Westward In The Morning
Under every rock is a snake, Under every snake is yet another snake.
Writing about my first few weeks working as a Western Big Game Hunting Guide at C Bar Z Outfitters in Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico.
I was tired, weary, and sleepless. Baked by the sun, and burned by the V8 engine sitting under me in the old 93 dodge, I rucked along. Crossing the wide open plains, the scenery changed from prairie to high altitude desert.
Ruins of forgotten stone cowboy houses dotted the landscape, dry testaments to the pioneer’s struggle, now safeguarded by the rattlesnakes and visited only by the passing eyes of travelers and coyotes.
I am thankful for the old dodge, she made the trip well and really keeps a man grounded. New cars feel like a spaceship floating across the landscape, quietly doing 90 mph in a temperature controlled, 69 degree pod, lined in cloud filled cushions.
I like feeling connected to the ground I traverse. The rumble of the road, the heat of the engine, the bolts and nuts running free when I push past 80 mph. The knowledge that I have at least a dozen bowling ball sized objects ready to fly into the back of my head if I were to crash. It’s real isn’t it?
That is a recurring theme in this adventure, reality. The world as it really is, not fogged by blinding comforts. Not muddled by societal barriers. The world in all her glory, life and death. It’s easy to think you “know” that life requires death, to ponder it while on a walk, and act like you know what that means. I always understood the concept and the statistics, so on and so forth, but it’s totally different once you feel it, experience it, and stand face to face with it. Feel it on your skin, see it with your eyes, smell it in the air, day after day.
Finally I pulled into the ranch-house driveway, greeted by an old corral and horseshoes. Cacti, brush-oak and sage littering the landscape. The distinct smell of wild sage wafting up, with it’s almost marijuana like qualities. It’s dry here, A high altitude desert sitting at 7,000 feet on average, the wind wails and the dust flurries. You can find beautiful rocks everywhere, some even touched by the Apache that once dominated the region. The bad lands of northern New Mexico, my new home.
The first assignment I was set out on, was to glass a hill from a vantage point a mile and a half away. The boss, (guide for 28 years) dropped me out of the truck with a set of binoculars.
“Watch the country to the east focusing on everything south of the fence-line, taking note of all you see. Be silent and wait until dark before you move out. I could pick you up, but you need to be able to find your way home through the backcountry if someday you were with a client. This is not to be mean.” He vanished in a cloud of dust and I was left alone. So I watched, nestled in a little hole I had dug into the volcanic sluff. The landscape here is marked by ancient volcanos, tops blown, with volcanic rock spread all around.
Hawks and eagles catching the updraft and searching for prey. Sharp eyes I wish to emulate. Mule deer browsing the hillsides in search of acorns. Bear doing the same…
Then came the first elk, what would become the center-point of my life for the coming weeks. Then the next, then two more, and before I knew it I was looking at an entire herd, 60 strong pushing down out of the forested hillside into the wide open grass flat. There is nothing more exhilarating than the sound of a bugle. From miles away I could feel the presence of these powerful, beautiful creatures. The bulls bugled and pushed the cows around, the sound still gives me shivers.
I scribbled all I saw that evening into my notebook and rolled out once the sun had drifted below the horizon. A symphony of bugles, crickets, coyotes, and other strange sounds I could not identify played out under a blanket of a million stars. The nearest town with a population stronger than 40 is over an hour away, the stars need not be coy, for the sky still belongs to them.
Within the first week I was warned of rattlesnakes perhaps 2 dozen times and for good reason. Those first weeks it seemed under every rock was a rattlesnake and under every snake was another snake. I saw my first that night, basking in the road. He coiled up and barred his fangs as I walked past, shaking his bone-chilling tail. The fierceness that is held within a rattlesnakes’ eyes is unmatched by anything I’ve ever seen. Here, one has to be present in every moment. Only the paranoid survive, in rattlesnake ridden, mountain lion country. There was a section of the trail I walked that night that cut through a dense assortment of sagebrush. As I walked through it I could hear all along the trail right by my feet the soft rattling of snakes. Nowhere to go but forward I continued on, listening closely to ensure I didn’t step too closely to any of those rattles. I passed a bush and spotted something large leap down into the flood plane 15 feet below. I shined my light to see a bobbing pair of eyes, connected to a long brown body watching me from the grasses below. I marched along towards the ranch house listening to the movement in the grass, turning around time to time to see the eyes once more. it kept the same distance from me the whole time, stopping when I stopped and moving when I moved. A curious cat is all I could assume it to be, as he thankfully ended his stalk in about 150 yards.
It is amazing how quickly one becomes accustomed to these ever-present dangers. And furthermore, how exhilarating and beautiful it is. Almost as if, this is where man belongs, toe to toe facing off with nature every day. Within all of us are these animalistic instincts, rooted in our genes, flowing in our blood. Instincts that are only tapped into when you tango with the world as it truly is. Society with all it’s comforts, never allows a man to tap into these instincts, leaving him unfulfilled. Most people live as shallow husks of what they could be, pacified by the world they’re born into, and comforted to death. A gentle semi-easy ride to the grave, perfectly average. I didn’t know thankfulness until I made it out by the skin of my teeth. I didn’t know primal aggression until I ripped an animals’ heart out. I never knew perseverance until I got up at 4am, hunted all day, killed two massive bulls at dark, stayed up until 2am the following day, slept two hours, and then went out to kill the very next morning. All while having to keep my wits about me, dealing with all the same dangers.
I’m not saying hunting is the only way to experience these challenges, but it sure has been the most primal and real way I’ve experienced. Mostly because there is no option to “give up”. There is no greater feeling than to take a deep breath, and to feel alive.
You’ve shot a bull elk and he just threw himself into a canyon as one final “fuck you”. It’s getting dark. You can’t just “come back for him tomorrow” the world doesn’t give a damn if you’ve hiked eight miles that day. The world doesn’t care if you’ve been up since 4am. If you don’t claim that kill something else will. So you grit your teeth and you spend the rest of the night carrying that fucker out on your back, across rugged mountain terrain. I came to this place in search of adventure, having no idea what lessons laid in store.
Flash-forward a week of excruciating effort on the part of me and my boss,
“Here take these, you don’t know how long you’ll be up there. You’ve got my waypoint on the map right?”
“Yessir.”
“You’ve got water?”
“Yessir.”
“Alright get up there as quickly as you can. Call me if you need me.”
A cloud of dust and the truck disappears across the horizon. Pack heavy, I turn and face the wide valley, sandwiched between two ridgelines jutting up from the landscape 600ft. Up the eastern ridge was my destination, to a hunter who had gut shot a bull that morning. The hunter had been sitting there for over 6 hours, glued to his binoculars, watching the bush the wounded creature had bedded down in. Running on 3 hours of sleep, covered in elk blood from a bull I had gutted not 40 minutes earlier, I began my march through the brush. I hiked my way through a rocky valley sandwiched in between two steep ridges. I struggled through thick scrub oak, careful not to roll an ankle on the volcanic terrain.
Wandering about the steep hillside, near to the waypoint, I searched for the hunter until a pebble thumped the back of my head. I looked up towards the sound of a faint whistle to see the hunter sitting in a pile of boulders. I hiked up to the exhausted hunter, weary, hungry, and happy to see company. There we sat and talked some. I pulled out my binoculars and fixated on the bush to give the guy a break for a moment. “I can’t believe I fucked that up man!” he kept whispering over and over. Sadly the cook had only packed one lunch… (thanks joe).
So cliff bars and cheez-its were to hold me over. Seasoned by my elk blood drenched hands.
We sat there for a few hours listening to the elk bugle all around us, from the ridge to the right to the left, every which way it seemed there was a bugle. We were in dense game country. Within a short while a large color-phase bear appeared in the valley. Many of the bear in this region are color-phase. Black bears, with a brown pigment to their fur. I’ve spent the last two summers in The Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, trust me when I say I’ve seen black bears. But never anything like this, that bear was the size of a 2-door sedan.
You’re probably thinking at this moment I needed a change of underwear, being covered in elk blood, in lion country, watching the largest bear I have ever seen sniff and search the valley for the wounded bull. But I didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong the thought crossed my mind, but my reaction was to my own surprise, laughter. Joy. A feeling of adventure I have never experienced before, one I’ve always longed for. Never have I ever felt more alive and present in the moment than then. It was beautiful, it was real. I remember sitting there laughing to myself and saying under my breath, “What the fuck am I doing, what have I gotten myself into? How did I end up here? This is crazy and I love it.”
As I was saying earlier, to dive headfirst into dangerous waters and return victorious is the most exhilarating thing on earth. To be in that moment, victorious, is the most centered and alive you’ll ever feel.
Within no time, another bear joined the search party and they scoured the valley. The bull had been shot on the hillside I sat on, ran through the valley, and up onto the other hillside, almost eye-level with us. (They are resilient animals.) the bears could smell the scent of the gut-shot animal, the distinct scent of guts, the pheromones released by the stress of being wounded. But because of the wind blowing through the valley, the scent trail was a swirling mess and the bear could only wander about in circles. After a few more hours of metaphorically staring at the wall, (This job requires endurance of all kinds, physical, and mental.) the hunter grew restless.
“I’m going over there, he has to be in there. Watch the bush and try to spot where he goes in case I bump him out.”
Being new, I had little authority to tell him his plan was a bad one. This guy had also been on many hunts here before, and felt as if he knew what was best.
“Whatever you say bud I’m just here for support right now.”
So the hunter descended the hill and made his way through the bear ridden valley, 300 yards from where we last spotted the monster. I watched through the glass, yet another bear, a smaller one, come booming down a ridge straight for the hunter, stalking as he made his way through the valley. For a moment I thought I was about to watch someone get mauled. The bear showed all the signs of a predatory bear.
Many folks fear grizzly bears the most and think little of black bears, due to the overly aggressive nature of grizzlies. But in fact, while less likely to attack or act aggressively, black bears are much more likely to act predatorially. Less attacks happen in black bear country, they tend to leave people alone, but they are much more likely to take the notion to hunt people. Especially a skinny bear, which this one was. He followed the hunter with his head low, sniffing and marching. I suppose the bear thought it too much trouble, for he gave up his stalk once the hunter entered the brush.
The hunter bumped the wounded elk out of the brush, missed a shot, and returned defeated. The wounded elk disappeared out of sight. That evening ended with us returning to camp with mixed spirits. His hunting buddy had landed a bull so the trip was successful, but having wounded an animal, and being unable to secure said animal, definitely left a low tone to the camp. They left the next day putting an end to the first week.
The next week was mild, a lot more bloodshed. We had some antelope hunters and busted through them in a couple of days. Antelope are fun to skin, they fall apart very quickly. It was the first animal we hung and the first animal I got to skin that season. It had been a long time since I had skinned anything and man I missed it. Skinning is such a Zen type art. You get into the flow and it just goes. Much like the videos that are so popular of people peeling things and such. It is very satisfying work.
So that is the start of my career as a hunting guide. The stories don’t end there though. In the next post I’ll tell about the time the dog pictured above, Jack, and I got caught in the middle of an elk stampede, with no-where to go but up.