That’s the Breaks: No Time Wasted
The six-word hunting story: Signs of everything. And yet, nothing.
The first thing I noticed about Nicole when I arrived to hunt camp with Kestrel was how she stood next to her truck with her shoulders squared back, her face glowing in the dark with the calm smile of someone about to do something they absolutely love. If I hadn’t known anything about Nicole at the time, I would have at least known that; bundled in a puffy jacket and a beanie, her dogs knocking into her shins, discussing plans for opening morning, she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
But I did know some things about Nicole. I knew that she has inspired me into a more confident version of myself in the months since she brought me into the fold of The Westrn. I knew that she is capable of looking at the world from the furthest ends of various complex perspectives all at once, a person who leans into contradiction like it’s a fire that might save her life on a cold night. I knew that she was selfless, although I didn’t know how selfless until I discovered that she had already set up a tent for me and filled it with extra bedding in the event of a serious midnight temperature drop.
I had few expectations going into this hunt. My desires were simple: bond with my colleagues, bear witness to a landscape doing its thing in a way that only hunting seems to allow, maybe notch a tag. But a lingering thought had been crushing me lately, the thought that if I really wanted to write about hunting, I needed to get out and hunt more. That I couldn’t exist as this fraudulent sideline observer who spent more time on the phone at her desk than behind glass with rocks bruising her seat. I broke down about this imposter syndrome months prior; Nicole assured me that the 2024 trip with her and Kestrel would be just what the doctor ordered.
Spoiler alert: it was.
What follows is a linguistic meander through a place that Nicole, put simply, loves. May we all be so lucky as to find a hunting partner who looks at a landscape in the pre-dawn and sees its ancient inhabitants browsing next to its present ones, who remembers their microscopic place in the geologic timespan of this landscape, and who eats at it voraciously, straining their mouth to get the best bite like it’s a double-decker sandwich. May we all find a hunting partner who combs every edge of every treeline, who consumes every moment with every sense. May we find a hunting partner who laughs at screwups; not silently, but loudly, even if the deer run away. Because, well, that’s life.
I found a hunting partner like that. Actually, I found two. I’ll ask if they still have openings for other wayward imposters like me, but I make no promises.
-Katie
I’m sitting at a table. Laid out before me is a deck of cards. Instead of suits, the cards hold all the landscapes of the planet. The one card I pull is where I’ll go next.
Friends have touted the beauty of the wide volcanic expanses of Iceland, the hot breathy feel of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, the blue light glowing from glacial caves in the Arctic, and New Zealand’s otherworldly ridges above trout-filled waters.
But it’s October and my resident rifle season is about to open. I reach for the card. I close my eyes. I pray it reads The River Breaks of Montana.
“I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.”
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Where we hunted the opening weekend of Montana’s rifle season doesn’t qualify as the breaks as they’re known in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. I’ve been to those breaks. Cut deep and steep into the earth by the quiet yet efficient expanse of the Missouri river, giant paddlefish and pallid sturgeon course through the arterial waters, while elk, bighorns, mule deer, turkeys, and a thousand other critters big and small thrive in tall carved canyons and broad field plateaus above them. There, you must go down to go up. Float in to see only a small breadth of the pockets. Walk but never far enough to reach a view of the enormity of the place. Secrets abound.
Where we decided to hunt might be referred to as the footbreaks to the bigger, wilder breaks north of us. The nature of this spot is gentler, though just as secretive in a way that is scaled down, a bit easier to access, but no less complicated. It formed in its current state more or less in the Pleistocene epoch, and likely has been hunted for just as long. As far as we’re aware today, human existence here reaches back 12,000 years, although it likely goes back much further.
Today, of course, the language is sticky. The French colonial word “Oumessourit” (oo-meh-soo-ree) shortened and stunted down to “Missouri” over recent centuries. The word still holds remnants of its original translation: “people of the dug-out canoes.”
A smaller tributary river runs through these hunting grounds. It was named by a slightly adventurous man about 250 years ago. How many names did it hold prior? What did the Indigenous people call it? Blackfeet, Crow, and Little Shell Chippewa occupied these lands. Before them, the Clovis people walked among mammoths, American cheetahs, dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, and mastodons.
Far before it was named by primates with language to spare, Cretaceous critters held court. The first recorded dinosaur fossils in North America were found a few hours from here in 1854. In this place, I hunt the same grounds long ago hunted by my childhood favorite: the paltry-armed and toothy Tyrannosaurus Rex. I can imagine looking down on the animal from a cliff’s edge. He’s moving through a river passage, then climbing a far ridge. I look across a wide gap at the brute, now skylined in the roar of Jurassic Park lore. Even with millions of years between us, the image feels possible — if not slightly ridiculous. A girl can dream.
This is a long-lived land of inhabitation. This is a perpetual place of plenty. It is also a place of disappearance. It’s a pockmarked and pocketed country that covers itself up at scale.
You can drive through and by the Breaks without knowing what you’re close to. You could think that the flat fields and wide rolling expanses of grass hold only more of the same. And yet, you come to an edge and suddenly flat earth cuts down and away into a river canyon more beautiful, strange, and alive than any you’ve seen before. This is not the everlasting and expected perspective of the Grand Canyon or the castle-like red rock walls of Zion. This is where water and ice sculpt an ever-shifting wild art into sandstone and shale walls. Sand, clay, silt, and lime are easy to find here. Run them through your fingers, bring them to eye level, remember that it was all under the pressure of sea water — only 70 million years ago. That species of sturgeon I mentioned? It’s also 70 million years old.
Some things never change.
The breaks as they exist today provide a lot of time for thinking, in the ways you must move to and through them. First, I travel by Ram 1500. Next, I travel on gravel. Finally, I travel by foot.
I’ve hunted Montana’s breaks country in one way or another nearly every season that I’ve been a hunter. I’ve hunted it alone and with friends, I’ve filled my share of tags in its crags, and I like to share these landscapes with hunters holding fresh eyes for it. Once you participate in this sort of landscape, something shifts in you. The clay seeps into your pores. The life it holds pulses, and you figure out how to match the rhythm.
The rhythm beats slow and steady, and that’s how Katie and I moved through it on the last day we hunted together. Katie’s sole tag was filled, the doe was processed, and we were hunting for me. We started from the riverbottom, curving through a few fields to a draw that turned into a private canyon. A few hundred feet of gain rose from either side, a creek with willows rested in the narrow bottom, and it reached a consistent 100 to 150 yards from wall to wall for the most part. If we bumped something across, we’d likely see it and I might still have a shot opportunity.
Fresh sign, fresh tracks, fresh scents — the freshness of the landscape wafted up in the abnormal heat of this day. As hunters, we’re irritated by abnormal heat. We pray for snow and bitter cold to move animals up and about, rather than this unseasonal warmth that hunkers them in the shadows and prompts nocturnal activity. Our legal ability to hunt begins and stops within a half hour of dusk and dawn. Nocturnal animals are difficult to find in daylight hours, and they move only at their very cusps. It’s easy to be in the right place at the wrong time whenever you hunt, but it’s unbearably easy to do so when heat lays over even the most reliable habitats like a stiff, itchy wool blanket.
So, we timber hunted the side of the nameless canyon locked in the dark shadows of afternoon sun. Together, we navigated thin game trails beat into the steep sides of clay and rock. The rim of the ridge just above us, we refrained from skylining our bodies in the white sunlight. We aimed for a spot that touched the edge of private and public lands, a place where animals know to hole up sans human pressure. We bet on this tough country being filled with pockets where a buck or two might hide in the crevices. We walked slowly with binoculars ever in our hands, lifting them to our eyes every few steps to scan for life. Kestrel would be hunkered down at an alfalfa field hunting whitetail does at the end of the hike. We’d hitch a ride back to my truck with them.
Stories of deer, elk, birds, and cattle wrote themselves into dried clay. A few years before, I sat high up at the tail end of this draw with Kestrel and our lovely friend Andi. We watched another hunter play cat-and-mouse with a bugling bull elk in the golden cottonwood draw along the river. He drew his bow back. But the shot opportunity never came. He walked out of the draw, shoulders low. The bull busted across fields, into the country.
From the tracks and scat in the clay, I could tell bull elk had been back to this riparian Eden during the lava-hot archery season — perhaps the same one among others — near water, near fodder, near cows in estrus, near thousands of trees to rake. The deer sign, however, remained as fresh as that morning, very close to the present moment.
Waning light began to reach through the trees with long blonde fingers. Katie suggested we hoof it and I agreed. We still had more than a mile to go to the spot we wanted to check out, and another mile or more to Kestrel after that. Dusk felt close enough to touch. We hopped up to the ridge, where bed after bed after bed imprinted tall grasses on the treeline. Rock sculptures sat tall in every cranny of the landscape, with round, dark caves and moody gaps in their midst. We moved through them quickly; I craned my neck into every pocket, hoping for an ear wag or an antler peeking from brush. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Signs of everything. And yet, nothing.
Until deer. Two of them. I stopped and they stepped into the light from the shadows. Mule deer does. They haunted us at every corner of this hunt, the only illegal cervid in this unit on our hunting tags.
Where are your sons, brothers, and mates? That’s the wonder that occurs in such a place. My friend Remi Warren calls this a mule deer nursery. Around every bend, muley does mix in with young offspring, and forked horn bucks band together in bachelor bravery. The mature bucks live somewhere on the periphery of all this until mating season arrives. Our timing meant we were about two weeks away from their arrival. Katie and I thought we might turn one up in higher, more technical country. No dice.
We arrive at a ledge that leads us down to where Kestrel is hunting. The precipice is thin, with maybe a hundred feet of fall in a few places on either side. Vertigo hits me. All the time spent in the mountains never took away my fear of heights. I cop to my shakiness; Katie offers to lead the way.
Step by step I follow her steady tracks toward the river. Light continues to fall. From the fields ahead, a rifle barks, but we’re too far to see anything clearly. From our vantage point, we count dozens of whitetails in the portion of the field closed to hunting. We split up and walk across the second cutting of protein-dense alfalfa, deep green, baled, and drying. Deer bump out and cross ahead of us into legal territory, the minutes tick down to closing light and it passes without another shot. We call for Kestrel, and eventually a single headlamp clues us into their whereabouts.
On the ground lies a whitetail doe. Kestrel steadily works at the breakdown. Katie and I take off our packs, pull out our knives, and begin to strip away skin and sinew.
It all happens so fast, this transition of animal to meat, of trading grocery store butcher counters for a freezer full of wild game. I have sewn both of these transitions into the biggest alteration of my inner world: the deep feeling of falling in love with a stretch of soil and earth, knowing that it is both mine and not mine, and that it has been thus defined in the hearts of many others, time after time after time.
Coolers fill with meat back at camp, though none of it is mine — and that’s beyond okay. My two dogs dance at our feet, as dogs and their precursors have done here at the feet of humans for countless millennia. They gobble up scraps and voraciously clean what’s left as we pack, process, and get ready to leave the next morning.
Perhaps, one day, far in the future, a pair of hunters will talk about us as the ancient people who walked this land. They’ll hear of a mushroomed bullet or a fossilized doe skull pulled from this very spot of clay, discovered on the edge of what must have been a field of alfalfa hay along the banks of the still-flowing tributary. The sun will stretch glowing fingers through pines; they’ll start to hurry across the ridge. A magnificent mule deer buck will step from the shadow into the light, a royal descendant of our doe friends.
On the edge of the evening, a single shot echoes against the canyon walls. Deer across the river valley turn heads and ears toward the sound, then lower their heads to graze as the curtain of darkness falls over them. A final breath leaves a body; razor-sharp knives make quick work of the job in tandem effort. A coyote yodels a song from a nearby precipice, ready to descend toward what is left behind. Two headlamps turn on simultaneously and light the path before them as a big and starry night clothes the country.
This is the final story in a three-part series about our Montana hunt. Read takes from Katie and Kestrel to complete the experience.
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Nicole Qualtieri is the Editor-in-Chief of The Westrn. She’s written for Outside Magazine, USA Today, GearJunkie, MeatEater, Modern Huntsman, Backcountry Journal, Impact Journal, and many others. A lifelong horsewoman and DIY outdoorswoman, Nicole lives on the outskirts of Anaconda, MT with a full pack of happy critters.
Lovely, Nicole. I felt the swirling of time — past and present and future mingling into one — as I read it.