My ex-boyfriend was always trying to get me to eat his meat. Shockingly, this isn’t a euphemism. He was a hunter; I was a vegan. Hunting was important to him, and he wanted to share it with me.
When I met him, it had been a dozen years since I’d read Eating Animals, and yes, the only thing more embarrassing than being a vegan is being a vegan because Jonathan Safran Foer told you to. Like his, my reasons were related to factory farming and global warming, to suffering and compassion, to being the kind of person you want to be. They were pretty good reasons, now that I think about it, and I still believe in them.
After a year of dating, my ex and I broke up. Nine months later, I flew to Montana to learn how to hunt.
Let’s call my ex Michael. Let’s also imagine that every single other person in the world called him Mike, but that he wouldn’t let me call him that because he was “trying to rebrand,” so I was the only asshole calling the man by his government name. Michael was 11 years older than I was, and in his distant past he had been a white dude with long blond dreads and an art degree living in the Pacific Northwest. Which is to say: He had been a vegan once too.
That he was, in 2022, eating only meat that he personally killed was the second thing he told me about himself. The first was that he knew how to clean a skull; one of my Hinge-prompt answers was about trying to clean the flesh off a skull I found in the desert. (Sheep. Not human.) I told him that “I know how to clean a skull” was the sexiest thing he could have said to me, and that if you were going to eat meat, hunting it yourself seemed like the way to do it. For our first date, I took the train from New York City to the town where he lived to go on a hike with him.
I wouldn’t eat his meat, but our relationship consisted mostly of hunting-adjacent things—nature, cooking, the TV show Alone—and it was through those things that I fell in love with Michael. A month or two into dating, we went on a hike the morning after a fresh snow and followed animal tracks to a hidden mouse, a dead chipmunk, a coyote we never quite caught up to.
We foraged, too, walking through the woods and—because of our knowledge and our attention and our ability to accurately perceive the color yellow—coming home with bagfuls of golden oyster mushrooms. The connection between wild food (fungus) and wild food (“anything that has a face”) began to form in my mind, and the idea of eating hunted meat began to seem more and more like a thing I’d want to do.
I remained strict about not eating meat, but I wasn’t the strictest vegan in the world. I knew that thing about little minds and foolish consistency and hobgoblins. I wanted to enjoy my one life on this planet, so sometimes—arrest me—I did eat butter. I once watched an interview with the guy who played Peeta in The Hunger Games where he called himself a vegan-plus, “like, vegan plus some other things I wanna eat every now and then.” Maybe, for me, one of those other things could be a hunted animal. Maybe I could even hunt it myself.
Michael and I had broken up, ultimately, because of hunting. After months of fighting about lies and about other women, fights that always involved me sobbing and him making some analogy about holding trout too tightly—but that also always involved us getting back together—Michael called me one morning sounding quiet and shaken. He’d had a court date earlier that morning, he told me. Because, for the past six years, he’d been flying back to Montana to hunt with friends, and on those trips he’d been buying Montana-resident hunting licenses.
“…OK?” I said. It didn’t sound like a huge deal.
Apparently it was a huge deal, punishable by large fines and even jail time. But Michael told me that during his Zoom court date, he had been “honest” with the judge, had cried while expressing how much he missed Montana, and that the judge had gone easy on him, giving him a relatively small fine and suspending his hunting license for a year and a half. It had made him realize that he needed to be honest with other people in his life, starting with me. I asked if he had anything he wanted to tell me, and he said no, but that I could ask him questions. So I asked about my worst suspicions of him, and had them confirmed. It fixed the problem of us always getting back together.
A Lonely Hunter
Despite being a vegan who lived deep inside New York City, I now wanted to become a hunter. I couldn’t believe such a horrible relationship had changed something so fundamental about me. But maybe that was the sign of a really bad relationship, I thought, or a really good one. I no longer had a boyfriend to teach me about hunting, but maybe I didn’t need one.
As I educated myself, I promised myself I would never click on an NRA link, and I never did. At some point, though, a friend asked me if I had seen the video of Wayne LaPierre shooting an elephant. I hadn’t, but I watched it that night. In the video, filmed for what would have been an NRA television show, LaPierre is trophy hunting. He shoots an elephant, but it’s not a clean shot and the elephant doesn’t immediately fall, so he rushes after it and shoots it again at close range. The elephant groans. Wayne LaPierre, former head of the National Rifle Association, is not a good enough shot to put an elephant out of its misery. He shoots it repeatedly, only hurting it more, until his hunting guide steps in and kills the elephant himself. I turned the video off. It made me ill.
Because I needed help to hunt, I found an outfitter who specifically offered to teach first-timers. I’d fly out to remote northwestern Montana to hunt with Seth Moore, owner of Yaak River Outfitters.
One Monday morning in late September, I woke up at negative three in the morning and began my journey to Yaak to hunt mountain grouse. Why grouse? For one thing, a man I called Best Friend Greg, because his name is Greg and he’s my friend Harris’s best friend, told me that hunting them involved a lot of walking around and was the closest I’d get to “hiking with a gun.” (When I ran that line by a different friend, they responded, “So why don’t you just go bird-watching?”)
Three species of grouse—ruffed grouse, spruce grouse, and dusky grouse—lived in the part of Montana where I’d be hunting, so there would be abundant opportunities, and I’d get to learn about three distinct birds. We’d be hunting with dogs, which seemed good on a vibes level, and also, as friends enthusiastically reminded me, grouse was one of the main things they’d eaten on the most recent season of Alone. It also just seemed that for me, a person who had never killed anything other than a bug, it might be a little bit less emotionally difficult to kill a bird. They didn’t have those cute mammal eyes.
On the plane from New York, as I chugged black Delta coffee and looked out the window at the pinkish-orange light that indicated a sunrise, I thought about my late-breaking new fear. I was worried that I was going to kill a bird and feel nothing: no remorse, no sadness, nothing but excitement to cut open its body and carve it into edible parts. Two flights and a bonkers drive later (mountains, trees, big sky), I made it to Overdale Lodge, out of which Seth Moore runs Yaak River Outfitters. Seth was there to greet me, to help me buy my (out-of-state) grouse-hunting license, and to get me settled into my one-room log cabin. The decor consisted of a taxidermied deer head, a bear throw pillow, a wooden plaque with a little moose on it—all very “animals you can get permission from the state of Montana to shoot” chic. It began to sink in that tomorrow I might kill an animal. How did this happen? I wondered as I unpacked. And why did I essentially pack five different sports bras and no T-shirts?
The Hunt Begins
The next morning began as all hunting stories must: with a string of pans in the middle of the woods. Seth handed me the gun I’d be borrowing, not from him but from his 13-year-old son. It was a rifle sized for babies—perfect for me, a baby. Seth told me to aim at a pan, just to get the hang of the gun before shooting clays. I aimed, and totally missed.
One of the many reasons I’d decided to hunt with Seth was that his website promised, “No prior experience necessary.” I’d shot clay pigeons for practice before flying to Montana, had even done well enough to post a clip to Instagram (“Aren’t you supposed to be vegan?” a friend reacted), but that morning I could not get it together. Seth launched clay pigeons and I missed, missed, missed, missed again. There are so many elements of shooting—stance, aiming, swinging through, safety, the fact that an explosion is about to happen inches away from my face—and I tried to think about it all at once, when of course I shouldn’t have been thinking about any of it at all.
It brought up an ethical argument among hunters: Is it wrong to shoot a bird that isn’t flying? Some hunters say that shooting a standing bird isn’t sporting. But the fact that it’s harder to make a good shot on a flying bird means it’s more likely that you’ll hurt them without killing them. I wasn’t hunting for sport; I was hunting to connect to nature. And I wanted to kill these birds in a way that minimized their pain. I decided I would only shoot birds that were standing on the ground or sitting in a tree. So I returned to shooting the pans. I practiced and practiced.
By late morning, we were in the Kootenai National Forest, looking for grouse. Moduck, the German wirehaired pointer, ran ahead sniffing for grouse as Seth; our photographer, Christina Gandolfo; and I followed behind. Upland bird hunting is more about flushing birds from their hiding spots than it is about sneaking up on them or tricking them into coming to you, so we chatted as we walked.
We jumped into the conversational deep end, talking about the ethics of hunting, its role in conservation, the environmental debates being had in the Yaak River valley as a whole. We talked about the kind of hunters who didn’t talk about this stuff. “We don’t have a great reputation, hunters in general,” Seth said. With Yaak River Outfitters, he wanted to foster a more thoughtful approach. Walking through the forest, inhaling the smell of pine, was heaven. Seth pointed out elk rubs, deer tracks, scat of moose and bears and wolves. (“I’m not the kind of person who likes to touch poop,” Seth said, but he took a rock and broke up the wolf scat, so we could see the bones and hair of what they’d been eating.) On any other trip, this would have been the entire project for me: hiking, noticing. It was strange for it just to be a side benefit, strange not to take an iPhone photo of every single mushroom I saw.
It was strange, too, to leave the old forest road and walk straight through the forest. My time spent in national parks had trained me to never hike off-trail, but here, in a remote corner of public land that wasn’t visited by millions of tourists a year, our footsteps didn’t pose some massive environmental threat. Instead of positioning myself and other humans as a threat to nature, here I was, walking through the woods and hoping to eat an animal “harvested” from this very forest, placing myself directly inside nature. I pushed through brush and branches, elated, an emotion complicated only by the fact that I was carrying a loaded firearm and trying desperately not to kill anyone.
Suddenly, we flushed a covey of grouse. They flew uphill, and we climbed up looking for them, Moduck running ahead. She stopped, staring intently at a small tree—pointing—and sure enough, sitting at the base of the tree was a little grouse. It was a ruffed grouse, which made sense, because the hill we’d been climbing was covered in kinnikinnick, which Seth told us was one of their main food sources. Before I got set up to shoot, we decided to let Christina take a photo of the bird, and just as she did, it flew off. I wasn’t disappointed that this bird got to live another day.
The same thing occurred over the next few hours, at a couple of different locations. We saw flashes of grouse, but I never fired a shot. We heard wolves barking in the distance and found a deer jawbone that I decided to take home. At some point, Seth mentioned that you could hike to the Canadian border, so of course we did just that. When we got there, the border was marked by an obelisk, a “little Washington Monument,” Seth called it. It was made of metal, read UNITED STATES on one side and CANADA on the other. Like the pans from that morning and every single road sign we’d seen since, it was riddled with bullet holes. Christina and I stood on its pedestal, walked around it: Now we’re in Montana, now we’re in British Columbia. Eventually we started the hike back to the car. Everything was so beautiful.
We were driving back to the cabins when, up ahead of us, we saw a ruffed grouse just sitting on the edge of the road. It made a certain sense. The entire national forest is covered in food for the grouse, but for them to find gravel for their gizzards, the organ that grinds up what they’ve eaten, they have fewer options. One of those options is the road. Seth parked, and we stepped out of the car, into the light rain. I put on my eye and ear protection. Seth loaded the gun, handed it to me. I got into position.
Over and over, on his website and in person, Seth stressed his belief that killing an animal was a serious, emotionally weighty thing. He explicitly said that while he would do his best to give me the opportunity to take a shot, it was up to me, when the time came, to decide if I actually wanted to do it. And I did, definitely, want to shoot this bird; I just hoped it wouldn’t suffer.
I crept close to the grouse, getting into range. My heart was racing, but I knew that would happen, so I took a deep breath and started to exhale. Seth put his hands over his ears, and I pulled the trigger.
The bird stood there, looking at me like, “Uhhh, what’s up?” I had totally missed it.
I took a deep breath, aimed again, fired again. This time, I hit it.
But not well enough. The grouse scurried across the road and down the mountain’s slope. I had done the thing I didn’t want to do: injure a bird. This bird was now in pain, because of me, and would be until I killed it. I had one more bullet in my gun, so I waited for the grouse to stop moving, then fired my final bullet. The grouse took off, farther down the mountain. Seth asked for the gun, to reload it.
My entire body was warm and red with shame and sadness. As Seth put more bullets in the gun, I was suspended in the horrible reality that I had flown across the country to torture an animal, to make it die terrified and broken and bleeding. This was the exact opposite of what I had wanted from hunting: to become more in harmony with the natural world. Seth came back, and we slid down the mountain’s slope to where I could, for the fourth time, fire my shotgun at this tiny little bird. Finally, the bird stopped moving.
I breathed, so relieved that it was over.
The bird ran again.
Seth asked for the gun, and I obliged. He fired a fifth round into the bird. Finally, for real, despite a few death twitches from the nervous system’s last electricity flowing out—it was done.
We climbed back up to the truck, where Christina waited.
“How do you feel?” she asked me.
“I feel like Wayne LaPierre shooting an elephant.”
Furious and disgusted with myself, I followed Seth to a tree stump at Overdale to learn how to butcher a grouse. Processing this animal would give me a better understanding of its anatomy and diet. It would be an intimate way of honoring this bird by making sure as much of it was consumed as possible.
Seth cut an incision down the bird’s body, pulled the guts out, pulled off the head. He showed me the joints where he cut off the feet and wings with a pair of kitchen shears, had me touch them so I could find the joints myself in the future. As he worked, I was shocked at how easily a body was broken down. I asked Seth if we could look inside the crop, the pouch where undigested food is kept before it enters the gizzard—and in it we found a bunch of white matter Seth couldn’t identify and a bunch of kinnikinnick.
The breast that wasn’t shot was gorgeous, looked like something you’d see in a grocery store. Seth put it into a Ziploc to be brined; everything else, the guts and feet and all the meat too damaged by bullets to be eaten, went into a plastic grocery bag to be disposed of. At the end of the process, Seth asked if I wanted a couple of the grouse’s tail feathers. I did, not as a trophy but as a reminder. He handed them to me, and I walked back up to my cabin after my first day of hunting.
Shooter’s Remorse
I spent the evening wrestling with the fact that I had done the number-one thing I didn’t want to do: I had caused an animal to suffer. Well, I guess the number-one thing I didn’t want to do was accidentally kill myself, or another person, or one of the dogs. But I had done the number-four thing I didn’t want to do.
I really had practiced shooting as much as I was able to in advance of this trip, but obviously I did not practice enough. If the fact that I lived in NYC with no money and no car meant that consistent shooting practice wasn’t available to me, maybe hunting was not something I could ethically do. Maybe that was OK! After all, I’d been happy being a vegan for almost 14 years. Maybe this week was just my meat Rumspringa.
But still, I was grateful to be here, grateful for the hiking and the mushrooms, the wolves barking and the little Washington Monument, for all I had already learned about the natural world. It had been a perfect day, until I’d actually done the thing I had come here to do. Even then, I was grateful Seth was there with me, able to end the bird’s suffering.
Spiraling out, I called Emmy, my best friend, who’d helped inspire me to stop eating meat way back in high school. In recent years, she’d started eating fish on doctor’s orders, and part of my desire to become a hunter had come from seeing Emmy raise three ducks and then kill them to eat for Thanksgiving. On the phone, she assured me that processing that first duck had been much harder than she expected, emotionally. That killing was a difficult thing. She told me about her own efforts to use as much of the birds as possible and asked me if I’d saved the grouse’s heart, which a grocery-store meat eater might find gross but which was just as edible as the breast. I hadn’t saved the heart, I told her, but I would next time. And I knew that I did want there to be a next time, but I wanted to do it right.
Another Day, Another Shot
The following morning, I laid out my clothes and thought, Here’s my cute little bird-murdering costume, and then headed to the shooting range. I worked on my cheek weld, learned to stop flinching in anticipation of the shotgun’s recoil, shot turkey-head targets and analyzed where the pellets were going, shot again and again until I felt better, felt, finally, good. We drove out to a summit to hunt, passing a grizzly bear along the way, hiked above the clouds and saw not one single grouse. Again, we were driving back toward Overdale when we spotted a grouse—this time a spruce grouse—on the side of the road.
We got out of the car, approached the bird, and I aimed. After that morning’s practice, I knew to aim a little lower than I thought I needed to. I fired.
I. Totally. Missed. The bird flew off.
It seemed to have been a clean miss, which was much better than if I’d wounded the bird, but Jesus Christ. I could not believe that after all that practice, I still could not properly shoot a grouse. Seth took that morning’s dog out to see if he could locate the bird, to double-check that it had, in fact, made it safely away. While he did that, I sat in the truck, feeling bad for Seth for having to deal with my dumb ass, messing everything up, terrorizing God’s creatures.
Christina leaned forward from the back and hugged me around my seat.
Just then, Seth walked up. He said he had spotted the bird, alive. I saw he was still holding the shotgun, and I thought, Oh, God. Here I go.
I wanted to shoot that grouse, wanted to be hunting, wanted to process it and eat it. But I hated that I might not do it correctly, might make another bird suffer. Outside, the spruce grouse was sitting up in a tree. I aimed. I breathed. I kept aiming until I felt sure, and thought Please as I squeezed the trigger.
It died immediately.
When we processed that grouse, I asked Seth about keeping the heart, and that night I thought about the meat eating of it all. I had spent all day walking around in the wet cold to kill one bird. As a fan of hiking: Job well done. As caloric math: Something here was not adding up.
There was a knock at my cabin door. Seth’s wife, Maribeth, had brought me a potpie she’d cooked using yesterday’s grouse, the first thing I’d ever killed.
I had been preparing to eat hunted meat all year. I’d heard that after a long period of vegetarianism, your body loses the enzymes you need to eat animal protein. While I didn’t know if that was true, I knew that the one time I’d eaten meat since 2010, by accident in Barcelona in 2014, I had been up all night puking. (Though I learned during the writing of this article that it is in fact not true, at the time it felt like a disgusting vegan badge of honor.)
I certainly wasn’t going to murder an animal if I wasn’t going to be able to digest it afterward. I’d been eating bites of fish here and there to build up a tolerance. And then, when I’d been in Missoula that spring, my friend Jesse cooked up some venison shot by his soon-to-be brother-in-law. He threw it in a cast-iron pan with some butter, put some salt and pepper on it, and served it up to me and his fiancée, Nikki. Trepidatious, I put a piece of deer in my mouth. It tasted: fucking amazing. It was the Platonic ideal of meat. I remembered why I used to be obsessed with steak and bacon. My uterus was probably like, Finally, bitch, thank you.
Maribeth’s grouse potpie that night was delicious.
On the last day, it was just Seth and I. As we drove and as we hiked, Seth told me fascinating hunting stories. It struck me that I had no hunting stories, just stories about my ex and, to a lesser extent, stories about my favorite episodes of Alone. But I realized that I did have a hunting story, now, if I could figure out how to tell it.
Since I’d shot a ruffed grouse and a spruce grouse, we decided to spend the day looking for the last remaining grouse species in the Yaak, the dusky grouse. It’s an elusive bird that lives in hard-to-get-to areas, high up and rugged and far away from the road. But that’s the kind of place I love. We drove, seeing ruffed and spruce grouse on the road, and I was content to identify the species and pass them by. High on a mountain, we ditched the truck and charged uphill on the hardest hike I’d been on in my life, one I never would have attempted just for fun. We didn’t see a single grouse and didn’t care. As we drove to a different spot, the views of the valley made me think of a quote from the monk Thomas Merton: “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time.”
The most God-shining-through-it thing of all happened the next day when, as I was driving out of the Yaak River valley under a literal rainbow, Delta Air Lines texted me to say that my flight was canceled owing to heavy flooding in New York. I called Delta and asked if there was any way they could fly me to Milwaukee that night, so I could share the meat that was slowly thawing in my luggage with my best friend, Emmy. They responded, essentially: You know what? Fuck it, dog, sure.
Emmy had been such an inspiration for me to become a vegan and then to become a hunter. I had talked and bragged about her so much the past few days. Sharing that grouse with her, watching as she cooked it up for breakfast alongside potatoes she’d grown, and eating it with toast and jam from currants she’d foraged—it was my wildest dream. It was the fantasy of living exactly right. I was sharing food, and pleasure, and a connection with nature, with one of the people I loved most in the entire world. Emmy fried up the heart for me and, feeling emotional, I ate it in one bite.•
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of the books How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?
