Solo

I’d like to think he’d be surprised, but not disappointed, that a granddaughter got his gun.

 
There’s a particular curve along this dirt road that climbs and climbs where you can tell if it’s going to be windy and it almost always is. Especially now, mid-November, when everything along the Front Range howls.

But the yellow curvy-arrow signs that line the road seem redundant. No one’s going fast, everyone’s just climbing. Up to dawn, to morning. I think about the year my sister got a t-shirt for her birthday that had an embossed barrel racer on the front, her ponytail flying out behind her cowboy hat, with the words “Dangerous Curves Ahead” printed at the top on the front of the tee. My grandmother said to my mother, “Do you really think that’s appropriate?” I didn’t understand at the time but I knew it was something about a woman’s body. Something about us.

My mother said, “She’s only nine.” My mother said, “It’s just about a horse.”

The sun’s rising and streaming through lodgepoles the way you think a diamond will shine until you see one sitting all dull on a lady-older-than-you’s hand and you realize you never wanted one of those in the first place, you just want to hold fire. Light, warmth, a heart in your hands.

I got a flat from this road last year, but it’s such a washboard I didn’t realize it until I got back on the pavement and my stomach sunk. I’d never changed a tire; there was always someone, some male along with, a father you could call, a man who came to the rescue. A dad, boyfriend, husband, stranger who we somehow felt comfortable with because they’d stopped to help. Because that meant they were a good person and not a strangler who’d put you in a septic tank on their thousand-acre farm. Now I wonder why the women I knew, the strong women who raised me, never changed their own flats. Why, even as I was brought up at the beginning of the “girl power” movement, was I still, by default, taught to depend on men for unpleasant things. For the dirty, the heavy, the cold. Society doesn’t want, doesn’t prepare girls, to be alone.

But I dug out the user’s manual from the glove compartment, jacked up the back right, and got on with it. A cow moose walked through a pond down below the roadbed and I thought this isn’t a bad place to learn something new.

I reach the end of the road and park. A gust of wind shakes my truck, my rusty old Ranger, rocking side-to-side like standing up in a canoe. My body tenses; I hold my breath. I know what this will feel like, like you know heartbreak will after the first few red flags.

I strap on snowshoes, pulling hard on the plastic straps that have stiffened in the cold, grab my pack and shotgun and crunch across the parking area. No one else is around.

I had plans to hunt a new area I scouted this summer, with a maze of meadows full of scrub willow and cinquefoil for cover. I was hunting mushrooms and the day was hot and windy, the kind of day a wildfire kicks up. And I saw the hind-end of a hare disappear behind juniper. He was a beautiful light brown then with the color hair that on women, shows gray first and fastest. I circled the area, round and round, and I couldn’t find him again. But he made me anxious for winter. 

Weather dictates direction, and right now, the snowfield between me and the meadows seems too daunting. I stick to what I know and head to a closed Forest Service road that angles northeast, where the wind’s not as bad as it could be.

There’s a fresh inch on top of weeks of snow, layered like tiramisu, the melted and frozen crusts like crumbled cookies. Windblown slabs lay upon each other, so when you posthole it feels like you’re in one of those cartoons where the character falls through a building, floor-by-floor.

Out here in the open most of the snow has already blown away. A hare could have been here five minutes before right now and its tracks would already be gone, wiped clean. These windy days are like walking up a river in old Westerns. Lose tracks, lose scent, stay alive. I should have swung down on the far side of the meadow because now, I have to get there from here, where the wind pushes my 120 pounds back like a hand on a kid’s forehead, when they think it’s funny and that you’re so strong. 

In Colorado, the snowshoe hare’s range is limited to high-elevation forests where they feast on conifers. On the Engleman spruce, lodgepole pine, and subalpine fir that circle meadows like flowers on mountain ball cactus that are the first wildflower to bloom, mid-April when hummingbirds arrive from Mexico and turkeys start gobbling in the canyons. And there’s a sweet spot of weeks to hunt hare up here even though the season goes for months, from October through February. To time it so there’s snow for tracks but not so much you posthole every step. And I’ve mistimed this hunt. Waited too long through too many snows. 

I posthole to my thighs in places. My ankle tweaks and I have to pull myself up and out by nearby spruce branches. I think about the snowshoes getting stuck, wonky in the willows, and snapping my knee. I think about a bull moose charging. This is my first time hunting alone and I’m instantly aware how it changes pace and pressure. Because there is no fallback, no one or thing to depend on other than what you remember of what you have done before.

Society doesn’t prepare girls to be believed.

I’ve always hunted with my partner, Jay. He’s taught me how to stalk and track and shoot. How to skin and gut, but before that to lay on hands like a prayer of thanks, a wish for safe passage. An ask of forgiveness. His experience has so many years on mine that even when I know what to do, I rely on him for reassurance. If I come home empty-handed, if I fail at what I’m out here to do, is it because that’s just how things played out, or is it because of me? Do I even know what I’m doing? Of course, most days afield you come home with a light pack, I know by now. Most days you do not find success. But it stings a little more when you’re a woman and when you’re alone. No one’s there to corroborate your story that you did the right things and they just didn’t work out this time. Society doesn’t prepare girls to be believed. 

I’ve had seasons now of knowing how hard these hares are to hunt. Days on days of misses, or seeing nothing at all. Of the maddening amount of tracks. Of knowing they do not burrow, they’re around. That one crush you want to cross paths with over summer break but never do. 

We don’t hunt with a dog and it took a while to figure out how to be successful. How to find them and pressure them until they jump. How they like meadow edges and baby spruce where they sit just how a mushroom would. When we hunt hare together, we take turns playing the beagle. One of us busting through cover, the other walking slower and angled behind, pretending to be ready for one to jump your way. It’s slower without a dog to snoot them out, but we’ve started working well as a team most days. Reading body language and hand signals and never walking single file. And mostly, considering “getting an eye on one” to be a successful day. That’s been our rate of success with snowshoes. 

And alone now it’s different. All the dogging and shooting’s up to me and I don’t have an extra pair of eyes. I don’t have someone to pull the trigger when I miss. 

I move slowly to minimize the sound of snowshoes on the crusty snow, and keep my eyes scanning, looking for movement, shadows, patterned shapes. An old man told me, “Just look for the eyes.” As they hold tight beneath a baby spruce, those big black marbles will give them away. I’ve managed this once, last year, but otherwise it’s always been running shots. And I like that. I don’t have time to think. Instinct has less emotion attached.

I shoulder my grandfather’s shotgun. He’s dead now. But my grandmother found it in their basement a few years ago and gave it to my dad, who gave it to me as I was the only one in the family who would use it. It’s a .22 / .410 over-under, for sitting shots or running ones. That’s a farm gun, Jay said at the time, That’s useful. My dad wondered why he’d kept it and my grandmother did too. No one knows so I make up stories… how it was given to him by their farm-hand, an Okie who’d take my Grandpa hunting for rabbit after evening chores. How they’d sneak out from Sunday services and walk railroad tracks to avoid being seen by anyone who’d be wanting to know why they weren’t in church. Grabbing shotguns they stashed in a culvert, they’d put in pheasant loads. Five shot. They’d smoke cigarettes.

I don’t think my grandfather would have considered himself a feminist, and I didn’t have the chance to ask, but there’s an egalitarianism that comes from growing up on a Great Plains farm during the Depression. I’d like to think he’d be surprised, but not disappointed, that a granddaughter got his gun.

I walk on the tops of trees, on tips of the small spruce that start at the edge of the willows. The snow’s so deep I’m feet above where I’d be in the summertime, hunting porcini. I always wonder what it would be like to be taller, what the world would look like at six-foot-two. What I’d see, what I’d miss, what I’d catch in between. And maybe this is it, just more trees in my face, up where the branches are thick and there’s farther to fall through. 

Jim Harrison called the songs of unseen birds grace. The courtesy of telling your friends where you’re going and when you’ll be home. And as I push through deeper into the trees, the wind eases and old tracks appear. I try to quiet myself but everything quickens. For me, grace has never been calming. 

A few more steps and there’s movement to my side-left. I question it like an old memory, walk over to investigate, and the tracks are fresh. I follow up a steep hill, counterclockwise. I widen my eyes, feeling that might help, but I just feel buggy and dry. The hare jumps again, farther away this time. My eyes strain and breath thickens with panic of losing him. I walk robotically now, checking before each footfall for tracks, shotgun jammed into my shoulder. Left arm ready to lift the barrel, right finger anxious on the safety. And again and again, four times, he sees me first and slips away until he doesn’t, silhouetting himself on the snow between two lodgepoles. 

It’s my time now and I take it. 

It is snow, which is fur, which is brown, which is blood, which will all wash away in the end.

So I’ll tell you of the color of snow. You’ll understand someday when you see a snowshoe hare. When you hunt one and jump one and see it vanish like your breath in a handlamp beam on a winter’s night, as you purse and blow and pretend like you’re smoking. When you see one laid out with sun and shadow moving through trees like you’re staring at the bottom of a freestone creek, squinting hard to make out the green-dappled backs of cutthroat trout. 

Do you remember, as a kid, trying to find a use for the white crayon? It was always the longest, sharpest, the most unused, because white doesn’t really exist. It’s a reflection and scatter. It is snow, which is fur, which is brown, which is blood, which will all wash away in the end. It’s absence. The color leaving my hair, the pigment dying and moving to age spots on my face instead. It’s one of the first colors we used to paint with, on the cave walls of Lascaux, calcite used to highlight horses, bison, and lions drawn in charcoal from the fires that kept us warm. That gave us sight. White’s all around me and when I look down I can’t believe my eyes.

The color of snow. The hare. The grief set hard in.

And now I remember what to do. How to slit around the back legs and pull off the skin like a sweater. How to cut ribs to hip and pull the insides out; how to take care with the bloodshot. How it feels to hold a heart in my hand. 

Five o’clock back at home and the cabin glows. How I imagine it must feel being backstage after a play when the curtain is drawn but house lights turn on and everyone claps. For you, for the job you’ve done. Hopefully well.

In the mountains you have to pay for a view. To be up high looking east for the new day or west over the Divide. But my cabin nestles low in a canyon where the cold hangs well into midday and snowbanks swallow the raspberry canes whole, down at the end of a draw where cattle once pulled carts full of ice from a pond above to towns below. I’ve found their shoes, just like for horses but in two parts, the luck all let out for their cloven hooves. And when I look around or up, all I see are trees, pointed pines jagged like teeth in a dinosaur jawbone, bleaching in the sun and the sand.

I step out to the back porch and look west, the hole of sky above me filled with orange in big confident strokes.