Rather than simply explain to his daughter the many benefits of hunting for game meat, this father decided to lead by example. And it worked.

How does a father explain the benefits of hunting to his children? A few years ago in a restaurant in Jackson Hole, my daughter informed me that she was becoming a vegetarian. This had come up, like so many youthful, rebellious declarations, seemingly on the spot. I did what I could to stifle a smile at what seemed to me a lack of conviction.

“Does this include chicken?” I teased.

“Of course it does. Chicken is meat, isn’t it?”

After a half-hearted attempt to explain to her the healthy benefits of hunting for game meat and how we are hardwired to eat meat, she dug in. It wasn’t so much the idea of meat that offended her, but how it arrived on her plate, treated cruelly and pumped full of unnatural this and that.

“Meat can be great for you, Dad, but not when it’s been fed corn and shot up with hormones. And have you ever seen a slaughterhouse?”

I pointed out that they had elk on the menu.

“Oh, I would eat that.”

Teach the Benefits of Hunting with Outdoor Mentorship

And so I spent the summer teaching her how to shoot a 7×57 Mauser.

I once shot a deer in the ass. It was not my intention. I flinched. This was not due to a lack of preparedness on my part, but to an affliction of the nerves and the mind and the way blood surges through its by-ways when a big, big deer walks into view. This is not listed in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it should be. Hunters know unmistakably this mental imbalance and that functioning in its throes is a complicated prospect. It didn’t end ugly. Fortunately, I had hit the biggest artery in its body and it was over in seconds. But not before the nightmare creep of failure and the potential suffering my mistake could have caused began to haunt me. I lived with this for days before I let it go, and admittedly, I still think about it today. How would a 13-year-old girl bear up under this?

Lead by Example

We plunged down a steep, sandy slope, my daughter before me and behind Sheldon, the cowboy who was our eyes and guide. Such was the grade and its friability that Maia had to hold tightly to his shoulder. The gravel and sand we kicked up moved past and below us, gathering momentum before it disappeared.

The sun had yet to appear and so it was gray. The dried creek bed below us was only 70 feet away, but to us it was bottomless. Even the sage that pockmarks this country was indistinct in the light. Despite this, Sheldon was sure he had seen a buck 500 yards away. Climbing into this creek bed was the only way to get near it in this land of little cover. And such was this buck that I was informed discreetly to bring my rifle also. The idea was that this was a big enough deer that one of us had better get it. I was thinking, of course, that this stalk would be just another exercise and proof that even cowboys can’t see in the dark.

Sliding down the scree, unnerving as it was, put the “fair” into this chase and, looking back on it and the apprehension on Maia’s face, the highlight of the stalk. At the bottom, Sheldon took off. We followed as best we could. For a big man, he moved like a cat. Water had not flowed here since the spring, but the path was clear. This was fortunate as Sheldon disappeared into the gloom ahead and our way was to be found on our own.

Dawn finally gave way to day and what were shapes were rocks and brush. Some light rayed over the top of the scree, but it was still hard to see. After a breathless winding dash we came to a sharp bend where the water had met with resistance and was forced to jog hard to the right, carving an altogether more serpentine escape.

For us it was the end. Forty feet up this embankment was Sheldon, laying in the scrub and glassing ahead of him. He put his finger to his lips and motioned us up.

Hours before dawn I’m awake in bed. This has become customary for me these last few months. There’s a new bed of snow outside and, as the moon moves across the sky, the misshapen limbs of an apple tree are projecting in bright, perfect panes on the ceiling and skittering in the opposite direction. This skittering movement is perceptible only to someone who stares long enough. This is the time I make mental lists. In turn those lists are the reason I can’t sleep. I want to distract myself from this circle of gloom so I think of my time in the Missouri Breaks with Maia. I’m wondering when my daughter killed her deer whether she realized she had entered that company of men and women who gain sudden knowledge of their place in the world, who realize how small they are in things, yet so very powerful in shaping them? That this wasn’t wanton slaughter, but rather a reenactment of our atavistic urge to pursue, kill and ultimately provide—the same tragedy played out on savannas many millennia ago.

Show, Don’t Tell

I wonder if I had somehow reached her in ways that previously eluded me—cut off as I was from her in many ways unspoken. It wasn’t fatherly neglect that had created this minor communicative rupture. It was the opposite. A friend told me that success of parenting hinges on the art of slowly letting go. I would have added, had I thought of it at the time instead of now, staring bug-eyed at a moonlit ceiling, that part of that process is a version of the writer’s credo: show don’t tell. Children loathe in us the cloddish bluntness of our instruction. There in the wrecked beauty that is Montana, chasing deer with her father, just as he had chased them many times before, had she not been shown? Had I not provided another little bumper—one of many we lay along the way—to bounce off, to give momentary pause and reflect on life lived and life yet to come?

And then she asked breathlessly, “Dad, did I just kill a deer?” a question that brings with it a whole new world of accountabilities.