closer as it walked. When it got here, I believe it got the smell of me with the wind blowing and then it just walked off. So that was my day and I got to see a caribou and I been hiking ever since because that was the biggest thrill ever since I been hiking here.”

Afterward, I wasn’t sure if Bob had encountered a caribou or if a caribou had encountered Bob.

Later in the summer, we spend time with a subject who spent a decade trying to get a glimpse of a mountain caribou in the wild, without success, and here is Bob, the translocated Bostonian, wondering if he should dive under the rocks to avoid the charge of a radio-collared and translocated bull caribou, at the time the most critically endangered mammal in North America. In the video, Bob appears to get emotional during the last sentence. As he says, the encounter that day with a radio-collared bull caribou “was the biggest thrill ever since I been hiking here.” This statement still resonates with me, because of both the significance of the encounter for him personally and his complete lack of interest in the radio-collar as well as the politics surrounding the herd augmentation effort. For Bob, it was an encounter with something magnificent that could “charge ya.” It simply happened to be a mountain caribou.

His encounter story is a bearing witness to caribou, which are now absent from Idaho, but it is also a bearing witness to ourselves in terms of asking what world we choose to inhabit. Do we want to live in a world in which “this“ — Bob’s word for caribou because miracles do not possess taxonomies — cannot seize us in some alpine boulder field? Cannot make us want to dive under the rocks when faced with its nameless and terrifying beauty? Do we want to live in a world in which a deer can’t walk out of the pages of a child’s tattered encyclopedia? I am that child and because of that deer I now walk the ungulate highways in search of caribou ghosts.

I feel a strong kinship to Bob. As a child, an uncontrollable stutter caused my voice to seize and trip over itself, making it uncomfortable to talk. So I avoided people and instead sought the company of animals who relieved me from the burden of speech. They were gracious and let me practice my solitude beside them. There, I learned to sing with them. For an animal is a song, a specific reverberation of space and time that echoes and harmonizes across van Dooren and Bird Rose’s “countless interwoven ethea that together comprise the foundation of our worlds.”

I am beginning to think the song of mountain caribou in the lower 48 has ended, or is in the process of being forgotten. Extinction is a kind of forgetting.

IV.

While sitting face to face with an interview subject, I often think how I am looking at eyes onto whose retina appeared, inverted, and bore human witness to the image of a real mountain caribou. A physical trace now exists in their brain as the encounter’s dendritic signature. And as they talk, I feel the image of the mountain caribou migrating from their brain to my own, from their solitude to mine.

Greetings,

I may have some information relevant to your caribou research project.

Don’t hesitate to contact me.

Dave Boswell

I didn’t hesitate, but the call went straight to voicemail. A few hours later, while eating Chinese takeout, I got a call from a Spokane number:

“Hi, is this Dave?”

“Are you the caribou guy? Which one are you?”

“I’m Jack.”

“Well nice to meet you, Jack. My name is Dave Boswell. So you guys are putting together some kind of project about mountain caribou?”

I tell him about how we are building a digital deep map; a multimodal and interactive spatial narrative about caribou loss told through video and audio interviews, ecology, photography, and getting ourselves lost in the woods. The loss of a species is the loss of a world; a world that is mappable insofar as it is understood to be lost. We were going to map their absence. Gone is the starting point.

“Are you guys natural resource majors?”

“No, English.”

“Well shit, that’s weird. Have you ever heard of the Jeannot Caribou? It was shot by Jean Jeannot in 1892 and the mount was exhibited in the 1893 World’s Fair wherever it was that year.”

“Chicago?”

“It was the largest black caribou ever shot in the state of Idaho. I use the term ‘black caribou’ on account of their dark coloration. Long story short, I found two caribou mounts at a hotel saloon in Hope, Idaho and bought them. The smaller one I gave to the biologist Don Johnson at the University of Idaho. He wanted the jawbone for something. He measured the Jeannot caribou and said it was the largest specimen he’d ever seen. Hold your arms out wide as you can. That’s how big it was.”

I envisioned filming Dave sitting by the fireplace with a glass of merlot, the Jeannot caribou mount resting beside him, telling the story of how he, against all odds, rescued the internationally famous caribou from Hope, Idaho. I asked him if we could come see the mount and get his side of the story on camera.

“It’s in the basement at my place near Priest River. But it’s a sad story. Some teens broke into my cabin a while back and stole the antlers. Stole some other stuff too.”

“They sawed them off?”

“No, they used a fire poker to hack them off. You guys want to come spend the night at the cabin?”

I immediately called Chris to tell him about the enigmatic caribou aficionado who invited us to spend the night at his cabin in order to see the Jeannot caribou which, unfortunately, had been mutilated by teenagers and was now kept in his basement. Chris agreed without hesitation to spend the night at Dave’s remote cabin, the risk of visiting a stranger’s remote basement be damned.

In the weeks leading up to our visit, Dave becomes a mythic figure to us. He’s a true disciple of the gray ghost, a mountain hermit who wandered the Selkirk wilderness for a decade only to fall short of glimpsing his idol. The closest he got was a set of tracks at a place called Goblin Knob.

V.

Dave, holding a glass of wine filled beyond decorum, and his neighbor, Phil, come out to greet us. Dave’s voice is booming and sonorous, its intonation flecked with a pleasing grit. When he speaks, which is often, his backwoodsman’s penchant for a profanity-laced tirade is executed with the flair and verbal resources of an urbane lawyer (Dave practices at a small firm in Spokane). He wears blue jeans with suspenders and a white linen shirt, the front beginning to untuck itself. Pale blue eyes are deep set under white eyebrows. His shoulders are still broad, presenting an imposing figure despite being well into his 70s.

Phil is younger by a decade, mild-mannered and soft spoken. Phil’s T-shirt has the name of a conservation organization on it and features a tableau of African wildlife — zebras, rhinos, wildebeest, impalas, giraffes and elephants. His long hair is kept in a ponytail which has a beautiful sheen to it. He’s just been through a divorce. I immediately like him.

We move on to a larger cabin built by Dave and his brothers. The interior is dusky, storybook-like, and smells lushly of cedar. Our camera recording, Dave becomes uncharacteristically demure about his own encounter with mountain caribou, which in fact never took place. Chris and I make a dent in our bottle of whiskey. Dave takes a big gulp of wine. As I told him over the phone, we’re interested in precisely what you didn’t see and how that felt. He looks at Phil. Phil, however, looks at me and I realize we’ve got Dave where we want him. He is getting ready to sing.

“Phil, I told you these guys were crazy.”

Dave tells the story of how for 10 years he tried and failed to see a black caribou in the wild. He spent a decade going up and down the gnashing serrated teeth of the Selkirk crest on snowshoes. But to no avail. He saw tracks but never the ghost itself. Chris asks him what he thinks it would have been like to see a caribou. Dave smiles, repeating the question back to Chris.

“What would it have been like to see a black caribou in the old growth spruce forest on top of the Selkirk crest? If you were agnostic, you’d reconsider because God has just exposed his face to you.”

We lose the light and decide to film the same session again in the morning. We move back over to the first cabin and drink even more beer as Dave prepares a stir fry dinner.

“Hey,” says Dave, “You guys wanna see the Jeannot caribou?”

Phil yanks open the cellar door and gestures for us to enter like a maitre d pointing to our table. I see Chris hesitate, ducking his head under a crossbeam. The basement is illuminated by a single overhead lamp which casts an orange hue on everything. We’re all standing in front of a washer and dryer. On top of the washer sits a caribou shoulder mount-sized object covered by a black trash bag.

“Phil, why don’t you go ahead…”

And then we saw it — the worst example of taxidermy I’d ever seen. The Jeannot caribou now cosplayed as a hay-stuffed sock puppet with gouges in its head where antlers should have been. Instead of dark and depthless tan and black shadows cast by old growth canopy, its coat was the color of a Ritz Cracker. The frayed skin flap of the lower jaw had completely detached. Phil was using it to make the caribou talk like some profane and dilapidated Muppet.

“You guys want some caribou hair? It’s hollow. It’s so buoyant they used it to make life jackets in the first World War.”

Dave gives us each a pinch of formaldehyde-stained hair. My mind goes to the sinking of the Lusitania, and I picture the survivors bobbing in the cold Atlantic in life jackets made from dead caribou. Then, Phil mercifully places the abomination back in its trash bag. Chris and I go up for air. We need it.

We emerge to twilit skies. I feel the bowl of the meadow and its million buzzing insects begin to slowly tilt as I realize how drunk I am. Dave and Phil make their way to bed. We pour ourselves a Scotch from Dave’s liquor cabinet and find our way to the porch, which I promptly fall off, into the soft grass. Neither of us knows what to make of what just happened, other than it being an encounter.

Later that night, in our star-studded vortex of drunkenness, we spot a curious object in the heavens. It was like a star, except blurry and more massive in size. This blurriness, we established, was not our fault, but due to the object being covered in a kind of luminous mold — making it brighter than any other in the sky. Strangest of all, it had a tail. Then, it dawned on me: Comet NEOWISE looked close enough to reach up and grab.

If only we could snatch the comet’s tail, hack it off in the spirit of teenage vandals, and bury it high up in the final place where the last caribou in the South Selkirk mountains made its home, then the black caribou would come back.

But I am too drunk to stand on Chris’s shoulders.

Are there mountain caribou in the South Selkirk mountains of Idaho right now?

We begin to laugh thinking about the ‘face of God’ but neither of us know what the face of God looks like.

Jack Kredell is a hunter, writer, and PhD candidate in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho. His research examines the wildfire crisis through its emotional, ecological, and institutional dimensions. He has collaborated on digital environmental projects including Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho's Mountain Caribou and Keeping Watch, which document environmental change in rural Idaho and the western United States.

Sometimes, the best way to receive a long-form narrative is on the run. Or, perhaps in your car. Or, if you’re like me, cleaning the house. So, we’re expanding the way we offer some of our long reads, and we hope to add some great conversations to the mix as well.

In March of 2024, a piece called ‘On Killing Animals’ kicked off The Westrn with a start. A few weeks ago, it won the ‘Hunting Blog’ category at the OWAA National Conference in Chatanooga, TN.

We figured it’s the right piece to kick off our podcast ‘Westrn Radio’ and we hope you enjoy listening here on Substack, on iTunes, or via Spotify.

Let us know below if you enjoyed this!

Author: Kathleen Shannon
Summer 2025 Print Issue (Vol II)

On an icy cold February morning, 90s R&B blasts from the speakers of Elizabeth Painter’s heavy-duty Idaho Fish and Game truck, Big Boy. A French braid falls apart along her head and a half-eaten Kodiak brownie breakfast bowl grows cold in the cupholder. She lifts four fingers off the wheel to wave at a truck passing on the rural road. She doesn’t get one back.

“We’re changing hearts and minds,” Painter says, shrugging. “It’s the long game.”

It’s 2022 and I’m in grad school studying environmental journalism at the University of Montana, where Painter is a doctoral candidate in the wildlife biology department. It’s her third field season researching white-tailed deer survival rates in northern Idaho. She’s letting me tag along for a few days, so I can document her work while bettering my own.

Whitetails are considered the raccoon of deer, for their ubiquity. But that doesn’t mean they should be taken for granted. They make up “a lot of biomass in the system,” Painter told me. Despite being important prey for grizzly and black bears, wolves, cougars, bobcats and coyotes, the state hasn’t tallied white-tailed deer populations much beyond hunting data. Painter remedies that by tracking the predation and survival rates of does and their fawns, starting while fawns are still in utero.

“I’m basically a deer gynecologist,” she says with a smirk. Depending on their age and whether they’re pregnant, she fits deer with collars or other devices. It all requires trapping them first.

Off unassuming roads in mixed conifer woods, Painter has established a network of deer traps. Named for their inventor, the 1950s-era ‘Clover’ traps are rectangular stalls comprised of a metal frame with thick netted walls. At night, Painter baits them with hay, leaving one end rolled open as a door. When a hungry deer enters in the morning, it trips a wire and releases the door, which rolls down and shuts the cage with a clunk.

This time of year, Painter and her three-person crew spend most daylight hours setting and checking traps. When they pull up near the first deer trap of the day, a hush descends. They climb out and grab supplies from the truck bed. The only sound is the crunch of their boots on ice.

They follow a flagged trail, canopied by cedar and birch trees, toward a netted cage they’d baited the day before. As they near, two of them start sprinting. Painter, who is recovering from surgery (a herniated disk caused by lifting a deer), arrives last to find one technician bear-hugging the fawn under the front armpits like a wrestler while another straps front legs to rear, immobilizing her. Within a few minutes, the fawn is surprisingly calm, and the kidnapping vibe has dissipated. A tech struggles to fit the doe’s neck with a boxy black GPS device on a leather collar. “Hashtag collar conundrums,” Painter says.

Painter comes from a family of artists, and her first career path was, indeed, a painter. During art school at Bard College in Upstate New York, she got a migraine that never disappeared. She was in and out of school, sometimes flying home to California. “I spent a whole year painting sloths as metaphors for people,” she recalls.

While her friends struggled to launch careers as artists, Painter read about a woman researching wolves in Oregon. She pivoted and started taking general science classes at community college. She took wildlife classes online while she finished her last semester of art school. By 2015, she received her bachelor’s degree in wildlife science from Oregon State University. After just two months of learning Spanish, she went to Mexico to study conflicts between jaguars and cattle , earning her master’s degree from El Colegio de Postgraduados, Campus San Luis Potosí in 2018.

In freezing Idaho, Painter now rides shotgun while a technician steers Big Boy through the Coffee Corral drive-through. After catching the fawn that morning, the team had to euthanize an injured deer and found a few other traps empty. Idaho Fish and Game tasked the team with collaring 60 deer in the span of several weeks in two large study areas teeming with whitetails. They rarely capture mule deer. Painter opens the map app on her phone to point out nearby trap locations.

Collecting biological data from a white-tailed deer fawn (~7 months old). Alex is preparing a GPS collar that gets fit to each individual’s neck size.

When Painter comes across hunters, they often assume she’s studying the controversial wolf population. “No, we study deer,” Painter tells them. “We’re doing this for you.” It’s true that her work could affect the number of deer tags available to hunters. But whether that means more tags or fewer depends on the data.

Locals tend to be wary of the government. With limited budgets, the state agency can’t afford a permanent presence in every community. So Painter knows that planning years of field work behind the wheel of an Idaho Fish and Game truck means she needs to form good relationships with the public. It’s a mission that steers her approach to her work, and colors her interactions on the road. “Hearts and minds." She repeats it from behind the wheel like a three-word manifesto.

During those four years, Painter shared her findings with landowners and the community over lemonade and lunch. Her work shows that the primary cause of death for fawns in the study area is predation by bears – both black bears and grizzlies – and that mountain lions hit white-tailed deer hard at all stages of life. Across her 21,000-kilometer study area and all her field seasons, she captured roughly 700 deer total and found that the whitetails are “showing signs of population decline under current environmental conditions.”

That brings us to today. We’re both out of school, and working in our respective fields. We caught up on what’s changed during a recent phone call. She is now Painter-Flores. I am now a big game hunter.

Painter-Flores defended her doctoral dissertation in May 2025 and accepted a job at the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit a few weeks later. In a male-dominated field, she was glad a group of women interviewed her for the role. Years earlier, she had told me, “Being a woman of power is of the utmost importance in my life.” Coming up in another industry occupied largely by men, I could relate.

On our final morning together in the field, the team works on a trapped doe and Painter preps for her expert obstetrician procedure. After the usual measurements, they give the doe an ultrasound to confirm her pregnancy. Then, Painter installs a key tool for her research: a vaginal implant transmitter. The small T-shaped device immediately starts sensing temperature, light and movement. Those will change dramatically when the doe gives birth in early summer, triggering a radio signal to her collar, and then an alert to Painter. Finally, she’ll search for the new fawns, collar them and see if they survive or become prey.

After the team unstraps her legs, the doe bounds away, her white tail standing tall in the air. “See that?” Painter said. “She’s giving us the finger.”

Kathleen Shannon is a Montana-based writer, audio producer and ponderosa connoisseur who’s reported in camouflage, crampons, and wildland fire pants. She's rounded up her work at kathleen-shannon.com.

This article originally appeared as a feature in the Spring Issue of our newsprint magazine eponymously titled The Westrn. Get a print copy shipped from The Westrn Store for just $15.

Author: Sylvia Dekker
Summer 2025 Print Issue (Vol II)

I stumble, catching myself before eating dirt. It’s still dark, the trail only illuminated by the weak beam of my husband’s headlamp a few paces ahead. We crunch ever upwards, steps buoyant without our toddler and his various needs on our backs. My husband sings ‘Land of the Silver Birch’, a heads up for grizzlies. The sky lightens to a smudge of dusty purple. A glassy blue-green lake emerges from the trees, opening up the view of our objective.

That’s one big, faraway rock.

Rocks. So many rocks. I might as well be in the mountains.

I chuck a hefty one into the growing pile and eyeball the steep slope of my new yard, wondering how long it’ll take to turn a chunk of it into a productive garden. My back says forever. My arms agree with my back. I heave another and it splinters with a sharp crack. I slowly free patches of the steep ground from their burdens, the dirt underneath compacted into shiny brown pits.

It’s already May, and my Zone 3 growing season is a blink between frozen nostrils. Any frost-tolerant vegetables should have been seeded yesterday. A lifetime ago, my soil science professor insisted dirt was a derogatory term for the living soils we studied, best used to describe what my kids now track indoors. I snort as I try to stab a hole for a pea seed with my finger. Even he’d agree this was pure dirt: no structure, no porosity, no life.

I plant spinach, lettuce, beets and carrots in small sections in it anyway. My shovel scrapes into the dirt, sending shivers up my spine, and I know that when I pull carrots this fall they will be shaped by the small rocks buried beneath the surface.

The rock pile threatens to swallow half of my back yard. I pivot from chucking and begin intentionally placing heavy, colorful stones, creating rounded terraces. A garden of sorts emerges. Rock-defined beds remind me of a wander in the woods, hunting for shed antlers or little pink orchids.

I hate the brown bare dirt in the weeks post-seeding. It’s ugly and barren and stale. I anxiously wait for green shoots to emerge. When I irrigate, the water carves rivulets into the slope that disappear at the bottom of the garden.

I can hear the waterfall before I can see it. The noise propels me up the dirt path that winds through scrubby spruces and purple asters. The peaks are awash with warm, welcoming colours, but I’ve done this before and know the invitation comes with an asterisk of challenge.

Neither my husband nor I can budge one giant square purple rock, so it finds a permanent home in one of the bottom beds. I perch on it to survey this alien space I call a garden.

Why am I even bothering? Thistles, prickly lettuce and dandelions seem to sprout through the dirt every time I turn my back to move another rock. But it also seems like every time my feet and hands touch the ground, I become more attached to it. Creating a garden helps me hold nature close and keeps it relevant during this life stage when I’m more bound to home. I must work with its challenges to reap its gifts. The slow processes of planting, tending, and — if I’m lucky — finally harvesting is both rooting and grounding, literally and metaphorically.

My legs burn, my lungs burn, and I question why I’m doing this to myself, as I climb a long and steep slope. Sunshine spills over the rocks and juniper above us, wafting down summer-in-high-alpine warmth and spice. A bumblebee drones in wide circles around me. I begin trudging again, trying to disassociate from the discomfort and instead focus on my surroundings.

In the garden, I'm more than a passive observer; I’m an active being, spooking both deer and grouse. I manipulate things to be productive, plant things I like, and weed out stubborn grass. Here, I make hopeful decisions and changes that will positively impact the ecosystem surrounding my home.

The first year of vegetables was hardly productive. Nutrients, water, time and knowledge were in deficit. Winter lurked. It hailed often. Mule deer in velvet bounded over the fence, helping themselves to salads of spinach, strawberry leaves, and peas. My fingers bled after digging carrots in the fall. Like a false summit, the tops beckoned, luscious and tall. But the orange roots came out of the sticky dirt stunted, distorted, and deeply disappointing.

I tell myself roots in the ground is enough. Ground cover adds nutrients and organic matter. Roots break through the tough ground. My agricultural background informs this, but I still blink back tears of frustration and exhaustion.

I’m in this for the long haul. Life billows with the speed, enormity, and beauty of summer storm clouds. When my body — growing twin babies — tells me I can no longer carry my son up a mountain slope, my wanderlust gnaws. Nature beckons with all its little beauties and big adventures. I crave sucking lungfuls of fresh pine-laced air, leg-quivering exercise, and seeking little wild discoveries.

We emerge into a sun-drenched sea of color, and my jaw hits the trail. I pull out my phone and lag behind, trying to capture every wildflower and the vistas they frame. This is why I hike, I think. I make the most of the easy flat-packed dirt path. I soak in summer alpine bliss.

After the twins are born, a helpful friend pulls a chair up to the topmost rock wall and sits with her feet propped up. She reads a book, facing my wild, messy garden. In my postpartum fog, the fact that this cultivated space helps her relax blows my mind; I begin to intentionally use my garden as a place to recharge. I delight in watching frantic native bees on blooming dill and calendula. I drool over the last evening rays glowing through poppy petals. I take my camera out and capture visiting butterflies, tiny raptors, and gold finches.

This is why I garden. It’s not only for the veggies; I’m a flower girl at heart. A steep section becomes a chaos garden. I throw in several more packets of annual and perennial wildflower seeds –- pretty things I find along the trail like lupine and columbine –- and only occasionally pull grass and thistles. I dedicate an entire row running the length of the rough rocky rectangle to helpful plants like nasturtiums, marigolds, cosmos, borage, and monarda.

Eventually it blooms every color, from pink crinkly poppies to blue flax, buzzing with life that radiates out into the rest of the garden. The combination of blooms invites nature in for a feast. Hoverfly adults sip cilantro nectar; their larvae chow down on pest insects. Songbirds nibble sunflower seeds pollinated by mammoth fuzzy bumblebees.

The garden becomes my wilderness when the backcountry is out of reach. No one else knows where the paths really are. The bed shapes change every year. Rocks indicate random rows of zinnias, cornflowers, and sage. They mark the ends of a freshly seeded row of beans, ring watermelons that will never produce ripe fruit, and show where cabbages were before they’re chewed to smithereens by flea beetles.

Volunteer clovers and vetches pull nitrogen from the atmosphere, injecting the vital macronutrient into the soil. I leave them growing between the leeks that my kids helped plant. The rows are, at best, haphazard. The dirt needs more help, so we spread a dump trailer load of alfalfa hay, straw bedding, and goat manure over the entire garden. I can almost hear dirt becoming soil.

Standing with dirt-stained hands on my hips, I look over my messy, frustrating, yet fulfilling domain. I feel some hope and pride grow with it. This garden is now cultivating me, refusing to let me give up, teaching me patience. I wonder if, on this shady north-facing slope where slush still falls from the sky at the end of June, I’m finally figuring out Zone 3 gardening. From a fence post, a magpie chuckles in my direction.

A Swainson’s Thrush flutes ascending notes from the treetops below. It’s all open alpine meadow ahead. Blooms vibrate with insects among tumbles of rock. The perfect, lush, living garden conceals the harsh conditions it faces. We climb among clusters of deep pink paintbrush and rocky cliffs. We refill our water bottles in the crystal-cold stream and look back at the trail dropping down behind us, the shrinking lake, and the shades of blue peaks beyond. We’ve come a long way but a mountain still waits. The trail disappears in a boulder field. We snake from cairn to cairn. My hiking boots make mountain music with each step.

I slide around in Walmart crocs, moving rocks and pulling thistles. Strangely, this gardening thing is beginning to feel more intimate than wandering through the forest and sitting at the base of an old whitebark pine. Here, I invite the native species living nearby to pollinate, control pests, and share the foods we will eat. The relationships I’m developing with the forces are deep and appreciative. Among swaying herbs buzzing with happy insects, a kinship emerges.

Year by year, I start seeds in my basement each February, put final seeds into the soil in June, and thick frost sparkles on adult plants by September. I impatiently wait for snow to melt off the shady slope and for avalanche danger to abate in the mountains. I am as much at the mercy of weather whims at home as I am out there. I set up a cheap cone greenhouse to extend the season for my tomatoes and peppers so that maybe, maybe, they’ll produce fruit before the season ends. I practice crop rotation, trying to outsmart the flea beetles, slugs, and carrot weevils. I research companion planting. This turns my garden into a community of mutually beneficial, resilient, productive plants that rely and depend on one another.

My backyard’s biodiversity is thrilling, with some species more welcome than others. A ground beetle — shining like a black opal — burrows away. Rusty centipedes scurry as I dig potatoes. Spittle bugs and slugs slide around on slick stems. A tiny sweat bee lands on my arm, its forehead streaked with a stripe of Cheeto-dust pollen. Lacewings, lady bugs, crab spiders, caterpillars, butterflies and moths live, grow, and reproduce here.

We pause for a breather in a mountain goat’s dirt bed and examine his tracks. A ptarmigan waddles in the rocks above, cocking a beady eye at us. I relish every moment in the presence of wild things. It’s t draws me to the backcountry.

The day heats up, the slope gets steeper. We kick-step up a snow patch. Beads of snow shower down, sprinkling my sweaty, sunburnt skin. I get into the flow of uphill motion, soak in the pure silence of a day off from motherhood. A marmot whistles.

A dog barks at me from across the grassy alley when I hop into my strawberry bed to weed around runners while my kids nap. Detailed tending is for when patience is plentiful; today is not one of those days. I grab a hoe and release frustrated energy into the ground with each blow. I get into a flow, breathing in the scent of dirt becoming soil, pausing to crack my back. My hands turn brown — freckles on one side, dirt on my palms. Weed juice stains my thumbs green.

In the spirit of letting nature take the wheel, I let plants set seed at will. The next season, I weed around volunteer chamomile, sunflowers, spinach, flax, poppies, cosmos, and onions in my potato bed while three little kids pull sleds filled with small garden rocks in the lawn above.

I romanticize my every day now that the backcountry is that much harder to get to, and motherhood weighs like a warm but heavy blanket. It’s working. We draw chalk smiley faces on the rocks at the top of the garden. The kids gobble any and all fruit they see, ripe or not. I brush a mosquito off my youngest’s forehead. He grins up at me with strawberry-stained teeth.

Panting upwards, I suck a mosquito into my throat. I cough, spit it into the rocks, and take the last few steps to the pass. A sea of glaciers and peaks opens up. I forget about my burning calves. Dark rock towers on both sides of us, framing a sunlit icefield. A lake drops off the edge of a cliff. Blue peaks stretch out and melt into the sky.

Adventure lives as much on my steep garden slopes as it does on those made of tinkling shale. Even when the beets are tiny, the spinach bolts too soon, and the spaghetti squash is still green at frost, the garden satiates my hunger for the outdoors.

I embrace the chaos, welcome in both nature and little feet. I battle short seasons, summer hail, limited water, and challenging slopes. There are plenty of moments I don't enjoy about this place, like tweezing thistle spines out of my fingertips or picking slugs off my garlic. Overall, though, I’m harvesting a net positive: healthy food, hands-on work, productive procrastination, and straight-up beauty beyond my doors.

My legs shake with exhaustion. I enjoy this, I try to convince myself, as I watch a stone tumble away from my perch on the once big and faraway rock. It’s lifeless up here. My eyes wander to the blooming green below, but I drag them higher to where mountain and sky meet. It looks straight up, and I’m no mountain goat. I summon stubbornness. I put one foot above the other.

If I know anything about relationships, they’re a two-way street. I claim to be a nature lover, but treading trails, sharing my love for it, and encouraging others to get out there isn’t enough. In my garden, I give back in small but meaningful ways, all the while enjoying many of the things I love about being in the wilderness. The spicy smells, the discoveries, the aesthetics, and the rawness.

There is no more up. Everything in view is below and beyond. I barely feel the last few steps to where my husband flips through the summit box log. We relax on the peak for a long time, pointing out luminous crevasses, silty green lakes, and gravel raked into flowing lines by a long-gone glacier. I ignore the fact that we are only halfway done. As we begin the painful downclimb, I set my sights on wandering the level and colourful meadow again.

A butterfly flits under my hose shower in a flutter of dusty blue, and I spy a spiny juvenile ladybug patrolling a basil leaf. Every time I step foot in this garden, I connect with the wild. It’s a feeling I only get in the backcountry when I cut a morel, trace the rough pads of an old black bear print, or nibble a wild rose petal. As I head indoors to finish dinner with a bundle of fresh green onions and spinach, grown by these hands and this annual effort, I palm and scarf a few ripe raspberries the kids missed.

Between a hip-screamer of a downward step, I spy plump violet huckleberries dripping off green bushes along the trail. The berries pop, warm and sweet, in my mouth. My steps become lighter, halted, wandering. The rest of the downhill is a blur of colour, of satisfaction of birdsong.

I love it here.

I love it here.

Sylvia Dekker is based in a small town in the Albertan Rocky Mountain foothills. Fresh air, wild places, and the life they contain — from the smallest wonder to the vastest detail — are the heartbeats of her family and pen. She shares her love of exploring nature with her husband, toddler, and twin babies. Find her @syl.dekker and www.sylviadekker.com.

At its core, it feels like art. Art is hard won. It can often feel like shouting into a void, and then trying to make a sculpture out of the echo that returns to you. Really, it can feel impossible in the beginning. The impossibility caught up to us in the last issue. We dug deep into our own pockets to make it work, and we learned we need to get ahead of the game in order to produce the next issue pragmatically.

This is a long update, so in summary, we’re proud of The Summer Issue and what we made alongside our writers and illustrators. After doing this twice, we finally understand the scope and work it takes to get this done, and we’re raising $15,000 so that we can run our next issue.

We’re calling it The Hunting Issue.

That sounds like a lot, but we need to be transparent about what it costs to hire contributors, something we’re unwilling to compromise on. And we can’t hire them without a budget.

If you are already supporting us through either paid subscriptions or single purchases, we’re so damn grateful for you! We’ll make sure you get your money’s worth as we build to the next issue. More on that below.

And if you appreciate our digital work as a free subscriber, you can help by becoming an annual or monthly subscriber, an advertiser, or by keeping an eye out for soon-to-be-released merch.

Interested in the whole story? Keep reading.

Narrative Journalism is Worth the Effort

We focus on narrative journalism and narrative nonfiction within the broad scope of outdoor writing. We rarely report on what is beyond our experience; rather, we report what’s within it.

A story about adopting a burro can also educate about the plight of wild equines on public lands. A story about facing down wild animals can inform us of how our energy moves through the world — and how it might be our jobs to shift that energy. A story about a garden can press up against one writer’s longing to be in the backcountry, while family ties her close to home.

This issue, to me, is closer to our vision than anything else we’ve produced. It’s funny, punny, light-hearted, and fresh. The illustrations sing, the photography breathes, and the stories cross recreational pursuits, scientific adventure, family connections, and friendly mischief. When our readers look at this, I hope they feel the same sense of relief it gives our team. Traditional journalism can’t really offer us that respite at the moment. But I believe narrative journalism can.

In a world of specialization and high-intensity niches, versatility can feel like a gamble. If dice were tossed, this issue wins the shake-a-day pot. I’m proud of it. That said, we’re not exactly making ends meet.

The Honest Math of a Burgeoning Publication

Out of our 3,529 subscribers, 225 are paid subscribers. This works out to about $12,000/year here on Substack. We’re in the Top 50 Environment Substacks because of this, and we’ve often beat out some of the best environmental writers in the world on the Rising List. It’s incredible to be doing that well on Substack, while also telling of how difficult it is to make a living there. We’ll say, it’s also just successful enough to be dangerous: It tempts us to leverage that support to do more.

Most importantly, we’re committed to paying our contributors a market-acceptable rate for stories. With around 10 stories per issue from contributors, more than 50% of our budget funds the work of writers, illustrators, and fellow creatives. Our editing process is thorough, and it takes a few weeks to complete. Our biggest expense, then, is making sure each contributor is paid adequately for their work over time, and that’s certainly a spot where we refuse to budge. We’re not willing to publish something that only exists through labor exploitation. If we’re making this, we have to build the audience and market to sustain it.

For this to work, we’ve made compromises with paying ourselves, but we must impose practical limits. We expected to be doing editing and design work without compensating ourselves for a bit. By doing this we broke even on the first issue, surprising for a new publication. But with the second printing, we had to put about $7,000 cash into self-funding magazine production costs. That’s too deep in the red to repeat.

So in the spirit of “Do you want it to be good, fast, or cheap?”— we’re sacrificing ‘fast.’

Our Fall Issue is Now “The Hunting Issue”

Our next slated issue focuses on all the harbingers of our favorite season: Fall. Honestly, it’s the issue we’ve been most excited about as DIY hunters ourselves. We know many of you have been looking towards it as well, both as potential contributors and dedicated readers.

Fall is our time of year. It takes the footwork of time on the ground and puts something in the freezer, that we can go back to again and again and again. For the next three seasons, it also feeds our favorite sort of story — the kind you want to tell your friends around a campfire, bundled in your favorite fleece, with a beverage in hand.

So, we’re renaming the next newsprint magazine The Hunting Issue, and we’ll make it once we have the funds in the bank to do so, on a timeline that works for us and for our future contributors. Ideally, we’d be able to ship before Christmas, so it arrives along with holiday cheer.

We’d also like to make it a slightly longer issue, where we can give stories, images, and illustrations even more space to breathe, while offering more bang for your buck — or, more buck for your bang, if we’re being hunters about it.

How You Can Help Us Reach Our $15,000 Goal

We’re setting our initial goal as $15,000 to run The Hunting Issue, an amount that would allow Kestrel, L, and myself to make ends meet. But, we don’t want to go the ol’ GoFundMe or Kickstarter route just yet. We’d rather stay inside our Substack universe.

The biggest way anyone could help is to…

Pre-Purchase the Issue for $15

If we sell 1000 copies, we’re good to go. That’s doable.

But, there are a ton of other opportunities to help us bring The Hunting Issue to life. And again, if you’re already on board, hell yeah friends! We’re so happy to have you on our team.

But should you want to help further, here’s the list:

• Become an annual subscriber and you’ll receive both digital articles and print as soon as it drops. (And if you are an annual subscriber, don’t forget to fill out our address form to receive the paper!)

• Become a monthly subscriber and you’ll receive print articles digitally that are only available to paid subscribers. But, you’ll have to purchase print separately!

• Purchase a printed Spring or Summer Issue from The Westrn Store

• Pre-purchase ‘The Hunting Issue’ from The Westrn Store

• Purchase gift subscriptions or individual issues for friends and family that you think would like what we’re up to.

• Advertise with us! It’s affordable, and it supports our commitment to storytelling more than you know. We start at just $250, and we offer discounts for nonprofits, small businesses, and NGOs.

  Find Our Ad Rates Here

We’ve done our damndest to stay away from becoming overbearing fools when it comes to asking for things in market speak. So, just know that supporting us goes exactly where we say it goes — to the pursuit of art and storytelling.

Merch Incoming

We know the outdoors crowd loves merch, and you all have been asking for it. We’ve got a few ideas up our sleeve that we’re excited about.

• A “STAY RANK” t-shirt inspired by the advice column of the ineffable Rachelle Schrute

• A “GET (the) WESTRN” t-shirt that inspires folks to stay rowdy

• Hats, prints and stickers from our incredible illustrators, including 8-year-old Oscar Nichols-Chestnut’s badass skull drawing, our wrapping paper designs, and more

Already a Subscriber? We’ll Make Sure You Get What You Paid For

We know that print being on pause is not ideal if you’re already a subscriber. That’s a big reason we didn’t increase our price when we added print to the subscription model in January.

Our $50/year digital subscription promised two long-reads per month, and it stayed at $50/year when we added the newsprint magazine. It’s a silly decision from a business perspective, but it’s an honest decision when you’re unsure of how things will work long-term.

That said, we’re baking things into the annual subscription that we hope will convince you to stick around, like special discounts, pre-releases for merch, and other opportunities. And we’re still gunning to get The Hunting Issue out in 2025.

As our core community, we want to open the lines of communication. Have ideas that you think can help? Please let us know. Say something in the comments. Send us an email. Know us personally? Give us a call. And yeah, we’ll do your po

We’re new to selling this, but we’re committed to making it, and that in itself feels like a win.

Let’s do the damn thing —

Nicole, Kestrel, and L

The trainer stood in the center of the round pen, an athletic red colt circling him at a high energy trot.

“It’s about timing,” he said, stepping back, pulling off both pressure and energy. The colt quickly stopped, turned, and faced the man.

In the stands, a decent-sized audience listened attentively. In the mid-afternoon heat, horses and burros lazed in square pens at the Livingston, Montana fairgrounds. Their necks sported intricate white freeze brands, along with a loop of unique four digit tags, indicating their identities to prospective adopters.

The “First Steps” Horsemanship Clinic — led by a clinician who goes by the name ‘Mustang Matt’ — served as the educational leg of the Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Event in early June. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) brought nearly 60 unhandled mustangs and burros from public lands and corrals around the American West.

The adoption process for BLM mustangs and burros is unlike anything else in the horse world. America’s wild equines are protected by The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, signed into law by President Nixon. The animals’ ownership is held in the public trust, meaning that all Americans collectively own our wild horses and burros. The government has a vested interest in their continued care. So getting approved to take home an untouched burro or mustang means fulfilling requirements, including adequate fence heights, appropriate shelter, minimum pen sizes, and enduring a time commitment before the agency transfers ownership. Then, after a full year of care, adopters submit a final application for a ‘title of ownership.’ Once approved, a ‘titled’ mustang or burro is essentially like any horse in the equine market.

Currently, more than 80,000 wild horses and burros roam on public land, plus we have nearly 50,000 in government-funded holding corrals. This comes at an enormous expense to taxpayers, to the tune of $100 million annually. To me, taking mouths off the government feed bill is an act of public service — not only for feral animals coming into human care, but for the reduction of harm to native wildlife and sensitive ecosystems.

Though the truly wild ancestors of horses once roamed North America in the Pleistocene epoch, today’s wild horses and burros are better described as a feral and non-native species. Horses, in particular, are intensive and destructive grazers with a high need for water intake. They’re hard on the drought-ridden landscapes they mostly inhabit, and they’re just as hard on native flora and fauna. Rather, these 16th-century transplants evolved long ago to live and work in partnership with people. If I had my way, feral mustangs and burros would go the way of the covered wagon, and each would have hoof care, immunizations, dental care, and the nutrition they need to thrive.

Unsurprisingly, few others share my viewpoint. The majesty and freedom of wild mustangs in particular gins up a certain kind of Western image. That picture is less rose-colored once filtered through the reality of a a busted tooth abscess, easily-preventable permanent lameness, death by dehydration, or worse. The wild horses and burros act passed to protect these animals. Yet in many ways it accomplished the opposite: it limits our ability to manage wild equines as we manage most wildlife — at the state level and independent to the needs of the landscape they’re affecting.

At least I have a leg (or sixteen) to stand on in this argument. All but one equine on my farm started life on public lands. My four-year-old mustang, Seven, comes from the White Mountain Herd Management Area of Wyoming. I somehow ended up saying yes to taking on her titling process at a wedding. (It’s a wanting metaphor I do not care to indulge.) I received her official title a few months ago. She grows bigger and more golden with each passing day.

Another friend — one Kestrel Keller — keeps their BLM donkey, Rocco, with me. (‘Donkey’ and ‘burro’ are synonymous.) Now seven years old Rocco is well accustomed to domestication. He loves cuddles, demands both daily hugs and affirmations of his unfailing beauty, and struts his way through life like a prized rooster in his prime. I hunted with him last fall. When he out-walked my mule in rough-and-tumble country, I became an evangelist of his surefooted virtues. My mind ran rampant with donkey-powered daydreams.

At Friday afternoon’s event preview, I daydreamed once again. I stood with my arms crossed over the rails of the burro pen for the better part of four hours. That unrepentant hyperfocus is what turned me on to hunting. Once animals are in front of me, I don’t want to do anything but watch. I will watch, and I will watch, and I will continue to watch. The downside to this is that the intimacy of understanding behavior will eventually drive me close to something like love. It’s difficult when you’re trying to fill the freezer and instead have developed some level of attachment to a wild animal. It’s even more difficult when you’re trying not to take a wild animal home with you.

So, I left my horse trailer at home. I told myself that I came to this event to write a story, not to add to my herd of critters. I eased up when I realized the burros were older and a bit unkempt. They weren’t the bigger and heftier burros I’d pictured packing elk. But some burros appear more structurally sound than others.

No! I tell myself. No! Not this time. So, I watch. And I continue watching. At this event, the attendees are just as interesting as the equines.

The desire to touch something wild seems to be attached, like a barnacle, to the human condition. Human fingers clamored for the velveteen touch of a muzzle, the strong curve of a neck, the full roundness of a rump. Begging hands reached in toward the burros from two fence lines. The burros responded by pressing against the back rails of the pen, as far as possible from the spiny tentacles of wanting energy stretched in their direction. People jotted down numbers. They laughed at donkey antics. They crossed arms and watched.

Any herd of animals becomes a herd of personalities if you pay attention long enough. To my eye, the burros evolved with each passing minute. A shaggy donkey with fluffy ears laid down and rolled happily, finally stopping to scan the crowd with curious eyes. A tiny ragged fella harassed the whole herd, biting and kicking unremittingly. The youngest donkey had a happy-go-lucky Hi! How are ya! sort of expression that all but guaranteed him a home. He was the first to come around to the reaching hands. Over the weekend, a few other donkeys did as well — realizing that scritches and pats weren’t that bad after all.

Other donks looked on with dismissive judgment in their hearts. Enjoy being eaten, a small and curmudgeonly black burro seemed to say. He stayed tucked into the far back corner, wearing an oh hell no look that endured. He occasionally pinned his ears at any long-eared compatriot that seemed to be enjoying himself too much.

I begin jotting down numbers, just for fun, and without supposed attachment to an outcome. I like this one. I’d write it down. I see the solid build on that one. I’d write it down. One particular donkey held strong at the top of the list. One ear fell goofily to the side. He possessed both a flat, strong back and a big gentle eye. I read his tag number: 3024. But there were others. 3452. 1102. 3177.

My friend Elise showed up halfway through the preview. Hunting partners since 2018, we talked about how packing with donkeys could allow us to go further into the mountains, carrying less, and hunting more. Rocco was a constant inspiration. Elise decided she was in, and her donkey would live with me for the time being. Her excitement riled me up. I’d be going back to get my trailer after all. My heart softened. I pictured 3024 and his crooked ear happy at home with whoever Elise might end up with. Maybe I should get one too, I said. Elise grinned. Folks perusing the burros caught pieces of our conversation and became curious.

They can pack? How much weight? Can they keep up with a horse? The questions rolled in, and the efficacy of these small yet resilient pack animals changed shape as we conversed. I became a de facto salesperson, extolling the virtues of Equus asinus. Donkeys aren’t simply cute lawn ornaments, I’d say. Currently, more than 40 million donkeys exist worldwide, and the majority still work for a living, mostly in arid and rugged third world countries. Pound for pound, a healthy donkey can typically carry 20% of its body weight under most circumstances.

Donkeys are thrifty eaters, desert drinkers, healthy to a fault, and thus live longer than other equines. They often continue working well into their 30s and 40s. Gasps from the audience! Yes! I reinforced this point: burros are the parrots of the horse world. Do not be dismayed by this older herd and their teenage years — they still have much to give and many lives to live!

Their reputation for stubbornness is, I’d mention, mostly a misunderstanding. Skeptical and questioning looks. Donkeys possess an admirable sense of self-preservation, a keen eye for trouble brewing, and a bit of intellectual narcissism that renders us occasionally flummoxed. They run on what enthusiasts call ‘donkey time’ and we are so inclined to endure this time structure until one or both parties throws in the towel. Raised brows…

Ok, so sometimes they’re stubborn. But they have their reasons and we have our curse words, right?! Knowing laughs! Chuckles! Plus, they’re delightfully social, and this plays to our advantage if we’re smart about it. Donkeys possess less flight but more fight. Disarm the fight through thoughtful socializing and training, and you might cultivate a long-eared bestie, like Rocco, who will follow you to the edges of the earth and back. Though even he sometimes causes minor drama, like pulling away in a fit of joy and wildly bucking a hundred yards down the trail when you take the first turn towards home. Run…away? Like, away away?

Here, I’d laugh nonchalantly, tossing my hair behind my shoulder. Oh, it’s all in good fun! The mischief, the shenanigans, the occasional rope burns on hands! Rope burns? Well, he did pack 140 lbs of elk meat out on a six-mile trip for his previous owner. Here, I’d show them the picture of Rocco, with a meat-laden pack. Wow, they’d say. Wow. People walked away in a confused but titillated fog.

At the very least, two people were convinced. Elise and I jotted down our final list of neck tag numbers, our picks for the following morning. We decided to reconvene at 8:45 a.m. to make the 9 a.m. adoption. Coffees in hand for us both, Elise beat me to the line, which was longer than we’d imagined. Apparently, one gal got up at 4 a.m. to stand in line and assure her pick of the mustangs — a brassy palomino yearling from Oregon’s South Steens herd. Others had been in line for at least an hour. The first-come, first-serve culture of the event was a bigger deal than either of us knew.

Our picks slowly dwindled. My heartbeat quickened. We started chatting with the couple in front of us. It turned out they lived just a few miles from me, in a spot I pass by often.

“Who are you standing in line for?” I asked, just making conversation.

“Two of the burros,” the couple replied.

“Oh, us too. Which ones?”

Three…oh…two…four. The first number rolled off the fella’s tongue, the second number fell into obscurity, and the air in my conversational thought bubble popped. I looked at Elise, and she looked at me, pursing her lips. My heart dropped hard and fast, like a kicked stone from a high trail, down a rocky cliff of disappointment, and into a rushing river of self-flagellation. We should have gotten there earlier.

“Oh, 3024 is a really nice one, I was hoping to get him, but it’s fun that I’ll see him in the pasture from time to time.” I meant it. The couple smiled kindly; we continued chatting. When we reached the office window, there was only one left on our list. That was good news for the adopted donkeys and bad news for me. I decided to forgo adopting a donkey, and Elise chose the sweet-eyed shaggy boy, 3177.

We filled out his paperwork and received his folder, replete with even more paperwork. After getting everything in hand, we hustled over to the arena to watch Mustang Matt’s clinic. He’d be working with two mustangs at two different levels of training, modeling how to work with the particular needs of each individual. Elise and I tucked ourselves into the stands, as Matt worked the young sorrel colt.

.

A good horseman makes the conversation between horse and trainer into a sort of interspecies waltz. Mustangs may not be socialized to humans, but they live intensely social lives and learn the equine language masterfully on the range. Matt’s many years of working with hundreds — if not thousands — of mustangs meant he too spoke their language.

Timing. Feel. Pressure. Release. To horse folk, these words invoke a sense of wonder at first. A person at the beginning of their equine journey may watch someone like Matt and think some sort of magic was at play. But, there’s as much artistry — if not more — in the human explanation. He breaks things down not only for the horse in the arena, but most importantly on a step-by-step basis for the aspiring audience, many of which hold folders of paperwork for their own new four-legged family members.

The next day, I arrived back in Livingston with a trailer behind my pickup. Six donkeys were left in the pen, including 3177. The five others were the only donks who hadn’t been adopted. In total, more than 40 animals found homes. And now, I looked at 3177 and felt compelled to offer him companionship in the journey.

The stragglers were, well, straggly. But the little curmudgeon was still there. He’d made me laugh throughout my observations, and that’s not a trait I take lightly. I looked at the sheet of available donkeys to find his number. This was 8945’s third adoption event. At 21 years old, he’d spent three years in government holding pens. Because of his age, he was eligible for what the BLM calls ‘sale authority’ rather than the year-long titling process. (The BLM does this for animals that might not otherwise be adopted.) He came from Sinbad, Utah. An omen. I smiled. A long-time household favorite, the comedian Sinbad held a space in my family lore that spanned decades.

I texted my mom: I found a donkey. He’s from Sinbad, UT lol. She sent a laughing emoji, and said she knew I wouldn’t come home empty-handed. I rolled my eyes at myself, as I wrote out the check, filled out the forms, and gathered his paperwork. A crew went to work funneling 3177 and 8945 into the gated loading zone.

The boys hopped onto my trailer, without much ado. Like so many equines and humans before us, we headed west towards home. We sailed at 70 mph on highways, with big wild stretches of country on either side of us. I imagined a future day when we would all pack into it.

When I got home, I backed the trailer up to my high-fenced run where the donkeys would get used to a new life — one of loving care and connection. Rocco snuffled tiny excited brays as two of his kind unloaded. He stretched his milk-colored muzzle through the fence, sticking out his tongue as he does when he’s at his most goofy. Noses touched. Seven and Mojo got in on the action, meeting new friends, saying polite hellos.

I stood at the green gate of the pen, folded my arms over the rail, and watched, and watched. I watched until the setting sun washed golden light over the nearby Pintler Mountains, the rugged Flint Range, and blue mountains even further off. Adventures beckoned from the ridgelines.

My pack felt lighter already.

Nicole currently writes an online column called ‘Four-Legged’ for The Westrn, where she documents the taming and training adventures of both Brasso the shaggy donkey and Kevin the curmudgeon, as well as her other four-legged creatures.

GearDaddy is the sporty section of our newsprint magazine, in which Nicole talks shop and outdoor gear. Online, we expand upon the top ten list and also add budget-friendly alternatives because there’s nothing more fun than sticking it to The Man *and* getting the better side of a bargain.

Find my Top Ten Things for Spring here, and expect more hunting gear in our fall installment of GearDaddy.

GearDaddy’s Top Ten Things for Summer

1. Hiking Comfort: Swiftwick Pursuit Crew, $22

I used to roll my eyes at in-depth sock coverage as a gear writer. It seemed that most socks didn’t live up to the hype. Swiftwick changed my mind. A blend of 60 percent Merino wool, 36 percent nylon, and 4 percent spandex, the Pursuit meets you in the middle of the benefits of wool with the stretch and forgiveness feet need to stay healthy while moving. Partnering the right amount of compression with lightweight tech, the Pursuit Crew is my favorite sock for managing blisters, wicking at its finest, and keeping my feet happy — whether I’m in my cowboy boots, running shoes, or hunting boots.

2. Workout Wool: Artilect Sprint T-Shirt, $43-$90

Strange to think of wool as a summer option, but it’s been a — and I hate this word — game-changer for me. Wool keeps scent to a minimum, cools me down when it's hot, and keeps me dry when it's sweltering. Hiking in wool has led to fewer issues with chafing, annoying dampness, and discomfort while using a backpack. Artilect’s t-shirts crush everything else that I’ve tried. They’re durable, well-designed, and comfortable. And you can wear them multiple times without washing. The price tag is worth it, I promise.

3. Car Camp Bliss: Sea to Summit Tanami Down Comforter, $199-$299

Sea to Summit is a stalwart for a reason — its gear always hits. The Tanami Down Comforter is my summer go-to in my GoFastCamper. Unlike a sleeping bag, the quilt offers more flexibility for coverage, and it’s both light enough for hot nights and warm enough to take the chill out of the air. The queen-size is also a big enough option for folks who sleep with partners.

4. Packable Dessert: Mountain House Ice Cream Sandwich, $5

It’s summer which means it’s time for ice cream. The Mountain House Ice Cream Sandwich is my go-to backcountry desert, and for good reason. It reminds me of eating astronaut ice cream at the Neil Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, OH as a child. Why? Because it’s literally astronaut ice cream. A freeze-dried ice cream sandwich is an absolute childhood delight. And at $5, it’s worth the extra calories after a big day in the backcountry.

5. Doggy Durability: YETI Dog Bowl, $55-$65

At this point, I don’t know how long I’ve had my YETI dog bowls, but they continue to look as new as the day they arrived. To me, it’s nice to have something designated for my dogs that is reliable and will likely become an accidental heirloom as the bowls are indestructible. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10,000 years from now they were dug up in an archeological dig, then used for the canines of the future. They’re worth the initial investment.

6. Light-footed Ranching: Ariat Bantamweight Boots, $140-$250

I’ve been rocking the same pair of bantamweight boots for three years, and they’ve yet to let me down. I must have hundreds of miles of walking and riding in these boots, and they’re no worse for the wear. Mud, snow, rain, dust, manure — they’ve seen it all. I’ve worn Ariats for riding since I was a little girl, and though there are many boots out there that can compete, it’s hard to make a more expensive switch when Ariats can take such a beating, keep my feet comfortable and blister-free, and require nearly no break-in period. I might buy a pretty pair of custom boots one of these days, but my Ariats will always be my daily go-to. They’ve earned their spot in my kit of most reliable gear.

7. Yard Party: Solo Stove Bonfire, $329+

I freakin’ love my Solo Stove Bonfire. The smokeless technology is always strange and impressive to see in action. My eyes glaze over when people explain how it works (air intake? physics?) so I just prefer to think that it’s magic. It’s awesome as a fire pit at home, and it’s small enough to throw in the truck for an event in need of a warming space. You can buy accessories to make it a bonafide grill or even a badass fire-powered pizza oven, or you can wing it like I do with a makeshift grill grate and marshmallow sticks for the nephews.

8. Doesn’t Suck: Eufy Robot Vacuum, 11S Max, Under $200

Is it weird to throw a robot vacuum in my GearDaddy coffers? Kinda. But life on my Mini Ranch is made so much easier by running my Eufy once a day. With two dogs and one feral cat constantly rolling in the dry grass and dirt outside, I might as well have floors made from soil and grass. The affordable and reliable Eufy vac keeps it spic and span. I named her “Piper” and when she occasionally gets stuck in weird places, I run around my house yelling “Piper, nooooo!” IYKYK.

9. Summer Smells: Origins Ginger Hand Cream, $20

Summer is a time for bad smells. Yes, sure, wildflowers come. But everything just smells more intense in the heat. Ginger, to me, is the antidote. And Origins Ginger products smell better than everything, everywhere, all at once. This scent is spicy, crispy, and clean. Whenever I wear it, heads turn like I’m the belle of the ball. Then, they keep turning because it can’t be possible that someone dressed as a ranchy and dirty gremlin can smell that good. Um. Yes, I can. And so can you. Ginger, all the way.

10. Bespoke Casual: Chaco Customizable Chillos, $50

As of writing this, my Chillos have met their maker. Oh, Chillos! You’ve seen me through years and years of slip ons and slip offs! Your trout-colored countenance gained me so many compliments! You walked and ran through mud, slop, and piles of hay in rubbery comfort, with a quiet sturdiness! And then, I accidentally broke you beyond repair! Chillos, oh Chillos! Ok, I’m done. But now I need a new pair. Because these were my go-to’s for instant run-and-gun, and I don’t have a pair that can so easily replace them.

BUDGET OPTIONS:

As part of my online GearDaddy fulfillment, I now offer you an extended and wonky diatribe on how to save some cash, while upping your gear game.

1. Use Poshmark to Search for Coveted Items.

Poshmark might not have the gravitas of cooler apps that the kids are into, but those kids end up paying a lot more for stuff than you will on the ol’ Posh. I found a pair of cute Chillos for under $30 that I’m considering replacing my faves with. I also tend to find slightly used running shoes, amazing deals on Ariats, and Origins for much less than I’d find anywhere else. I got two pairs of Swiftwick socks for under $20 last week, and I found a designer purse that I’d wanted for just $25. The downside is shipping is always somewhat of a bother, but you can negotiate costs with sellers, making shipping less of a breakup deal.

2. Get an Affordable Quilt: Rumpl Backcountry Puffy Blanket, $149

If you don’t need the full force of a queen-sized Tanami blanket, Rumpl has a smaller option that’s just as nice for half the price. You can also use it as a cozy cape when things get cool by the campfire. Though it might not be warm enough for most mountain scenarios, it’s a great option for travel, hot weather camping, and the like.

3. Save Money Building a DIY Fire Pit

Less portable but more permanent, it’s actually easy to build your own fire pit by following these directions from Lowes. My best friend from college built one for under $70 using stone pavers. You might be able to build one even cheaper with bricks or secondhand materials from a local construction site. I suggest checking to see if Habitat for Humanity has a Restore in your area. It’s a great place to find good deals on building materials.

4. Utilize a Repair Program for Broken Chacos (Or Gear)

My Chillos were at a point that I’d say were beyond repair, but Chaco has an exceptional repair program that I’d use otherwise. I took a firsthand tour of the awesome ReChacho repair program in Grand Rapids, Michigan and it’s a super cool deal. They’ve fixed over 300,000 Chacos, and in 6 to 8 weeks your beloved pair is back on foot. Other companies will fix gear as well, Patagonia included. Before you replace, always see if you can repair. It’s often the most affordable and sustainable option.

Want to read the entirety of our gear coverage? You can still purchase both the Spring and Summer Issues! Find them here.

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Print Excerpt: The Summer Issue
Author: Kubie Brown

I used to head into the outdoors with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Being a 6-foot-4 ex-rugby player and boxer turned fishing and hunting guide, I went at nature with all of the head-down, straight-up-the-middle energy I’d take into a bar fight. Tromping through the mountains like Paul Bunyan on a high protein diet, I figured I would simply run over whatever obstacles were put in front of me because I was the toughest thing on two legs.

I never factored in how the environment might react to me. No matter how big, tall, or tough you are, nature is a complete badass. If you push against her, she’ll be more than happy to push back.

I’ve been a guide for over ten years and a wandering, backcountry outdoor junkie for most of my adult life. Over that time, I’ve fished, hunted, and hiked in some truly magnificent wilderness. But I’ve also evolved. I’ve gone from a take-no-prisoners conqueror type who hurled himself at the outdoors with reckless bravado to a respectful and considerate outdoorsman. This transformation came after having several encounters with creatures bigger than me, who helped realize that I was going about things all wrong.

About 12 years ago, a big animal entirely humbled me in the outdoors for the first time, and it wasn’t something I was even thinking about. I hiked alone into a backcountry pond hoping to catch a few trout and as I was standing on the open bank casting, I suddenly had to pee. Being away from the public eye, I simply unzipped and began to relieve myself in the pond, but as soon as my urine hit the water, I quickly realized that I wasn’t alone after all. Hearing a crashing sound in the brush behind me that sounded like a troop of hikers coming through the woods, I quickly zipped up and turned around to greet them — only to see a mature bull moose staring me down.

The branch-antlered bull came out of the trees at a trot only a few yards away, tilting his head from side to side and making a series of undulating grunts. I barely had time to register the wild creature’s majesty before suddenly realizing the moose was coming right at me. Dropping my fly rod, I ran to the nearest tree with the bull hot on my tail. Ducking around the trunk, I tried to hide behind it, but the bull came around after me. To date, it’s the oddest and scariest game of Ring-Around-The-Rosie I have ever experienced.

For a full five minutes, the moose chased me in a circle around the tree, his antlers practically tickling my spine as I stayed just ahead of him, the image of being gored and stomped into red velvet pudding running through my mind. I had a .22 pistol in a hip holster but figured that shooting the bull with it would be about as effective as trying to stop a freight train with a BB gun. Plus, I would probably only make him more angry. So I fired the pistol in the air, hoping the sound would frighten him off.

It didn’t.

We stood for a few minutes facing one another from opposite sides of the tree in a tense standoff before the bull finally turned and, with a final grunt, sauntered off back into the forest. It was getting dark by then. I packed up and then hiked the most terrifying walk back to the truck I’d ever experienced — where every rustle in the shadowy brush made me jump like a house cat seeing a cucumber.

I later learned from a buddy who worked as a hunting guide that bull moose often urinate audibly in water to mark their territory and declare their presence to others. I realized that the encounter, while aggressive, was likely the moose reacting to me unintentionally speaking its language. He probably wondered why the hell I was claiming the pond that was rightfully his and had to suss me out. I vowed to never take a loud piss in moose country again, or at least not until after I’d made sure the coast was clear. Only a few years later, I found out that things can still go wrong with a big animal, even when you seem to be doing everything right.

As diligent guides and complete fly fishing junkies, my friend Dave and I decided to scout a potential fishing spot for clients in Yellowstone National Park. We hiked deep into the park’s interior, intending to fish a creek that flowed through an open meadow which we hoped would be chock-full of willing cutthroat trout. When we reached the meadow, we both noticed a bull bison laying on top of a small hill near the water. Keeping more than a respectful distance from the animal as we both had seen more than our fair share of selfie-taking tourists being tossed and gored when they got too close, we skirted the edge of the knoll. As the creek horse-shoed around the slope, I stopped to cast to a rising trout while Dave walked around the corner in search of another pool.

As Dave disappeared around the bend, the bull bison stood up and moved off the hill. I paid him no mind as he was quite a ways off concentrating on making a good cast and drifting my fly to the rising fish just seemed more important. In fact, I was so intent on my quarry, I didn’t even hear Dave scream.

Unbeknownst to me, the bison spotted Dave walking along the bank and — despite being more than 50 yards away from the animal — the bull charged and chased Dave into the river. Diving under the water, Dave swam beneath an undercut bank, effectively hiding from the bison which snorted and bellowed as it searched for him. Unable to find its original target, the bull wandered off and came around the hill, where it spotted me standing on the bank 100 yards away.

The ground suddenly began to vibrate beneath my feet. I raised my head and looked around for a moment, hoping to see an unexpected geyser eruption, floor cracking earthquake, or something of that nature. Then I turned and looked behind me.

“Jesus Christ!” I yelled, spotting the oncoming hairy juggernaut bearing down on me from only a few feet away.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure I did a fair impression of the man himself as I leapt from the bank and practically ran across the surface of the water as the bison plowed into the creek behind me.

I got to the other side of the stream, but the steep bank prevented me from climbing out of the water. I turned around and looked at the bison standing chest deep in the water, blowing like a bellows and staring at me like a bowling ball eyeing up the last pin standing. He moved to the edge of the bank where I had been and hooked his horns into the earth, tossing chunks of grass and stone high into the air. I tried walking through the creek away from the bison. But he stayed with me, mirroring every step I took from the other side of the river.

I thought I was in real trouble when I noticed a pair of bison cows standing a few yards downstream from the bull. Knowing he’d continue to parallel me, I walked towards the cows and as I passed them, the bull seemed to calm down. Finally, he stopped to socialize. Taking my chance, I crossed to the bison’s side of the river and ran straight up the hill, almost colliding with a soaking wet Dave coming up from the other side.

“Did you see that *#* bison charge me!?” We screamed in unison.

To this day, we still can’t figure out what we did to agitate the bison. Perhaps we’d accidentally gotten between the bull and his cows. Maybe he just didn’t like the sound or sight of two tiny idiots waving fly rods around in his river. Whatever the reason, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t respect the bison enough. He quickly put us in our place.

To be honest, I’d always sort of looked down on tourists that had been roughed up by wildlife in Yellowstone because I thought they brought it on themselves by getting too close. Now, I think that at least some of them may just not have been paying enough attention to the animals' mood. It was something I noted and kept in mind whenever I guided. Eventually it would save my clients from becoming just another park statistic, and perhaps even save my own life.

I’ve always had a special fear of grizzlies. They’re the largest, strongest creatures in the woods and they just felt like that neighborhood kid who you know is tougher than you and so do your best to avoid them. But as an avid outdoorsman and guide who is constantly marching or leading folks through bear country, I was inevitably going to face up to one sooner or later.

A few years after the bison encounter, I once again found myself in Yellowstone, this time as a fishing guide. My clients were a couple from New York City who had wanted a day of fly fishing in the park but didn’t realize it included dealing with insects. The river I intended to fish absolutely swarmed with biting black flies. After a couple minutes of swatting them away, my clients wanted to move on to a new spot. So, we drove to a small creek near the main road where the trout are smaller, but the bugs are few and far between.

I remember getting out of the truck and having a bit of an uneasy feeling as I looked out at the creek dotted with thick patches of brush. It seemed too quiet, but I quickly shrugged it off as I wanted to just get the day over with. We took a path down a hill and along the edge of the creek. As I walked ahead of them, I kept up a steady banter about trout species and the art of fly fishing. Then, just as we rounded a turn in the trail that led to a particularly juicy looking pool, I heard sticks break in the brush to our right and turned to look—all I saw was fur.

It's important to note that whenever I take people into the outdoors, I always tell them not to run from bears. My clients hadn’t listened because as soon as the grizzly broke out of the brush and came rushing towards us, they both took off like squirrels running from an unchained dog. I don’t know whether it was a heroic or stupid move but as the bear turned towards my fleeing clients, I instinctively ran straight at it. Waving my arms and howling like a madman, I cut off the charging grizzly, drawing his attention to me. Then, I grabbed for the bear spray I carried in my bib pocket — and promptly dropped it down my waders.

As bear spray slid down past my knee and out of reach,I knew that I was in serious trouble. As I faced down the grizz, I yelled and waved my arms, trying to make myself as big as possible. At the same time, I tried to get a hand to the spray in the vicinity of my ankle. The bear stood in front of me, close enough to smell his breath. He popped his teeth and tossed his head. I tried backing up. But when I did, the bear came towards me. So I stopped, planted my feet, and continued to bellow at the top of my lungs, feeling like this might be it. However, after a few more seconds that felt like hours with the grizzly squaring up but not attacking and my voice now getting hoarse from shouting, I decided on a new, more gentle tactic — I broke into song.

“Hey bear, good bear, nice bear, go away bear,” I awkwardly crooned. The effect was astounding as the grizzly suddenly lowered his head, stopped popping his teeth, and just stared at me for a few more agonizing seconds. We had surprised him, probably interrupted his midafternoon nap, and he had reacted accordingly and when I was yelling and waving my arms, I probably seemed like I wanted to scrap. Now, like the moose, he seemed to accept that I wasn’t a threat, or maybe he just thought I had a decent singing voice. Then, as if he suddenly remembered having other more pressing business to attend to, the grizzly turned and lumbered away into the brush, leaving me in stunned silence.

I walked back up the hill to the truck and was immediately charged again — though this time it was by my clients, a passing park ranger, and a few tourists who had heard the word ‘bear.’ Waving everyone off, I assured them that I was fine and walked back to my truck where I immediately collapsed on legs suddenly turned to Jell-o. Thankfully, the bear saved me from the crowd’s concern and complete humiliation. He popped up over the hill a few hundred yards away to pose, distracting everyone long enough for me to take a few deep breaths and then casually reach down in my waders to retrieve my bear spray without anyone being the wiser.

I still don’t quite understand why I’ve had so many close encounters with animals when so many other outdoorsfolk have had few or even none. Perhaps it’s because I used to put out a certain alpha aura that caused big animals to challenge me. Maybe as a hunter, angler, and guide, I’m simply outside enough to increase the odds — or maybe I just have a punchable face. Whatever the reason, whether I’ve done something right or done something wrong, having been chased and charged several times over has taught me a lot about living with and not against the natural world.

I never held any sort of grudge or malice towards any of the animals I encountered. I invaded their territories, freely stumbling, stomping, and pissing my way through like I owned the place. I was bold and brash and had forgotten or perhaps never truly realized that I was an outsider, a guest in a realm that I wasn’t treating with the proper respect. And as a cocky visitor, I was treated accordingly. It taught me a lot.

Now, whenever I set foot outdoors, I go with the right state of mind by stepping lightly and listening carefully to what the natural world around me is saying. I pay attention to instinctive signs and watch wildlife carefully, always remembering that I’m a visitor who must mind his manners and do his best to stay humble.

Kubie Brown is a fishing and hunting guide who masquerades as an outdoor writer while playing in the mountains and rivers of Southwest Montana. When he’s not fishing, hunting, or writing, Kubie spends most of his time tying flies, playing rugby, and insisting to everyone that he has a real job.

Sally Madden is an artist and cartoonist, she hosts the Thick Lines podcast and co-edits The Comics Journal site. She loves the taste of pine needles and is allergic to bees.

This first appeared as a feature in The Westrn’s quarterly newspaper.

Annual subscribers receive issues per year, in addition to our digital long reads. We’re currently offering 20% off annual subscriptions through July 15, or you can purchase the Summer Issue at the same discount using this link.

More on that in a minute, but if you’re already a dedicated reader and want to learn how to get your hands on 32 pages of genuine paper-and-ink filled with outdoor writing that makes you feel something, read on.

TODAY ONLY: Get 20% Off Print Subscriptions + $5 Off Individual Copies of the Summer 2025 Issue

Our Substack subscription includes four print issues per year — plus full online access to our work through Substack. Don’t forget to send us your address via this form to get on the mailing list!

Individual newspaper copies are $15 per copy — including shipping — at The Westrn Store.

But — TODAY you can get 20% off both. Why? We send final files to print tomorrow. This means you’ll be on the list for first available copies.

For Subscribers: Get 20% off our annual Substack + Print Subscription

For Individual Copies: Last Call for $10 Individual Print Pre-Orders via our Online Store

Meet our Summer 2025 Issue — A 32-Page Newsprint Magazine

Below, you’ll find some of the incredible contributors and pieces in the Summer 2025 issue. While the spring issue tended toward a theme of subversion, our summer edition hews closer to land and wildlife, with a theme of celebrating complex relationships with nature and the outdoors.

• A funny and transformative feature essay about facing up to predators, from outdoor writer and guide Kubie Brown

• Brown also profiles Livingston’s Hatch Finders Fly Shop as a local standout —dedicated to building rods, river-specific flies, and tight community

• Trace the melancholic steps of the Lower 48’s last mountain caribou herd in the Selkirk Mountains of Idaho with Jack Kredell

• Sit in the passenger seat with a deer biologist answering burning questions about white-tailed deer, while carving out a space for herself in rural Idaho, courtesy of journalist Kathleen Shannon

• Struggle and succeed alongside writer Sylvia Dekker as she takes on extreme Zone 3 gardening

• Kestrel Keller’s beloved story Trail Magic is our digital-to-print feature this quarter

• Attend a Bureau of Land Management Wild Horse and Donkey Adoption Event alongside our own Nicole Qualtieri — who has every intention of leaving without a new critter

• A grilled perch recipe from long-time wild food expert Jenny Nguyen-Wheatley

• Climbing guide and fellow Substacker Teddy Dondanville writes a profile of New York’s famed Gunks for the Eastrn

• Angler Brian Worthington makes his case for the back seat of the drift boat

• Photojournalist Aaron Agosto takes us behind the scenes at a family-run rodeo open to all

• Original illustrations by graphic artist and comics podcaster Sally Madden

• Kestrel interviews former Montana gubernatorial candidate and long-time public lands advocate Ryan Busse

• Our resident dirtbag Rachelle Schrute offers her sage advice regarding flatulence in the field.

• Nicole’s much-loved “Reining Horses” sketch becomes our back page gift wrap

• The ‘Crosswrd’ returns, with a “Summer Favorites” theme

Get the Issue at Its Most Affordable TODAY Only

Our Substack subscription includes four print issues per year — plus full online access to our work through Substack. Don’t forget to send us your address via this form to get on the mailing list!

Individual newspaper copies are $15 per copy — including shipping — at The Westrn Store.

Why We Hope You’ll Subscribe

Our Summer Issue, to me, reflects that sense of becoming on public lands that we’re all so desperate to hold onto. Writers pitched along an unintended theme of transformation and connection to the lands beneath their feet — whether it’s attempting to garden in Canada’s Zone 3 or facing down the alpha males of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with tongue firmly in cheek.

I know everyone asks for money money money these days. (Ugh.) Instead, I hope you’ll think about what outdoor stories mean to you and what they’re worth — especially as public and Tribal lands and waters continue to be under attack. While we started this project as an antidote to the divisive news grind, we also believe stories that touch on the essence of nature and humanity serve as a form of advocacy.

In a world where content is mostly free, but your attention is the product — supporting family-run, independent outdoor media seems like a fair trade to read yourself into new places, adventures, and hopefully community.

Thank you to everyone who has taken a chance on this project in the last year. We’re so grateful for your support and encouragement during the challenging early days of building an audience for something new.

Wishing you many storied adventures this summer —

Nicole (EIC) & Kestrel (Executive Editor)

Today, nobody blinks when I wear pants — which is, regrettably, most of the time. I actually love wearing dresses. You’d never know, though. Rural Montana is a sore beast when it comes to opportunities to dress up. I have lamentations about this.

Anyway.

Clicker training — in the popular horse world — is akin to women wearing pants in the mid-20th century. I went many years under trainers who would chew you out for giving a horse a treat.

“They get muggy,” the trainers said. “You’re spoiling them.”

Food is Both Survival & Motivation

Under the circumstances, they weren’t wrong. Horses get intense about food when they’re fed on a regular schedule. If a barn feeds stalled horses every morning at 7am, feed them ten minutes late and catch the ruckus of the barn. Pawing, neighing, posturing. You’ll see it all.

Food is, after all, survival. It’s in a horse’s best interest to get as much of it as possible. But in times of plenty — as in domesticated life — we humans are tasked with managing their intake, lest they, like us, become fat off both the land and the hand.

But it remains that food is the primary motivating factor for 99% of equines. And, of course, many four-legged and even two-legged animals among us. My mom potty trained me with M&Ms. I still remember the colorful glass jar of candy sitting on the back of the toilet. The power of M&Ms compelled me. To date, I have mastered the art of using the bathroom. Thank you, Mom…and M&Ms.

A Mare Named Lou

A mare named Lou inspired me to get more into clicker training when I couldn’t get her past a sour attitude. I bought her for a song. And together, we learned the basics of horsemanship. I’d never worked with horses that weren’t “made.” That is, fully trained. Lou was what we call ‘green’ and she was, perhaps, the greatest teacher I’ve had.

I knew someone had clicker trained Lou a bit. When I bought her, she knew how to ‘smile’ and would show her teeth in a silly bid for a treat. I decided to give it a whirl, and a brand new horse bloomed in front of me. She was always good-hearted, but she became good-minded, excited to see me. She’d meet me at the gate to come play. I taught her how to hand me a bottled drink. I got her almost to the point where she’d get it out of the cooler.

Tricks are fun. But the better aspect was how smoothly our riding relationship bloomed when I added the clicker into her sour spots. After two years, I sold Lou at a decent profit to a cute family who wanted to trail ride, and she was a doll for that. I’m grateful for our time together, and for the gift that ‘smile’ gave me. An intro to ‘clicker training’ had begun.

Clicker Training 101

The history of clicker training started in scientific labs. Really, it’s operant conditioning — which is a branch off of classical conditioning.

Remember Pavlov’s dogs? That is classical conditioning. That’s akin to the horses causing a ruckus at 7am as soon as they hear the barn door open and a human walking toward the grain bins. They’re conditioned to the stimulus of both time and sound. I assure you, before that human walks in, there are expectations of arrival.

Operant conditioning is attributed mostly to B.F. Skinner, though a man named Edward L. Thorndike developed the initial theory of ‘instrumental learning’ and the ‘law of effect’ . Skinner, however, popularized the system.

At its most basic, operant conditioning is the notion that an individual will repeat a behavior that are rewarded and will diminish behaviors that result in unpleasant outcomes.

It relies solely on the operant — or the student, in my case, a wild donkey — to determine which behaviors he chooses to repeat. Choice is the most important word here, because it’s up to the trainer to set up the conditions for the student to make the best choice.

To me, choice is the most important element of this training tool. More on that in a bit.

Positive Reinforcement has Nothing to do With Positivity

There’s so much on the internet about the four quadrants of operant conditioning, and I encourage you to read up on them. But for now I’ll tell you that they are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.

The four quadrants can be confusing because we English speakers have preconceived notions about these words that don’t apply here. Positive and negative simply mean addition and subtraction. Reinforcement aims to increase a behavior, and punishment intends to decrease a behavior. Better put:

1. Positive reinforcement — adding a desired stimulus to increase behavior

2. Negative reinforcement — subtracting an aversive stimulus to increase behavior

3. Positive punishment — adding an aversive stimulus to decrease behavior

4. Negative punishment — subtracting a desired stimulus to decrease behavior

This gets confusing. Here are some clear examples.

1. Positive reinforcement: giving a treat after a dog sits on command

2. Negative reinforcement: the car stops beeping once you’ve put your seatbelt on

3. Positive punishment: getting a speeding ticket after, well, speeding

4. Negative punishment: Taking away a teen’s phone when they’ve broken curfew

This is where things begin to get fun.

Clicker Training, A Highly Effective Tool in the Training Toolbox

Clicker training as a tool uses positive reinforcement to increase behaviors. There are people online attach themselves to the idea that positive reinforcement is the only way because of the assumed positivity of the endeavor. This is a falsehood.

The issue is that I also use aids to get to the behavior. Halter pressure, for one, is an excellent tool to communicate. If I am putting pressure on the halter to encourage my donkey to back up, I can release the pressure once he takes a step back (negative reinforcement), mark the step back with a click (a conditioned reinforcer), and then give a treat to even more deeply reinforce that behavior (positive reinforcement).

Let’s say my donkey responds to the pressure by trying to bolt. I may have to dig my heels in, use an exorbitant amount of pressure to turn the donkey’s head toward me, and say “No!” to tell him that this is not acceptable. This is positive punishment (the post-behavior increased pressure & additive verbal cue) followed by negative reinforcement (the release of pressure when the donkey stops moving).

Releasing the donkey when he bolts is an unfortunate but sometimes accidental outcome. It provides the whole scale release of pressure following an unwanted behavior. This is negative reinforcement, to the nth degree. Moments like this are where we see horses learn to buck riders off, pull away from people, or worse. The release of pressure is so powerful a tool with equines that most people rely on it as their main tool — often without understanding the underlying construct.

Clicker training gives us a tool to do more with less. Plus, it’s fun.

I use clicker training to create a deeper understanding about pressure cues, to see pressure as a conversation rather than a tool, and to get an outcome that both of us are happier with. I have friends who are phenomenal riders and trainers with a tremendous amount of what horseman call ‘feel’. I don’t have that talent, but I can figure out the timing with a clicker.

How I’m Using It Right Now, with Brasso the Wild Donkey

The first step to clicker training is what clicker trainers call “loading the click.”

To teach the animal that a reward is coming, you use a marking sound in combination with a treat. I click my tongue, since I’m ADHD and lose clickers. You can also say “Yes!” or bang a drum. Basically, any sound you associate the treat with works. Blow a high C note on a tenor sax. Or say the word “Sick!” Anything works. Consistence is key.

Both donkeys are currently in a phase of ‘intolerance’ with humans. They currently have the choice to not allow me in their space, and for the most part, this is what they choose.

Brasso, the big shaggy donkey, belongs to my friend Elise. He’s more intolerant of me in his space, but is now conditioned to the clicker. If I click, he knows a treat is coming. Since he’s less tolerant of me, I’m training him through the fence, meaning he has the option to leave. But he will now touch a target — I use a long livestock whip — and follow it, touching it with his nose. When he touches it, I click then treat. I can also pet him with the whip, click a moment where I see him get more comfortable, and treat. This will lead to me being able to pet him, probably pretty soon.

But, giving him the choice means that we move at his speed. I’m happy to do that.

Kevin, A Different Kind of Wild Donkey

Brasso has been out of the ‘wild’ for a little over a year, he’s younger and more curious, but also more scared. At 13, he’s young for a donkey. They can live well into their forties.

Kevin, on the other hand, is 21. He’s been in captivity for three years and has a clear dislike for humans and a general curmudgeonly attitude with other beings, including Brasso.

Funny enough, Kevin is more tolerant of me in his space than Brasso. After a few retreat/approach sessions, he learned to like the feeling of the lunge whip petting him. He’ll now stand next to me, smell me up and down, and lean into me with his body. I can scratch his neck, pet his back, and feel comfortable with him in my space. Initially, if I turned my back on him, he’d pin his ears and stomp at me. He’s stopped that. He’s decided I’m his friend.

The one thing he isn’t interested in is taking a treat directly from my hand. He is scared of anything under his nose. His eyes sit high on his head, which means his eyesight is limited underneath him.

I have to figure out how to slow down my steps to help him feel more comfortable, but Kevin is also more tolerant of easy negative reinforcement. He is more resilient to pressure than Brasso. Remember, it’s not a worse sort of reinforcement. For him, I can do less training — in a way — and get the same result.

For now, Kev and I will work toward clicker training and live in a very intentional state of limited pressure and big releases.

Well, This Got Long AF, but Here are Some Resources

Remember when I said a lot of horse folk hate treats? Telling horsepeople that you clicker train can earn you an immediate ‘idiot’ status in the field. But, I think the results speak for themselves over time.

I also think they’re right. Giving a horse treats without conditions will illicit a response, whether you want it to or not. Oftentimes, that response sucks. Horses get bity, pushy, they ‘mug’ you as trainers say.

But clicker training induces the opposite. When I work with Seven — who is further along — she will show me every trick in the book trying to see where the ‘click’ will come in. She can ring a bell, step on a plastic bag, back up, move sideways, stop quickly, and more, and she’ll show you all of it before she’d ever think of mugging you for a treat.

Why? Because the ‘click’ indicates the reward. Instead of begging for treats, she begs for the conditioned reinforcer.

My clicker trained Boykin Spaniel is the same way. He’ll go through every trick in the book to see where the ‘click’ will come from.

And that’s where treat-aversive people are, in fact, missing an advantageous tool in a program. A conditioned reinforcer marks the exact moment a behavior occurs AND quickly communicates to the horse that it is correct. It’s an incredible opportunity for precision.

That said, I’m still learning. I’ve leaned on the following books. And I’m excited to keep the donkeys going. More to come.

Clicker Training for Horses — Alexander Kurland
Clicker Training for Dogs — Karen Pryor
Don’t Shoot the Dog: The Art of Teaching & Training — Karen Pryor (ignore the title, the book is great)

The current Republican budget requires disposing of 3.3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land over the next five years — that is, if it passes the Senate. The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources amendment also qualifies nearly 300 million acres of public land in 11 Western states for sale to private parties.

This June 17th addition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), goes beyond past public land privatization schemes in the scale of affected land, and its lack of transparency and oversight in who decides which lands are sold, who can buy them, and what they can do with them.

If you were ever going to light both your ass and hair on fire while pooping your pants about something related to public lands — this is the time to do it. We left the world of “they won’t really do that” or “the courts will stop them” or “someone else is going to solve this” months ago.

Info on how to easily contact your reps is available at the bottom of this article, as well as an example script, since time is of the essence.

It’s time to behave like this land grab will happen if we don’t put an end to it now.

Understanding What Lands are Threatened Through Mapping

Hint: It’s a little confusing. The maps highlight areas that could be eligible for sale, not lands that will be sold.

The Outdoor Alliance built on The Wilderness Society’s mapping work to put visuals to actual locations of multi-use federal public land (aka your favorite spots) that would be eligible for sale in Wyoming, Alaska, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, Washington and Oregon.

The maps highlight hundreds of millions of acres that could potentially be disposed of, and believe me, many politicians are reaching for that goal and have been for a long time. We see you, Rep. Mike Lee of Utah.

My Professional Assessment After Studying the Map

The unprecedented nature of this proposal makes the public land transfer battles we’ve seen in the last five or ten years look quaint. This isn’t transferring federal land to Utah, or other states, to manage. How cute that we once talked about how state management may not be as effective as federal management. Or that it’s all a thinly veiled ploy to, gasp, sell our public land.

Today, we’re going straight from public ownership, to private real estate development with no stop in between. This is what getting robbed in broad daylight looks like.

I don’t say any of this lightly, and I typically avoid anything that hews too close to alarmist language. But we don’t live in normal times.

So for now, I’m not reporting on this in a traditional sense here, or anywhere. I’m a journalist and I’m telling you that more information is not going to solve this problem. Congress is about to be a mile down the street defrauding us of one of the most American things about America, while the rest of us are still figuring out how to put our pants on.

Risking The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Wyoming Range, Wildlife Habitat, and So Much More

In a Wyofile article about this amendment, the first I happened to read, I learned that the entire Wyoming Range would be up for grabs. I also saw that places in the Wind River Range and around Star Valley are included too.

My first thought: Kiss any hope for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as we know it goodbye.

Wildlife management in the last decade has increasingly focused on the reality that conservation needs to happen on large landscapes, and that requires big collaboratives of people who manage federal, state, and private land. We’re well along the path of realizing that we can’t simply manage national parks, wilderness, national forests, and wildlife refuges like islands.

But this bill encourages exactly that.

I went to the map and zoomed in to see a pattern of pale green sky islands surrounded by dark green parcels. The dark green represents nearly 300 million acres of public land that would be eligible for sale according to the bill’s language and the Outdoor Alliance’s GIS analysis.

Those pale green islands are what personally lit my hair on fire. Many of them are federally designated Wilderness Areas and National Parks, which wouldn’t be eligible for sale.

But simply developing the land around them has a strong potential to sever them from their landscapes. It’s easy to look at the map and see potential development patterns that could make mule deer and sage grouse populations, just to name a couple, shit the bed.

Recreational Access Will Surely Diminish

The map shows potential not only for an excess of habitat fragmentation and degradation nightmares, but also an access mess for hunters, backpackers, backcountry skiers, ATVers, horse packers, and people trying to access cultural resources. Landlocked public lands are already a growing issue.

Disposing of federal land as proposed in the Senate bill seems like accelerating it by handing exclusive public land access to the wealthiest among us. For anyone who has followed Montana’s Crazy Mountain public access saga, I’m imagining it repeating again and again thanks to this bill. But notably, not in Montana, because the Senate bill exempts it from this scheme.

The Energy and Natural Resource Committee’s fact sheet notes that most of the land going up for sale in the next five years is within five miles of population centers. As if that should comfort us.

That proximity is exactly what makes that land valuable for people trying to get their close to town runs, bike rides, nature walks with kids, foraging, and target practice after work. It boggles my mind to think that popular mountain bike trails like the Lunch Loop trails outside of Fruita, Colorado and Hartman Rocks outside of Gunnison, Colorado are included in this. Other iconic cycling and/or offroading areas affected include places close to Moab — like Behind the Rocks and Porcupine Rim.

Popular backcountry skiing zones like Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah and Snoqualmie Pass in Washington are in the mix. All told, according to the Outdoor Alliance this would affect an area that includes nearly 100,000 miles of trails, more than 45,000 climbing routes and bouldering areas, and 3,405 river miles.

This is Not About Affordable Housing

It’s interesting that Congress suddenly cares about national scale affordable housing policy when it can be used to commodify public land. As others have pointed out, Las Vegas already has an arrangement allowing them to use federal public land to alleviate housing issues on an as-needed basis.

If this were a good faith effort to solve the housing crisis, or solve any problem besides enriching modern robber barons with our assets, we’d be looking at something much more targeted and surgical than an 11 state proposal stuffed into a reconciliation bill.

Federal Land-Based Welfare for WUI Developers

So we’re just going to build “affordable” housing in harm’s way? It gets a lot less affordable when you factor in the cost of defending it against wildfire — or rebuilding after.

California is already having an insurance crisis, partly fueled by wildfire. In May, the nonpartisan research group, Headwaters Economics, published an analysis of how effective public land development would be at solving housing affordability. Wildlife risk is a major limitation, concluding that more than half of federal land near communities with housing needs have high wildfire risk.

We know how this story ends because of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or almost any flood in the southern U.S. — where the poorest neighborhoods are in the floodplain for reasons. Remember, DOGE fired all the government’s environmental justice staff, but nature and insurance premiums don’t know the difference between woke and negative externalities.

The Deficit is Far Bigger Than This Attempt at Incrementalism

We should be asking why politicians want to sell our irreplaceable assets to cover debt. This is blatant fiscal irresponsibility. Everyone knows it’s better to reduce spending before putting precious family heirlooms in hock.

Someone get Dave Ramsey down here to give Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the entirety of Congress a stern talking to.

A Sell-Off Primed for Corruption and Conflict

One sneaky piece of this that makes me lose my mind is that once this bill passes, it lacks a public process for land disposal, moving sales through on a rapid timeline. It fails to allow Tribes input on the disposal process, or right of first refusal to acquire unceded land, ancestral homelands, or sacred sites.

The Wilderness Society cites concern that “the bill sets up relatively under-resourced state and local governments to lose open bidding wars to well-heeled commercial interests.” If someone wanted to design a process to generate more conflict and division in Western communities, this bill would be a good template.

Even if you believe selling public land will alleviate the very real affordable housing crisis, this is a shoddy solution. I don’t care what side of this debate someone is on, we ALL deserve better.

You know how the British army sucked during the American Revolution because they marched in one big blob with red coats that stuck out in the eastern hardwood forest? That’s what we get to fight now, one big problem in Congress.

If the bill passes, it will turn into local skirmishes in 11 states. The national multi-user coalition that could fight this today will be so much harder to rally around local backyard issues. Read: it’s much easier to join together in cowing our senators away from this now than it is to fight it on our home turfs later.

Let’s be pains in their asses now, so we don’t all have to act like NIMBYs later.

Let Your Reps Know: The Answer Is No

Congress has a self-imposed deadline to pass their budget by July 4. Reconciliation bills only need a simple majority to pass. Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) stripped a different public land transfer amendment before the House voted on their budget. So we don’t know if this one will survive.

We also can’t afford to risk the possibility that it might. Don’t count on Zinke, and don’t get distracted by promises that officials are pro-public lands. Our calls to action aren’t that different from anyone else's. But if you aren’t usually one to raise a stink, it’s time to get big mad and crush this proposal.

Get your sledneck neighbor and gorp-gargling cousin together and let them know that it’s time to hold hands for the kind of unlikely political alliance that mainstream media loves and disingenuous politicians hate.

Call your representatives now, before it’s too late, and you have to join a Bass Pro-sponsored monkey wrench gang or chain yourself to a tree next to your favorite trail like some kind of REI-branded Julia Butterfly Hill. Go to their town halls if they still have them. Find them, and respectfully let them know you aren’t happy with this amendment and never will be.

Note the 3.5% Protest Guideline

Based on research of past movements, this is a tipping point of negative nonviolent public opinion that can sway leaders to actually change their decisions, while they’re representing us — We The People.

It doesn’t take lot to get there, but it does take a concentrated effort from a coalition of like-minded people.

Messaging Can be Hard: Here’s Some Help

Want to help others with their messaging? Copy and share your favorite text about why this is a shockingly bad idea to user group Reddit and Facebook groups and other forums. I saw someone mention they shared the info to their paragliding group and folks appreciated knowing. If you’ve gotten this far you are probably orders of magnitudes more tuned into this stuff than most people.

I’ve seen some people get creative with the the boots-on-the-ground route too, making ‘For Sale’ signs to put up at popular trailheads.

If you’re skeptical about calling your reps, phone calls do actually work, especially when a lot of people call about an issue. Phone calls also get tallied immediately by staffers and sent to reps. It’s the fastest way for them to get feedback on what their constituents think.

It’s also really easy. The switchboard just asks you to say your rep’s name, then immediately connects you to a mailbox.

Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Find Your Member of Congress

Sample script:

Hi, my name is [your name] and I am a constituent from [your state]. I’m calling to urge Senator [your senator] to oppose selling or otherwise disposing of federal public land. I am asking that [your senator] vote no on One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R 1) if it contains amendments that promote public land sale or transfer such as those recently proposed by Senator Lee and Senator Daines.

I am a [something about you and how you use public lands, why you care about this, or why it is personal to you and/or your family]. If this policy moves forward [how you will be affected]. [And/or something about why this matters to you on a large scale].

Optional: I support affordable housing policy, deficit reduction, and common sense public land management (or whatever). I strongly oppose selling BLM, Forest Service, or any other federal land to address these issues.

I ask that you proactively work with other members of Congress to steward federal public land on behalf of all Americans.

Thank you for your time and your work on behalf of [your state].

This is not the Norm for The Westrn

We started this publication as a creative pursuit, not a news or advocacy project. One of our goals is to help both ourselves and our readers recover from the overstimulation and desensitization that comes from a punishing and hyperbolic news cycle.

While we engage with conservation news and activities in other parts of our lives, we maintain this space for making meaning from experiences on public lands, more than reporting on current events impacting them.

But some moments are consequential enough that saying nothing is not only impossible, it also feels irresponsible. We want our readers who don’t know us personally to understand that this article’s style is rare both for this publication and for us as individuals.

We hope that tells you something about the gravity of this moment.

We want this piece to lead to action, and hope it gives people already in the fight an extra shot of resolve.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced the amendment with Mike Lee (R-UT). Daines discussed the bill’s language with Lee. Daines’ platform thus far is that he opposes public land sales and any done would have to be very, very narrow in scope. At the same time, Daines supports the Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Today, I’m breaking down my health assessment of the fellas, where we’re at, and where we’re headed. You can read their origin story here, and I’ll be writing a more formal piece about these boys and the adoption process for the Summer Issue of The Westrn’s newsprint magazine — which you can preorder here for $10.

Now, on to donkmanship.

Names!

I’ve been calling my donk Kevin Franklin, after my family’s favorite Sinbad character in the cult classic 90’s movie Houseguest. (Why? Kev was born and spent most of his life in Sinbad, Utah!) If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend. Phil Hartman and Sinbad play off each other hilariously, in a hijinks film where Kevin Franklin gets in all sorts of trouble. Welcome to the family, ol’ Kev.

Elise still needs to name her dude, but I’ve been calling him the Shagamuffin. We’ll see what she goes with. He’s extremely cute, and the friendlier of the two at the moment. But Kev is comin’ around.

No Emergency Care Needed: Infections, Coat, Hooves

Some of the donkeys in the sale had obvious things that needed to be treated on what I’d call a close-to-emergency basis. Thankfully, many of them got adopted by people ready to care for them.

A BLM vet told me that many of the donks had flystrike on their legs — which looked wildly painful and is so gross. I don’t recommend reading about it. Some of it looked like scratches or mud fever to me, which would vibe with the time the donkeys had spent in Kansas mud prior to coming to Montana. These boys do have little bits of scabbing, but nothing compared to some others in the group, and they are healing nicely in their big dry run rather than — ick — oozing.

Their coats are both matted to some degree, though the nutrition I’ve been giving is helping shine them up and shed them out. Mules and donkeys shed later in the summer than horses, and I’m hoping that by the time they’re really starting to shed, I’ll be grooming them and getting their coat problems under control. That said, the mats don’t look painful, just annoying, and likely hot as the days are growing warmer.

Thankfully, DOGE allowed the BLM caretakers time to trim their hooves at some point in the past few months. Hoof care can become an emergency situation real quick if left untreated, but by the time they’ll need their hooves done again, I will have them both in hand and hopefully trained for my farrier. Thankfully, he is a very kind horseman happy to take his time with green — or less trained — animals. If they’re not ready, we have options to contain them and provide safe hoof care.

Deworming is not as Simple as Ivermectin

I do need to pick up a pack of edible dewormer to run another round through these boys, as they’ve only been given Ivermectin through the BLM. Though I personally don’t recommend Ivermectin for COVID treatment, it is great for killing a lot of worms, but a variety of other dewormers are needed to prevent tolerance in parasites as well as kill multiple varieties of worms.

Ugh. Parasites. Hate hate double hate. Deworming is a funny dance these days, with certain parasites growing tolerant because of over-deworming, and many horseman not doing it all. My mule Mojo likely has intestinal scarring from lack of deworming — which just means he farts a lot — but after an aggressive cycle over the past year, he is looking phenomenal. We’ll get these boys on the same track.

For now, I’ll buy dewormer available as a feed supplement instead of attempting to deworm them with a tube. It’s a great option for horses who are unhandled.

Colorado State provides exceptional guidelines on how to best accomplish a deworming schedule, and as an alum, I have to shout it out here.

Blooming Friendships, Accepted Frenemies

Donkeys are notoriously great at guarding livestock. We can also interpret this as the following — they are intolerant of a lot of small predatory species.

Read: they are wired to dislike dogs and cats. I have both.

When the boys first got here, they would stalk the dogs along the fence line with their big ears far forward, looking extremely friendly. Then, at the last second, they’d pin their ears back and stomp with both front feet as hard as they could. They almost got my poor feral cat Rickety Cricket when I couldn’t get there first — and honestly, I think they could have — but it’s sort of like a bluff charge from a grizz. Their hearts aren’t totally in it.

Yesterday, my spaniel Bob was in their pen, happily munching on donkey shit, and they cared not at all. I caught Butch the Border Collie in their pen once as well. I did have some worries about them hurting the small animals, but I think we’ve established that all the small animals here are harmless. They’re beginning to fit in.

Human Contact

Donkeys have less of an established flight mechanism with horses. They tend to be stand-their-ground sort of critters. This accounts for the dog stomping. It also means that you have to approach training them differently.

With horses, we tend to use their flight mechanism to work with them as that’s their more comfortable reflex. Flight isn’t super heightened. With donkeys, flight is not the norm. They’d rather figure something out than waste valuable energy running from it. From what I’ve read on donkeys, using their flight mechanism can actually make them more fearful, not less.

But, I’ve only worked with domesticated horses, mules, and, well, one donkey who is a perfect angel, so I’ve been looking for resources. A friend recommended trainer Juliana Ladenburg, of Hope, The Wild Burro Place. She’s tamed and trimmed many wild donks over the years, hopping into emergency care situations and getting shit done. It’s inspiring. I’m scheduling a tele-lesson with her to get a better idea of how to build a program for the donks.

I’ve also been experimenting and exposing them to normal life at my little farm. I clean out their pen, feed them, and expose them to little things where I can. I do what’s called approach/retreat work with them daily, and they’re both getting so much more comfortable with having people around. They sniffed my nephew, and he was so so excited about it — telling me he was the first to touch them. We’ll give it to him. They seem to like kids, which is a very good thing.

They both want to be friends, and they’re trying so hard. I’m looking forward to hearing from a pro on how to get them going, but I’m taking my nephew to Washington state this weekend for summer camp, so they’re going to have a bit of a vacation themselves.

Because of this trip, Week 3 might come later next week, but don’t worry — plenty to talk about.

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Lmk down below!

Read More About It — In Print!

And I’m even more excited to write a big feature narrative about this in our Summer Issue of The Westrn’s quarterly print newspaper.

Get 10% off for reading all the way through here, or you can pre-order a single issue for $10 here to try it out.