Love the photo. Would have loved to have seen that duck telling everyone to step away, now!!

It’s not that it makes you callous, you just grow up with a better understanding of death in general (and biology, for that matter; Every time I help my dad gut and skin an animal, it’s a free anatomy lecture).

It is truly unfortunate that hunting has become stereotyped as a redneck, conservative, backcountry, whathaveyou sport. I often encounter folks who believe that my hunting must reveal some unchecked aggression or maladjustment. While I must admit finding great joy in hunting, it derives not from some demented desire to kill things, but from the glimmer of connectedness I feel tromping through an upland field, or sitting in a duck blind at the crack of dawn, all while watching every nuanced movement of my dogs for ‘game on.’ I feel connected to my place in time, to my surroundings, to my heritage, to my sustenance, and to my humanness. Most people need drugs to feel that.

Before being green was a fad (and a great fad it is), there were hunters. They were the crazy old curmudgeons you’d encounter in rural bars, talking about how ‘wild’ California once was, before all city slickers paved over everything. They’d share stories of the slough where they’d jump-shoot a dozen mallards with their best spaniel, but that is now a mini-mart and gas station. They fought every proposed development that came their way. They lost most of the time.

My grandfather was among these crazy bustards. I’ve spent years working for environmental causes to varying degrees (NPOs, policy, academia, etc.), and I’ve yet to meet anyone quite so passionate about the environment as me ‘pa. He was born poor; so poor that hunting was essential to his family’s survival. Though I was much more fortunate in my suburban upbringing, I nonetheless have childhood memories filled with weekend hunting trips, Thanksgiving goose, deer carcasses hanging in the garage, and weeks on end eating venison cooked seven ways ‘til Sunday. All this so his grandkids would understand that “meat don’t grow in plastic packages on trees” and “animals need wild places, just like people do.”

Today, I choose to know, really know, where food comes from and how it got in my cupboard and refrigerator. I don’t support the NRA and I don’t yearn to kill things, but I do hunt. At Norcal’s duck opener last Saturday I shot a limit of mallards. The week before that, I dined on chuckar and pheasant from the prior weekend’s upland hunt. This supplements leftovers from the summer harvest already sitting in my freezer.

Perhaps, one day, I’ll be the the crazy old woman in the backcountry bar with a retriever at my feet, sipping whiskey and telling tall tales of the epic duck hunting over Sac valley rice fields that have since been reduced to golf course ponds. For now, I guess I’m okay being the shotgun-toting-psycho-hunter-chick. If my ‘pa were here, he’d laugh at that, and be proud.