INSTRUCTIONAL

Mother Wilderness

BY RAVEN AÄE

Before my shot could report off the far wall of the basin, she was on her feet, mouth agape in a roar. I hadn’t heard my shot, nor seen where it landed, and I didn’t have time to think – because she pursued me at a gallop. I ran blindly backward, arms akimbo, through wild rose and burned trees. As we ran, I – a southpaw – clumsily clawed at the bolt on my right-handed Parker Hale thinking only, “Well, it is either her or me.”

Given you are reading my whiplash retrospective of the hunt, the surprise is spoiled – but, in that moment, my future held exhilarating uncertainty. Perhaps you’re wondering: “Why is this woman hunting a bear alone in the first place?”

I may have sprouted from Hell’s country, but I grew gangly on a frozen wave of effusive rock thrown from Devil Mountain thousands of years ago, on which my father kept steers and blackberries. He visited our cramped trailer only to do the necessities and returned to the fields with dirty fingernails, morning after morning.

I was an autistic savant twisted into a juvenile delinquent. One Halloween, I threw water balloons at the local cop car windshields and, in my flight, crashed my cowboy boyfriend’s truck into the Dairy Queen’s front window.

I dressed up and hit the bars with my little brother’s 21-yearold babysitter. I let cows loose in the school’s breezeways. I slept off my lunchtime beers in the back row of honors English then perturbed the teacher by acing my exams. I deemed the high school yearbook fascist (really, I was decades ahead of my time with that one) and instead had my classmates sign my ass with a Sharpie. On many occasions, I stole my mother’s Suburban 454 to drive snowy Forest Service land north of Rainier, where I’d wander for miles on foot and hone my raven call. All before I turned 15. I deserved to be sent to juvie. Instead, my parents, teachers and church leaders decided to fork me over to the local game warden and carnivore specialist a couple days a week after school.

It would be simple to focus my retelling of the time I spent with these formidable characters in the woods as only the highlights: gutting roadkill elk in a dark ditch with zero instruction, aside from “navel to throat”; working with Karelian bear dogs to locate and tag young cougars; building a den out of hay bales and fir boughs for an orphaned bear to be rematriated to his native forest; the many times I encountered half-tranquilized cougars in traps we’d set in town; firing a gun into the air to scare animals back into the wild when we released them. But the truth is the tedium and repetition of banal tasks is what prepared me to hunt alone later in life. We drove seemingly endless miles down sodden gravel

I deserved to be sent to juvie. Instead, my parents, teachers and church leaders decided to fork me over to the local game warden and carnivore specialist a couple days a week after school.