The Pursuit of Protein

Excerpted from ‘The Disaster Diaries’

The sun slanted heavily into the canyon, cutting bars through the trees, on an unseasonably warm October day as I followed Don Yeager up the trail into the wilderness, into thin air. Sweat sprang out all over my body. One hour ago I had stepped out of the car after a two-day drive from sea-level Los Angeles, and now, after three uphill steps, I was blowing heavily, my pulse thudding in my ears. We were climbing from nine thousand feet, and I felt the oxygen debt rise like a red tide. All the old clichés about hiking at altitude came back to me, it’s like breathing through a straw.

Finally, we reached the top: a wide meadow of grass and sage, bright sun, wind, and the whelming awe of open spaces. We walked quickly across the open field, keeping our profile low, into a parklike “tree island” in the middle of the meadow that was fed from an under- ground spring. A heavy down log makes a perfect seat, and Don and I settled in.

Before us stretched a vast panorama of southern Colorado: canyon, meadows, steep hilly mountains, snow-capped peaks close at hand. Don is a lifelong hunter and a former soldier. He had served as an instructor in the marines’ Combat Hunter program, and he knew how to pick an observation spot. We had breathtaking command of the entire landscape.

Don Yeager is the son of Chuck Yeager, the iconic pilot immortalized in The Right Stuff, a World War II ace and the first man to break the sound barrier. Don’s round forehead is similar to his famous father’s. He has crisp white hair and a weather-beaten face, most often wreathed in a big grin. Even at sixty-five, his vision was much better than mine, as we quickly discovered. Don is slender, with a neat military bearing and mustache that are slightly at odds with his West Coast friendliness.

The light began to slant more steeply, and a warm glow bathed the valley. At the “magic hour” that cinematographers love, the mountains were suffused in the rich amber of sunset, and solitary clouds streaked incandescent pink against the sky.

It was two days before rifle hunting season opened, and we were waiting for elk.

I had never been hunting before, and was desperate to learn something. If the world ended, all our ancient skills would be resurrected; and I wanted to have at least a semblance of a clue on how to proceed. Which had brought me here, marveling at the mountains during the magic hour.

The elk loved the magic hour, too. That was when they would emerge from the trees to feed in the open. Dawn and dusk: that’s when you hunt elk up here in the mountains. The Combat Hunter manual that Don had cocreated, to teach hunting skills to marines, referred to this time as the mesotopic, when the low light “can result in inaccuracies in visual perception, making marines most susceptible to attack during this time.” The elk took full advantage.

“Well, they should be out here, they were out yesterday—but there are no guarantees with elk, I’ll tell you that much,” Don murmured. His voice was a comforting combination of country and California from the sixties of his youth. Sometimes a “dude” would sneak in.

“Elk, above all other animals, you hunt on their terms. You develop an enormous respect. Those fat-asses who hunt from four-wheelers don’t have any respect or understanding, and they don’t deserve it.

“When I got back from Vietnam,” Don said, “I didn’t hunt for a long time. I was tired of the killing, the death. I hunted birds, a few deer . . . but I didn’t want to kill anything with a rifle. So I picked up a bow maybe thirty-five years ago. I didn’t know anybody to hunt with, so I taught myself. It took me five years to kill my first elk.”

“Elk are weird. You’ll find out. Just because you see them some place one day doesn’t mean they’ll be there the next day. They really travel; they move all over the place within their range.

The sharp senses of the elk were one of Don’s favorite topics.

“The old saying is ‘Elk hear you three times, see you twice, and smell you once.’ What that means is, if the elk see you or hear you, they’ll run, but they might not go too far. But if they smell you, they’re gone, for miles. Nothing will drive elk out like smell. You really have to understand and hunt the wind.” Hunting the wind means keeping the elk upwind of you, so your alarming smell is carried away from them. It’s easier said than done.

We glassed, breathing deep in the gorgeous clean air.

Suddenly, I heard a high, long, whirling sound, ending in a scream. It was inhuman and hollow, pure and lyric, like a humpback whale’s song crossed with a red-tailed hawk’s screech. Treble is what carries in the mountains. The sound echoed with some of that sense of space that a loon’s laugh carries; it could be miles or it could be a thousand feet. I knew what it was without being told—the bugling of a bull elk. The hair on the back of my neck tingled.

We were in the tail end of the rut, the elk mating season. The rut runs on the elk’s hormonal calendar, which in turn is driven by necessity. Winter is a starving time, when the elk have to outlast the cold on stores built in the summer and fall. The cows need to be impregnated at the right time, to carry all winter and give birth in the early spring, so that the newborn calves can grow enough to survive the following winter. During the rut, the bulls clash, compete for females, dash their famous antlers together, and bugle. The rut had been going on for a month, and had peaked maybe two weeks ago.

“There they are,” Don said, and I aped his posture, following his angle.

Like magic, like ghosts, they had appeared in a distant meadow with heads down, grazing. They had dark legs and underbelly with a tan body. I had been reading and thinking about elk so much that to actually see them was a surprise, but also oddly familiar. My imaginary picture shook, then jelled with the real.

More elk kept appearing, until Don estimated that there were maybe a hundred animals moving through the high benches of sage and grass. What had been an empty meadow was now dotted with elk, plain as day, bold as brass. Their movement was deceptive: they seemed stationary, heads down, grazing, but they covered a lot of ground and were vanishing when I checked back.

“Sometimes you got to haul ass when you hunt elk,” Don said in the deepening gloom. “I usually hang back and wait for the wind to quit, but when the time is right, you have to go get them before they get out. Once they get into the timber, you’ll never get close enough. You run a lot when you’re hunting elk; there’s a ticking clock.”

As he said this, the elk were vanishing, fading into the trees.

As true twilight descended, the elk were gone. Like a magic trick, like the tide. Somewhere in that magic hour of falling light, maybe forty-five minutes, maybe more, was my window for shooting an elk, and then it would slam shut.

Is hunting what makes us human? David Petersen, Don’s favorite thinker on hunting, writes in his book Heartsblood that “to hunt is to be human.” He means that humans have spent many millions of years of their history hunting, and only about ten thousand years farming, so hunting was and is our natural occupation. He quotes famous anthropologists and riffs on archeological dates to prove his point.

Petersen uses this as the basis for a ringing endorsement of bow hunting, a pursuit that he loves and finds incredibly spiritual and natural. But even a layman like myself had to wonder: when were the bow and arrow invented? Primitive hominids that predate Homo sapiens probably would have found a bow and arrow a technological marvel not far removed from the space shuttle. The persistence hunt (running an animal down) is a far more natural way to hunt, and I have to wonder how Petersen would feel about trying to run down an elk.

From talking to Daniel Lieberman, the anthropology professor at Harvard and exponent of the barefoot running/persistence hunt hypotheses, and from reading his book on the evolution of the human head, I started to glean a picture. The stone spear, the bow and arrow, even the persistence hunt are all merely symptoms of the real change. The real change was internal: the birth of strategy. The persistence hunt was strategic. In colder climates, where it was harder to get animals to overheat, other strategies evolved, such as chasing animals into mud or off cliffs, as the Plains Indians did.

All these hunting methodologies are symptoms of a larger brain, which goes hand in hand with the consumption of the easy protein and rich fats that meat provide. A big brain is a serious energy drain. About 25 percent of your metabolism when sleeping goes toward maintaining it. But its advantages are obvious, enabling the ability for what is sometimes called speculative hunting, which means to track an animal and imagine what it has been doing, where it’s going, and how it feels. The South African game tracker and author Louis Liebenberg has referred to this very ability as “the origin of science.”

As Professor Lieberman was quick to point out, successful foraging (as opposed to hunting) also depends on problem solving and memory, so a bigger brain would also lead to better foraging. The human brain has evolved to catalog and study and problem-solve, not just to learn tracks, scents, and minute details of animal behavior.

Our “natural” state is to be a deep student of our environment. That’s the essential precondition of survival. Primitive man would have lived in tension, a profound student of his surroundings, or he wouldn’t have lived at all.

If you had a yard as a child, you probably remember it with a startling intimacy. You knew that yard: every inch, every bush, each step on the tree you could climb, the whorls and knots in the branches, the bare dirt spots, the sandy gravel, the soft grass. It was deep, profound, intimate local knowledge. You intuitively knew what was happening around you at all times. Primitive man would have felt that way about a much larger stretch of ground, but it was still “his” territory. This very ability is really what allowed Homo sapiens to expand and succeed the way we did.

Art and science (as well as less noble pursuits, like entertainment and sports) were born in the pursuit of protein and survival.

I woke in the dead silence of the deep woods, eyes open in the ink black. I could hear Don moving around upstairs, and I knew what that meant. Rise and shine, up and at ’em.

My body flooded with tension, stiff on the bed. We’re going hunting, and I’m going to make the shot. I hit the switch, and yellow light flooded the darkness.

Don quietly handed a cup of coffee through the door while I dressed. Then he vanished into his preparations.

Wearing headlamps over synthetic Windstopper hats, we darted through the door, out into the cold, clear night. We needed to be in position before the light came up. Don knew from long experience that the way to hunt this area was to strike surgically. The longer you were up there, the more your scent spread out and contaminated the area.

It was cold and dark in Colorado at nine thousand feet, an hour before dawn. October’s chill was strong in the air. The bright, sparkling moon and stars seemed close, maybe a mile or two off. In full camouflage I followed Don up the trail, clumping in my new boots over the dirt and gravel.

“It’ll happen fast”: Don’s words rang in my ears. I felt pretty good, all things considered.

We stayed on the old trail until it petered out in a dry streambed of boulders and grass. We paused and heard the ghostly bugling right overhead. We were down in a dell, a deep pocket of timber, and above us were the benches. They’re up there.

Don murmured, “I think we can turn off our lights now,” and we hiked in the lightening gloom through the dell. The bugling continued, some of it right up the mountain from us, some of it across the fields to our left. A thrill every time.

Don stopped to mutter, “We’ll come up this way, and be ready, because things can happen quickly. Just cross your fingers that nobody opens fire, because they’re gone if that happens.” He was worried some other outfitters could have come in earlier, or even last night, to ruin our hunt. Apparently, in other parts of Colorado, there are hunters all over each other, blaze-orange behind every tree, gunshots, elk running to and fro, heated arguments about who shot what.

We started up a steeper slope littered with rocks and low grass, and instantly I was panting. Stalking when winded makes for a kind of claustrophobia. You have to take small silent breaths, but what you desperately want is huge noisy gulps of air.

The elk sounded close, right over the next ridge. “Get your heart rate under control,” Don murmured. “This is going to be pretty fast.” We kept climbing, picking our way around boulders and sagebrush. A few hundred yards ahead, I could see the bench level out. The elk were somewhere over that rise.

We were near the top when the rifle (slung over my back and jutting up a few inches over my head) snagged a dead branch on a fir and snapped it loudly. Don looked back quickly, as if to say, Okay, who brought the new guy? He whispered, “You can carry that down now, be ready to shoot.” He watched me chamber a round and flick the safety on, carefully. Could this really be happening so fast?

We carefully peeked over the rise, in good cover of trees, and saw them. Flashes of grayish white, too far away, and already moving back toward the trees.

“C’mon, let’s move,” he whispered, and then he was gone, darting across the open ground crouched low, a small rise shielding him from the elk. I jogged clumsily in his wake, trying to stay low, rifle in hand, backpack jouncing.

“C’mon, Sam,” muttered Don. Move it, dumbass, I thought. We scuttled through a small copse of trees, and I crouched behind Don, bringing my binos up.

“Oh yeah, there they are,” he whispered. “Get some deep breaths, start slowing yourself down, and let’s find a good place to shoot from.”

Oh shit, I thought, I’m not ready to shoot. In my mind, I had imagined elk hunting as a slow, comfortable process—sneaking into some well-hidden spot, setting up a nice prone position with back-packs, carefully picking out the animal at a hundred yards, and making the shot. Don took off his daypack and gestured for me to take it. “Slide it up there,” he said, pointing to a small, rocky rise. “Go out there and make it happen.”

I crawled out of the cover onto the rise, tossed the daypack down, and laid the rifle carefully on it.

“Stay down,” Don hissed from behind me. I awkwardly settled in.

The elk looked large in the scope, but they were all facing away from me. Their heads were down, feeding in the grass. One or two were facing sideways, but I couldn’t tell what they were: spikes (young males) or cows?

We held a whispered conference, Don invisible behind me and glassing the same herd. He floated over me like my conscience. I felt a little desperate—this shot was far, on the edge of my abilities.

“The cow all the way at the right, that’s a great cow for sure,” he said. All the way at the right? I looked and saw the one he meant, but she turned away from me. I had no shot, just an ass. She was already almost hull down. They were all dropping out of sight behind grass, and. I felt a twinge of despair.

“Over to your right, there are two cows together. You’ve got a great broadside. Let me affirm that’s a cow . . . you see what I’m talking about?”

I stared down the scope, helpless.

“No, no,” Don hissed. “Way over to your right, way over.” He had come around behind me to check what I was looking at. I pulled off the scope and looked with my naked eye, then reset my whole body, and now I saw what he was talking about. I was too scope focused. You have to pull your head out of the scope and look before you settle in. I hadn’t seen the whole herd. There were three or four elk in broadside—still a long shot for me, but no longer impossible. We discussed, in hushed whispers, which one to target.

I settled in prone and felt decent, not breathing too hard, focused down the scope and across the field. I picked the elk almost at random: that one, you’re mine. Don used his range finder and reported three hundred yards. Which meant I just had to hold my aim perfectly on the elk’s center mass.

Part of me wanted to quit, to try and sneak around through the woods for a closer shot. This was too risky. This would be my fourth-ever shot at this range, and the other three had been from a solid stand, aimed at a paper target.

“We gotta make something happen, we’re running out of time,” Don said—not nervous, but factual. There’s a ticking clock to elk hunting, and he was feeling the seconds stream by.

“I’m gonna cow-call, and she’ll turn. Do you have her?” He had a plastic diaphragm in his mouth already, a piece that could be used to call turkeys or, with a little practice, elk.

Down the scope, the crosshairs drifted, moving with my breath. Did I have her?

“Now, this is a make-or-break move, so they’re going to turn and look, or they’ll go. So check the head for horns, and then forget the head, find your spot, and hold dead on. Three hundred yards.”

“Okay,” I whispered. “Is the safety off?” Don asked. “Yup,” I answer, and instantly Don cow-called—a high-pitched squeal, almost like a puppy getting its tail stepped on. A different elk picked up her head, not the one I had in my scope. I waited, and time stretched, elastic and mindless. Don called again. Still my cow didn’t look up.

Then she did. Press. The sight picture disappeared as the rifle leapt in my arms.

“You got her, buddy!” Don’s voice was in my ear. “Nice shot!”

Relief flooded my system, and I laughed and started to stand, without the gun. “Reload,” Don said sternly, and I fell back down and clumsily worked the bolt.

“She’s down, buddy. Nice shot.”

I stood, a little shaky, and Don hugged me. “You did it, man!” He was laughing.

Don lowered his binos and looked at me. “Your problem was, you were trying to see everything down the scope. Use your eyes, then the binos, then, after you’ve figured out what’s going on, you get down on the scope.”

We approached the elk, a massive, burly, beautiful animal. Her stomach was as huge and round as a fur-covered barrel, and I walked in amazement around and around, reveling in the touch, the feel, pressing her hooves with my fingers, looking into her eyes, her long velvet ears, her wide mouth. I sat by her and rubbed her fur.

Don showed me how sharp her teeth were. She was a healthy young cow, and we looked at her teats. They were not full of milk, so there wasn’t some calf out there bawling for its mama, which was a salve to my conscience. I snapped some pictures, close-ups, wide angles.

“CSI Colorado,” Don said.

“I suspect foul play,” I replied, and Don laughed. There was only one bullet hole. A tiny red dot, a perfect double-lung shot.

Don and I talked a little bit about stress. As a combat veteran he was very familiar with the Cooper color code. Condition Red, Condition Black. “Sometimes you have to pull yourself in and out in a firefight—I’ve done it.”

In hunting it’s referred to as buck fever. Don had stories about guiding hunters into perfect spots to make fairly easy, hundred-yard shots on big bull elk, whereupon the hunters get confused, don’t shoot, miss wildly, or wound several animals by accident.

“There are guys without experience who go right up into the Red, and that scares them and they can’t function,” Don said. “Tunnel vision, sweaty palms, fast breathing. If you go up too far, and are bouncing on the Black, you just check out. You can’t do anything.”

This had all happened so fast, I could see how easily buck fever could grab hold of someone who was unprepared, without a calm voice like Don’s in their ear. The interesting thing, in hindsight, was how impossible it was to “snap out of it,” because I hadn’t even realized I was in it.

I had expected to feel sad—but instead I felt absolutely nothing. Not a twinge of guilt, not sorry for killing this beautiful animal, nothing. A mild, pleasant joy at a job well done, at not disappointing Don or making his life harder; a sense of mild satisfaction and well-being. I had felt sad upon seeing other animals killed in the past, but I had no sadness in me now, not a single drop.

Part of the reason, I think, is that in some way I wasn’t really the hunter, Don was. Don made all the decisions, he held my hand and led me around, he pushed and prodded me into the right space. True hunting would be me, alone, making the decisions, trusting my own judgment, finding my own way. This was just training. Don was showing me how to hunt, what a hunt could look like. This had only been a test for Don. Could he go hunting with this weird rifle that had feet and didn’t shoot that well? This was Don’s kill, Don’s responsibility, and Don’s triumph.

This was a necessary step, a part of the apprenticeship, but I wouldn’t be a hunter until I did the whole thing on my own. And this wasn’t for sport, this was survival training. If it comes down to me and my family or an elk, then morality and ethics won’t play much of a role.

You won’t anthropomorphize Bambi when you’re starving.