Leaving Winter Behind

A few weeks ago, I went south to escape the Idaho winter - five months now and still going strong. They say snow covers the landscape in a way that wipes the slate clean; buries the scars and the trash and the trails made in the earth. It does something else too, the banal flakes falling like sentinels to some whitewashed army come to hide all that it touches. It makes you mad.

       There is a yearning that builds in your chest the longer you are pinned indoors. You start to remember all the bright and sunny places you’ve been, all the days you basked on the beach, under a tree, on top of a mountain. You forget the heat when you shovel your sidewalk, the albino powder covering the sole prints of your boots as you track across your suburban driveway. You think of water, odd as it may seem with all the frozen particles hiding the thing you wish for in their small icy crystals. And if you’re older, you remember a time in your life when you had more energy, more time along with it.

       We’d been planning it for two years –a hunting trip to West Texas with friends who met more often in that aforementioned youth. Covid put a halt to last year, and apparently, we’ve all reached the point in adulthood when there is no possibility of meeting more than once in a 365-day span. There are teenagers and newborns, meetings and work obligations that can no longer afford to be cast away at the mere hint of adventure. We’re grownups, in other words, and with that inevitable moniker comes a wonderful shackle of responsibility that means you have people in your life that depend on you.

       After my oldest daughter’s volleyball game in Salt Lake City, I skated away as fast as the interstate would carry me. I love watching her play, and I know there is only one more year to absorb. She will graduate soon, and she will make her own sacrifices to the gods when it comes to the trips she decides to take and the chores she chooses to shirk. She is becoming a woman, and I can no longer decide for her. The thought both fills me with pride and deflates my heart. Will she remember me watching her before I left?

       The road grew lonesome into the night, but the silence gave me peace as the white dirt turned muddy brown, then to dry rocks tickling me toward the southwest. Utah came and went, then a slice of Colorado, then New Mexico and the Indian reservations dotting her barren and beautiful landscape. The people here live different lives than I do, and I wonder at the fate of my birth as to the placement of my existence. But there is no score to settle that I truly have any say over. They are here and I am merely a ghost passing through their world. I nod to them in my mind, apologize for the land they used to own although ownership to them was a concept they could never grasp. Again, with the schedule piling up, there is little time to reflect on the sins of our past. I can only move ahead, passing the shanties and government buildings as though they are giant wooden cows waiting to be shipped to some new butcher.

       At a hotel in Gallup, I see that everyone is wearing masks. There are signs instructing me to cover my mouth when I cough, billboards recommending the vaccine. The world has shifted over the last few years, and up north there remained a resistance to government assistance. Here, it is as though the pandemic is fresh and new, and the Indians look at me as though I might be a carrier. I remember once more the lineage of time, and if nothing else, traveling provides a viewpoint along that shifting clock that allows you to see both where you might be going and where you’ve come from.

        In the morning I rise before dawn, and after grabbing some McDonald’s breakfast (scolding myself for my dietary preferences yet devouring the sausage McMuffin at the same time) I speed east as the sun rises behind me. Orange floods in from both sides of my pickup, as though some vibrant sky bomb has detonated and now it oozes through the atmosphere with a snaillike demeanor. I have lost all memory of snow, and I can feel the rising temperature ushering my path.

Thank God for the sun and the sky, and for New Mexico to always show it to us.

       I find that as I get older, I drive more in silence. The noise of cell phones and TVs, YouTube and pop music, backseat shouts and client phone calls, has deafened my senses to a non-responsive pulp. I need taciturnity; let my mind run with the tires and the windshield. I used to think my grandpa was crazy when we drove out to the farm and he never touched the radio dial. Turns out he was only human, the course of his life suddenly in view of my own. Without the noise I can see his face, and maybe all those times I rode with him he was simply remembering people he had loved.

       More desert sage and dry arroyos on the way to El Paso, and the surrounding landscape becomes flooded with a culture so much different than my own. I see homes to the south in Old Mexico, fancy hotels across the line to the north. I see a people mad to cross that imaginary line, and I remember voices from the squawking phones that speak to the dangers of the border, the increasing threat of the cartel, the uncertainty of tomorrow. Again, the world is too much to handle in the confines of our own minds. There are too many choristers begging for our attention, too much history to dissect moving eighty miles an hour. Better to let that stuff go on your travels, remembering to give it its due attention at the proper place and time; perform your moral and civic obligations on a much later appointment on that bulbous calendar. Now is the time to look at the Organ Mountains, the river bottom to the south running smooth and tranquil, the birds flittering in the sky and the smell of mesquite in the arid vastness of more land than we have yet developed.

Thank God for the birds and the high dry desert, and for the highway to always show it to us.

We meet in random sequence on the ranch, brothers and cousins and friends shaking hands as though it has only been weeks instead of months between grasps. We gather gear in the way of efficiency, the old routines of over-preparedness giving way to rushed time. There are no superfluous movements. The non-essential has been cut away. We’re here to hunt and see the wild things, to enjoy each other’s company, to laugh again under the stars.

       We check into our rooms. We have a history with these 33,000 acres, and we know where we want to go. Soon the UTVs are loaded, some of us still in blue jeans, the sun falling against the Chinati Mountains, the vacuum of the Chihuahuan desert begging us to see her intimately.

       Black wildebeest dance inside small funnels of twisting dirt, their deceiving bodies light and agile, their black horns sharp at the end and curved backward as though the great mother grew bored when she birthed these unique animals to the landscape. She must have known us homo-sapiens would play with them like pawns on a chess board, but I wonder if she guessed we’d import Africa to Texas; fly megafauna halfway around the world. There are blackbuck antelope and axis deer and camels too, and they flee into the field with the donkeys and horses as we zoom by on our way to the more remote sections of the ranch. It has become the reward simply to see the animals feed freely along the range, and we are soothed by the grunts of their nasally throats and the kicks of their hoofed feet. We move on. We’re here to hunt aoudad, barbary sheep as I call them. They cling to the rocks and canyons, blend with the drab brown canvas dotted with prickly pear and ocotillo plants.

       My brother was sick with covid last year, and I don’t think his lungs have fully recovered. It was one of those situations that loom close to tragedy, and although we’ve spoken about it in passing, it’s left mainly unsaid just how near he might have been to the other side. He said he felt the presence of our father on the hospital bed, a long haze of proximity and smell. I believe him, and the lingering remembrance is somehow stronger here on the borderland. This is an ancient place, and the open sky and dry humidity and vast topography seem to sing out in unison of a stamp in time older and wiser than we know. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel ghosts in the glow of the canyons in search of sheep. The pursuit of death seems to lure the tantalizing siren, as though flirting with our prey opens the door to mortality itself. Is this a ridiculous reach of my romantic, novelistic tendencies? I say no. After all, it is death we beg from the ends of our barrels. Why not then be haunted by the fallen of yesterday, both four-legged and two?

Thank God for the windows to the past, and for the animals we hunt that allow us to look through that solemn glass.

We make hikes onto ridgelines, walk casually to vantage points overlooking severe canyons. There is a calmness among the group, and although we are hunting, we are also content to be shoulder to shoulder, the jostling of the rocky road bumping us into one another, the game out there in the gullies and cuts and us all too happy to be looking for them. Two members couldn’t make it this year, and we miss them as we climb in elevation to the long range of the Chinatis. Civilization has claimed a couple more victims, but we know we will see them again. The cities cannot keep hunters apart forever, and we seem to know this as we go, the wind in our faces and the Rio Grande out there ahead in the hazy flat below.

Thank God for the friends that will meet us tomorrow, and for the ones here and now at our sides.

We are also picky. My brother wants a ram over thirty inches, so we spend more time evaluating the bodies and horns of these north African beasts through high-powered spotting scopes and binoculars. A group of four mature males sprints across a sharp bend in the road, and after a short hike we watch them bound over the side of a cliff, the largest one a deep curled and heavy-shouldered brute - one my brother would have gladly taken. We search long but they disappear under the boulder chutes and drop-offs, all of it funneling downward to some hellish end we cannot see.

Thank God for the places animals go to hide, and for the faults of our own bodies that prevent us from interrupting there.

       We caught word that there is a “celebrity hunter” on the other side of the ranch and that they instructed the local guide to shoot and hang an aoudad ewe a week prior so that it could properly age before their arrival. It remains unclear whether they will disclose this detail when they air the all-important cooking portion of their program, and I am reminded yet again of the over-produced, money-induced shadow that haunts all things in this modern world. We are paying for this experience, and the hunting show is being paid for its promotions. Money weaves in and around all things, and am I fooled once more into believing I could ever hunt freely.

We descend a weaving switchback heading toward the lodge as the bright sky evaporates in long whisps of grey clouds. A band of small black objects dart across the trail and disappear behind thick stands of Desert Spoon and Lechuguilla, also known as Shin Dagger. The plants and javelina know nothing of dollar bills, only grow and survive.

Thank God for the skunk pigs and thorns to show us what primal really means, and for whatever circumstances that allow them to live and prosper.

       The next morning, we wake and drink coffee in the high windowed comedor, some of the other guests at the ranch waiting for their huevos rancheros and eyeing our camouflage with suspicion. Our advancement in years has ushered a crack in the dam of our pride. We originally booked rooms away from the main resort, the accommodations rustic, the meals to be planned and executed by us alone. But we were bumped last minute on account of the “hunting celebrity” who needed the kitchen unattended in order to film his segments, and I wonder as the waitress asks if I want more coffee if we have been played in order to fill rooms that were otherwise un-booked. The ranch manager has promised to make it up to us when the final bill is due, but time will tell whether or not both parties share the same definition of reciprocity. We talk about this briefly under our breaths, our hair disheveled, our voices groggy from more than a few cervezas and whiskies after yesterday evening’s hunt. But when the Chilaquiles are placed neatly on the table in front of us, the melted cheese oozing into the red sauce, the tortilla chips failing to the weight of perfectly cooked eggs, the tomatoes and onions dotted as if in a painting, the prospect of protein bars and charred toast doesn’t seem so appealing, and we allow that as we age it is perhaps ok to let someone else do the cooking.

       All day we hunt, the wind now blowing over thirty miles an hour, the game hard to find as they cuddle next to sharp undercuts or bed down against Century Plants large and demode like faded green Volkswagens abandoned in the desert. We laugh and tell stories, fill in the gaps of each other’s lives with anecdotes that are both exaggerated and true. We are a group of friends grown apart, a band of compadres forced into different area codes both by fate and decisions made on our own dime. The world is a dizzying array of chance and conclusion, and we are a group of men who vowed to meet once a year so that we may remember those who aren’t with us; savor time and life as it dries and fissures in the wind.

       Two barbary sheep are stalked over the next several hours. We debate horn length and symmetry as if there is some reward to be given to those most accurate. I think of my middle daughter’s cheerleading competitions, and I ask myself if there is much difference between the panel of judges critiquing back tucks and heel stretches and us here huddled over a rocky slope, scrutinizing the sheep and the way their headgear swoops and measures and turns. Human beings seem incapable of not boxing the world into numbers on a scoresheet, and so we temper the pull of the trigger and perform to the best of our ability. What else is there to do under the bright lights, the hot sun?

       Two shots are fired at over six hundred yards away. The bullets fly high, ricocheting off a large boulder, the band bounding over the top of the ridge, the large ram running freely, his chaps long and golden as he disappears forever.

“Well. Shit,” my brother says.

       There’s nothing else. Gone are the moments of self-doubt or ridicule, the anxious beggings of a shot to be taken back and reperformed. We are all old enough to know that we will miss. The animal was proven by all to be unharmed, the benefit of a party there to witness the bullet path. We are also too old to give my brother hell. Bullets fly and we are human.

Thank God for the missed shots and the friends that see them, and for all the other chances life gives us to be better.

       Late in the afternoon, we cross multiple drainages in lower terrain. The sky is falling, and the sudden possibility of going home empty-handed looms overhead just above the mountain peaks we toppled earlier in the day. Our lackadaisical approach to this reunion might be biting us in the ass, and we feel then a pending unfulfillment of a goal. It is the completion of the task that binds a hunt, and we all know the feeling of driving home with empty coolers. It is not that we love the animal ceasing to exist, it is that we love to do the thing we came here to do. Otherwise, there is a flippant pursuit of our days that hangs in the balance, as if we might as well be pissing in the wind. After all, cheerleaders who compete ask the judges what the score is so that they may learn how to improve. In order to get the score, you have to finish the routine.

The manager had told us about a group of exotics let loose by a neighboring ranch now roaming freely over the foothills of The Big Bend. They’re called transcaspian urials – an Asian sheep found in places like the Himalayas and Afghanistan. None of us will likely visit these regions in person, so it feels like cheating to have a chance at one in the Chihuahuan desert; pen-raised aliens now living like the native mule deer, but then again terms like free-range and high-fence are only as good as the barbwire strung across endless miles of yucca-ridden ridgelines by men who get lazy and animals who break lose. Besides, this country is unfenceable – a fact proven by the legend of one of the hired hands falling to his death when they tried to run T-posts up the side of Chinati Peak. What’s left is an impossibly defined collection of pastures, canyons, parks, mountains, and irrigated hay fields. And as close friends, we are not here to debate the skill of each hunter. Maybe that notion was blasted away with the invention of gunpowder. We’re here instead to see one another and put meat in the ice chest and horns on the wall and feel something bloody and real.

Thank God for the hunters that don’t look down on the way you spend your feral minutes, and for all the ridiculous games that were played to bring yet another country to America.

       We see them at a distance, forget about the sheep we came here for, decide not to look the gift horse in the mouth. My brother is open to what life offers him now, and he rolls with the changing circumstance with happy candor. We stalk on foot, the first glimpse of the Urials revealing a group of six bounding away. In that fleeting window, we see that there is a large, mature ram, his horns sweeping outward then curling like a bighorn, his mane jet black under his chin like some barbarous bowtie. Behind him, four females, then behind them, another male, limping a little on his back left leg.

       It is a pitiful thing to see animals hampered, just as it is depressing to see athletes injured, unable to perform. My brother is faced with a dilemma: go for the big ram who looks to be well over thirty inches, the trophy fee rising with every click of the measuring tape, or focus on the injured male, a fine animal in his own right but lessened by the gimp he carries, the checkbook subsequently lessened by what would surely be a discounted bill. He might not last long. Another hunter, perhaps a mountain lion, will take him down. Just last week an entire group of yearlings was slaughtered by a stealthy cat they’ve been trying to trap with no success.

       In our youth, I think my brother would have gone for gold. He wouldn’t have hesitated, would have bagged the biggest wall-hanger. But there is something different in his eyes when I watch him from the side as he settles his rifle on the shooting sticks. He is not the hunter he once was, and I don’t mean that as an insult. None of us are. It’s something along the lines of the old axiom that speaks to changing rivers and changing people. The older we get, the more we understand death by sheer means of proximity. I’m not going to say last year’s illness made him a soothsayer or anything, but I think the tightened swelling of his lungs as we hiked merged somehow with the baleful image of that injured transcaspian urial, far from his homeland but still wild, bounding forward with all the courage he can muster. The older, trophy male goes on, will surely breed his females successfully and thus pass on genes that look to be in their prime. This male, the injured sheep, will perhaps be pushed out of the herd later down the line. Or he will be killed in the night. Or he will live and overcome his injury.

This is the part of the story when the hunter tries to justify the kill as merciful, but the truth is that the sheep is much tougher than we give him credit for. There is no way to estimate the number of days he has left, and we are fools to rationalize the killing as something other than just that. When my brother pulls the trigger, his friends and family standing around him under that vast West Texas movie screen, the decision is pulled from the animal’s accord. The rapport becomes a rebellion against my brother’s own death, a savage reminder that we are takers in this world of imports, consumers in this land of survivors.

Thank God for the animals we eat, and for all the ways we decide to pull the trigger while we still can.

The sun goes down, and we spend the next few hours standing under constellations which draw indelible lines in the night sky, countless others perforating out from Orien and the Big Dipper like dust from a black shaking dog. We tell stories in the dark as we lean over the cooler in the back of the UTV, our arms sore and bloody from hiking and shooting and hauling. We cannot see one another’s faces in the starry night, but we look each other in the eye because we know where they are without seeing them and we laugh like we used to and we shake each other’s hands. In the morning we will all go our separate ways, back to the lives we’ve carved out for ourselves and our families. But West Texas isn’t going anywhere, and when the stars align we’ll be back, more aliens on the landscape running between fences.