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  Home Page » Features » Columnists » Adventures In Motherhood » Hunting Season And New Babies First And Last Breaths

Hunting season and new babies: First and last breaths

Dan calls me at Open Gym, where 10 million little feet are pummeling trampolines.

There is so much motion - swirling hula hoops, bodies crashing onto soft mats, parents jabbering - I can't believe harnessing toddler movement hasn't been touted as the next renewable energy source.

Dan calls from Eagle Pass, 11,760 feet, visible from town but a veritable galaxy away.

"I got an elk." He tells me.

My heart pirouettes for the second time this morning. The first was when Melanie, mama of Col's dear friend Mathew, called to announce in a quiet, smiling voice that she was holding her brand new, hours-old baby.

I find Col, 3, on a balance beam just a foot off the ground. "Look Mama, look at how I'm not falling off!" he calls, waving his arms and falling onto his sister Rose, 17 months, who trails him as closely as a secret service agent.

I tell him about the elk and the new baby.

"Oh." He says, about the most anticipated news in our household this season. He pauses for a nanosecond, and then jumps back on the balance beam.

The elk is a young cow, and Dan has already summoned four friends to help him pack it out. They will leave at first light the next morning following Dan through the spruce and fir, over crunching aspens leaves, across trickling gulches, up and down and to the exact kill spot where the cow took her last breath.

Melanie, too, has gathered her women. We've been lighting our candles, singing birthing songs and sending prayers out for a beautiful, healthy birth.

When Melanie gives me and the children the green light to glimpse her newborn - two days old! - the kids mob him like he's got candy hiding in his onesie. Col wants to touch little Alexander's doughy face and Melanie is so gracious not to flinch when Col's grubby hands come at the baby like swarming flies. Rose points and chants "Baby! Baby! Baby!" as if she's trying to say to me and Melanie stop your gabbing and feast your eyes on this fresh-out-of-the-oven miracle!
Two days later Dan is home with a whole truck bed of meat; we're so lucky to have added a deer, too, to our cache. Dan lets the kids roll around on the luxurious elk hide, which might as well be a soft mat snatched from Open Gym, rather than the very skin of an animal that was streaking through the forest just days earlier.

We set up for butchering - plastic wrap and freezer paper, knives, coffee for the morning, beer for the afternoon - and Col hurls a million questions at Dan.

"Did you shoot this elk Daddy? Did you bring it home in your truck? Are we going to eat it?" He knows the answers are yes, yes, yes - the kid's first solid food was smoked elk heart for heaven's sake - but he is laying the groundwork for the harder questions that follow.

He asks tentatively, like stepping onto river rocks with bare feet: "Is this elk going to come back to the forest?"

"No, honey," Dan tells him in his serious daddy voice. "This elk is dead. She's going to feed us all winter and come back in our bodies."

Rose points to the massive hind leg under my knife and chants "Meat! Meat! Meat!" as if to say, "Enough questions, boy. Let's praise this miracle! And get to work."

And we do.

Rachel Turiel has lived in Durango for 13 years; the first nine were spent in the mountains. Her column runs every first and third Sunday. Reach her at sanjuandrive@frontier.net.

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