Lost and Found

Lately, when I wake up at 4a.m., it’s to lull our son back to sleep for another cou­ple hours.

This year, my first tag was for early sea­son antler­less deer out in the scrub coun­try between the moun­tains and desert in south­west Col­orado – the cor­ner I call home. It was still hot after a dry sum­mer, and my scout­ing trips were telling me the deer were some­where else, most likely some­where that looked a lit­tle less scorched.

Usu­ally when scout­ing I have an arrow like focus on read­ing the coun­try and fig­ur­ing out where the ani­mals were. But this year, that focus had been replaced by steadily drift­ing thoughts of my son and wife at home: preparing meals, read­ing books, build­ing forts, laugh­ing off another fall, shar­ing all of the small moments that add up to a life together.  I was miss­ing more of them with every day and night I was out.

As I left the house well before dawn the first morn­ing of the hunt, I lis­tened one last time­for the tell­tale mur­mur sig­nal­ing that our son was about to wake, then slipped out in to the cold, turn­ing my thoughts toward the land and what it might hold.

Once I was hun­kered down in the sage glass­ing the famil­iar feel­ing of being on the hunt returned. At first light a red-tail called from high up in a long dead cot­ton­wood. Coy­otes and jackrab­bits emerged and tested the air with cau­tious noses.  I even caught a glimpse of a lonely look­ing deer in the distance.

I had moments of sin­gu­lar focus that morn­ing. But often I was dis­tracted by thoughts of home.

Then I did some­thing I had never before done. I weighed my desire to fill the freezer and the other tags I would be hunt­ing later this sea­son against the grow­ing real­iza­tion that I didn’t want to spend a large part of the fall away from my young son, and I hiked back to the truck and went home.

A few weeks later I was out again, this time hunt­ing closer to home and with only a few days allot­ted to fill my next tag.

I had been stalk­ing a small herd of deer for the last half hour, cir­cling to stay with the wind and inter­cept their steady path as they browsed toward a bed­ding area.  I crawled slowly on my belly through the grass as the dark blue bled from the sky and the first glint of starlight appeared high above.  As I drew a bead on a small buck about to dis­ap­pear into the trees and gen­tly pulled the trig­ger, I thought about all of the veni­son we would feed our son this win­ter, about the hunt­ing sto­ries he would grow up hear­ing and even­tu­ally liv­ing, and about how remark­able it is to live some­where I can search more spots than I can count for game and most likely find some­thing in one of them.

In the end, we all have to find our own bal­ance.  As I said my prayer over the deer I had killed, I thanked him for feed­ing my fam­ily, for being part of the cir­cle of life that we some­times for­get we belong to, and for help­ing to remind me how impor­tant it is to strive to live a life that respects our com­mit­ments and our place in a com­mu­nity of peo­ple, ani­mals, and ter­ri­to­ries much larger than ourselves.

Matthew Clark is the SCP’s back­coun­try coor­di­na­tor for the south­west cor­ner of Colorado’s San Juan Moun­tains and the Dolores River basin.