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  For Scott: This and everything else.

  And for Nathan, who would have been an exceptional hunting buddy or an intolerable one. I wish we’d had time to find out which.

  PROLOGUE

  I squint down the long metal cylinder of my shotgun, past the red plastic bump at the tip, and imagine what it will feel like to yank the trigger as a bird soars by. It is not the first time I have envisioned this situation. But it is the first time it could actually come true.

  The bits of foam I’ve squished into my ears drown out the faint, usual sounds like rustling leaves. All I can hear is my heart. Each beat thrums my whole body as if I’m standing too close to the bass speakers at a rock concert.

  A brown-and-white dog named Tessa stands frozen about ten yards to my left. A few minutes earlier, she sniffed out a male pheasant, her stubby tail wagging faster and faster as she closed in on its trail, nose to the ground, until suddenly she halted, her tail standing straight. She’s still standing there now, which, according to her owner, means her eyes have locked on to the bird’s eyes: a primordial staring contest with extraordinarily high stakes, at least for the bird. Tessa’s owner, Gerry, is behind me, creeping toward the dog.

  I rub the gun’s ridged safety switch with my sweaty thumb, hesitating, until finally I shove it forward into the “fire” position, the dangerous one. The rock concert in my chest becomes techno.

  “Are you guys ready?” Gerry asks in a flat voice.

  “Yes,” says Nancy, another novice hunter standing a few yards beyond Tessa, waiting to shoot the same doomed bird. Nancy hasn’t hunted in decades, but she grew up shooting guns with her father and brothers. Her husband goes bird hunting every fall, and now, with her children grown and out of the house, she wants to join him. It makes sense that Nancy is here. Nancy should be ready.

  But not me. My dad never took me shooting; he walked me to the local scoop shop, Lickety Split, or we rode the subway to downtown Washington, DC, and visited a museum. My husband doesn’t hunt, and I only decided about a year ago to give it a try.

  Now here I am, on a swampy swath of state-owned land in southern Oregon, with a loaded gun pointed at the sky, waiting for a bird. I’m one of twenty women hunting for pheasants on this foggy Saturday in September. We each paid forty dollars to traipse around with volunteer guides and their well-trained hunting dogs. The pheasants were raised in pens and released one week earlier, for a similar hunt for kids. Our goal is to shoot the birds that the kids missed last week. Years later, I will look back on this event and feel slightly embarrassed by its staged phoniness, as if I went back to the Renaissance fair I attended as a kid and noticed that the women were wearing Nikes under their polyester petticoats. Later, I will hunt for real wildlife, not creatures who have been raised by humans and planted for shooting. I will find myself kneeling before a bull elk, up to my shoulders in blood, as I gut the animal and prepare to pack its meat out of the woods. But for now, here, traipsing through tall grass with a loaded gun for the first time, I feel wild and daring.

  The night before the hunt, when I should have been sleeping, I instead compiled a mental list of everything that could go wrong. Around three in the morning, assured that I had exhausted every possible horrible outcome, I began to group and rank them in descending order of tragedy:

  My own death. Shot by another member of the hunting party probably, or a mistaken rifle hunter hundreds of yards away, or perhaps, in a particularly cruel swoop of irony, my own careless trigger finger.

  The death of someone else, caused by me. I would then endure crushing, paralyzing guilt for the rest of my life, which would probably take me past the age of ninety and involve frequent run-ins with friends and family of the victim. On second thought, maybe this fear should be number one.

  Any non-fatal maiming of me or caused by me.

  Embarrassing failure in one of its smaller, more familiar forms. Perhaps, when the time came, I would feel too guilty to pull the trigger and the other, braver hunters would wonder what was wrong with me.

  At eight in the morning, when I pulled up to the concrete building that was our designated meeting point, I noticed that four or five of the pickup trucks parked there had camouflage-covered crates in their beds. Dogs whined and barked from inside.

  “Shit,” I muttered. I hadn’t even thought to worry about the dogs, who would dart close to the birds and in front of my gun and be easier to shoot accidentally than any human.

  But by the time I get here, to this point where my weapon is loaded and my safety is switched off and a real, live bird is in my vicinity, I have managed to avoid these disasters for more than five hours. The list, which consumed my thoughts in the early morning, has almost disappeared from my mind completely. Only the last item—good old-fashioned embarrassment—lingers in my mind. As the day lags on, it looks more and more likely that I will return home empty-handed. This once innocuous outcome has already started to morph, unexpectedly, into a new worst-case scenario. I picture all the friends I’ve told about today’s outing. I grit my teeth and practice telling them, one by one, “Nope, I didn’t get one. Thanks for asking.”

  Lori and Debra, two of the four women in my group, have already killed a bird each. They are already using the proud, possessive language of real hunters, who speak as if the purchase of a hunting license includes entitlement to one particular specimen. “I got my pheasant!” They are safe and happy, chatting excitedly about what their husbands and children will say when they arrive home triumphant, with a bird in a cooler.

  I don’t have my pheasant. I’m tired of hiking through uneven ground in wet socks and boots, tired of carrying this gun that feels twice as heavy as it did in the morning. I’m tired of being on edge, of staying alert in case a bird appears suddenly. Tired of watching Tessa’s tail for the fast-wagging signal that a bird is near. Tired of eyeing where the muzzle of my gun is pointed and where Nancy’s is. I start to dread the two-and-a-half-hour drive back home to my husband—who remains confused by my nascent interest in hunting—without a feathery trophy of my own.

  “When I tell Tessa to release, everything is going to happen in a split second,” Gerry whispers. He stops just a couple of feet behind the dog and lets another moment pass before asking, again, “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Nancy is getting impatient.

  “Ready?” Gerry turns to me. The muzzle is heavy in my left hand. My outstretched arm quivers.

  “Yes.” I am ready. So ready I can hardly believe it. I cannot wait to kill this thing.

  Gerry steps one long stride toward Tessa, who lunges at the bird. I hear a squawk and flapping, thrashing against the grass. I wonder if Tessa has somehow managed to catch the thing in her mouth. Suddenly a dark bird with a long, spiky tail leaps into view. I squeeze my right hand into a fist around the trigger.

  Bang.

  CHAPTER 1

  GOING WEST

  You would be hard-pressed to find an unlikelier hunter than me. I’m a woman, and married to a man who does not hunt. I grew up in a city, terrified of guns. I love animals and even entered college on track to become a veterinarian. Yet, at the age of twenty-six, I made the strange decision to pick up a gun and learn to hu
nt. It was a complicated choice, but it started with one simple thing that almost all of us—hunters and non-hunters, women and men, city dwellers and country bumpkins—have in common: dinner. Not the greens and grains on the sides of the plate, but the hunk of meat in the middle.

  Of course, my decision to hunt was also deeply personal. It was a way for me to explore my relationships with animals—the dog for whom I buy Christmas presents, the mice I occasionally trap in my kitchen, the wolves whom I admire in theory but have never met. It made me rethink what it means to be an environmentalist. The experience transformed me from the person I had been just three years earlier. I’ll start there, when I’m a few months shy of twenty-four, and nothing could be farther from my mind than hunting:

  I live with a girlfriend in a cramped apartment in Manhattan, where I work part-time as a personal assistant to a movie director and screenwriter. I also freelance as a production assistant on various film and television shoots. Nearly half of my friends from Wesleyan University moved to New York after graduation, so I know fun, artsy people all over the city. At night, I dress up and attend their theater debuts and gallery openings. During the day, I brush elbows with indie film stars.

  But for the past couple of months I haven’t been able to shake this feeling that my life in New York has become one big, glitzy distraction. I spend seventy or eighty hours a week working to bring someone else’s vision to the television or movie screen, yet I still haven’t finished the screenplay I started writing two years earlier. I find myself daydreaming about a new job as a journalist. This isn’t entirely out of the blue—I worked on my college newspaper, as a contributing writer up through editor in chief, and I interned at the Hartford Courant for a summer. I know that journalism won’t be as glamorous, but I’ll hear interesting stories and get paid to write every day.

  So the night after Christmas in 2003, I flip open my laptop and go to a job site for journalists that I browsed regularly when I was in college and envisioned a post-grad life as Lois Lane. I search for staff writer positions in New York. Forty-some jobs pop up, but each one requires more experience than I can eke out of my résumé, even with the cleverest phrasing. On a whim, I rerun the search, this time for openings in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, just because the Northwest caught my eye on a road trip one time. Voilà: features reporter in Idaho Falls, Idaho; sports reporter in Columbia Falls, Montana; news reporter in Bend, Oregon. Eleven jobs in all. As I read the descriptions, the hair on my arms perks up. Each job is at a small newspaper in a small town, the kind of modest post I might be able to land with my handful of bylines clipped from the Courant. The exact place doesn’t matter to me at all. I love the idea of a new career in an exotic setting. I stretch out on the floor and start to tap out a catchy, one-size-fits-all cover letter:

  Dear ________,

  Don’t let the address at the top of this letter fool you. I’m not just a city slicker looking for a Western adventure.

  But the truth is, that’s exactly who I am and what I’m looking for. As midnight gives way to early morning, and I polish up the letter, I also compile a mental list of reasons why moving to the rural West is not just an exciting idea, but also a smart one. I’ll learn so much about myself by branching out and living on my own. I’ve always loved the idea of being outdoorsy; here’s my chance. It sounds like a movie: spunky city gal becomes country muckraker. I already own two pairs of cowboy boots. A year or two at a small paper will provide the experience I’ll need to get a better reporting job back in New York.

  The next day, I walk to the post office and mail out eleven applications.

  Seven weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, my friend Larrison and I pack my belongings into a rental truck and head west toward Bend, Oregon, where I have accepted an offer to write news for the local daily, The Bulletin. Larrison has generously taken time off from her job in the writing department of the soap opera As the World Turns to drive with me to Bend before flying home. Somewhere in Wyoming, an honest-to-goodness tumbleweed bounces across I-80 and we squeal. The desiccated shrub looks as if it rolled right off a Western movie set. But this is real life. In the wild.

  Our first stop in Oregon, just across the border from Idaho, is a gas station in a tiny farming town. I start filling the tank while Larrison heads into the store for a soda.

  “What are you doing?” A stocky young man in a baseball cap stomps toward me.

  I look down to make sure gas hasn’t spilled over the side of the truck. “Uh… filling up?”

  “You can’t do that,” he says. “Oregon is full-service only.”

  My heart drops. I can’t pump my own gas here? Have I really left my job and all my friends and driven four days straight only to find myself in the New Jersey of the West? I suddenly realize how little I know about my new home. I wonder how much of a hassle it will be to move back to New York in a few months if coming here turns out to be a disaster. I’ll have to find another apartment, not to mention face the embarrassment of telling all my friends and family that my Western Adventure was a bust.

  “You must be from out of town, huh?” he asks.

  “Yeah, New York City.”

  “New York City!” He drawls when he pronounces the name, like one of the dismayed cowboys in that old salsa commercial. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m moving to Bend.”

  He nods, as if this makes perfect sense. I’ve heard that Bend’s population is booming, but now I wonder if there’s a steady stream of New Yorkers driving U-Haul trucks into town.

  Later that evening, Larrison and I pull into Bend, where we’ve booked a hotel room for the night. It’s just after eight and the traffic lights are already switched off and blinking. The next morning, I check the classified ads and find a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a former boardinghouse downtown. It has polished wood floors, a graceful arch leading into the kitchen and built-in dressers in the bedroom and bathroom. Best of all, I have the place to myself. And for just $495 a month—$305 less than my share of the tiny Harlem apartment. Larrison helps me lug my bed, clothes and futon inside. We spend the next couple of days unpacking and taking breaks to browse secondhand stores and people-watch downtown.

  At a sandwich shop, we wait in line behind a thirty-something couple wearing head-to-toe spandex. I can’t help but stare past the corporate logos covering their garb to the sculpted curves of their calves and thighs. I look around the restaurant. Everyone here is thin, but not New York–smoker skinny. They’re muscled.

  “I’ve never seen so many good-looking people in one place,” Larrison whispers.

  “I know,” I say. “Everyone is so fit.”

  “You’re lucky.” She arches an eyebrow.

  “I’m intimidated.”

  The night before she flies back to New York, we mix Manhattans—an ode to my former home—and sip them from glasses perched on cardboard boxes.

  As I hug Larrison good-bye at the airport the next morning, I know that I should feel nervous and sad to see her go. Here I am alone, in a town I barely know, three thousand miles from my family and friends, yet I’m too excited to care. Larrison’s three-day stay has been like training wheels on my new life in Bend. I can’t wait to get started.

  The next week, I report to my new job. I was told during my interview a month earlier that the newspaper’s circulation is only about thirty thousand. But The Bulletin is the only daily in the region, and more sophisticated than its size would suggest. It’s housed in a brand-new building on the western edge of town that looks more like a modern ski chalet than a newspaper office. Windows stretch the two-story height of the lobby, with walls of stacked native stone and arched ceilings paneled in stained wood.

  The sixty-five-or-so people who work in the newsroom are not locals who learned the business because it was an available job, but professional journalists—mostly city folk like me—who moved here for their careers. Editors came from the Detroit Free Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Petersb
urg Times. Reporters moved here from Denver, San Francisco and San Diego. Two news reporters even grew up in the same Maryland county that I did.

  I’ve been hired to cover a rural area that stretches hundreds of square miles southeast of Bend. I spend the first day scoping it out from the driver’s seat of a used Ford Ranger pickup truck that I found in the classified ads and purchased the day before.

  Bend is almost the geographic center of Oregon. Sagebrush-studded high desert splays out to the east of the city. To the west, ponderosa pine forests creep up the volcanic Cascade Mountains. Unlike the Rockies—steep, tightly stacked peaks that form walls of granite stretching beyond the horizon—these mountains rise gradually, one at a time, like snowcapped sand castles. Together, the Cascades form a sort of sky fortress that traps clouds moving eastward off the Pacific Ocean and clutches them over rainy Portland and Eugene, freeing Bend’s skies for a rumored three hundred days of sunshine a year.

  In February, in the dead of central Oregon’s long winter, the landscape looks drab and dreary despite the sun. I drive past gnarled trees, scrubby shrubs and clumps of tall, native grass, dried and yellowed by the cold. Bare, reddish ground peeks between each of these plants. Unlike the wetter climates I’m used to, there is no fast-growing underbrush coating the soil here. A few dirty patches of snow cling to the shadiest spots. The sparse needles of the juniper and pine trees look dusty, more gray than green.

  I get on Highway 97, and as soon as I cross Bend’s southern boundary, the exit signs abruptly end, along with any other symbols of civilization. This is not like the East Coast highways I am used to, where one town peters out as another builds steam, with no discernible gap in between. Here, city ends. Country begins. I drive over a steep, craggy mound called Lava Butte. It erupted seven thousand years ago and covered nine square miles with black, porous rock. NASA actually trained astronauts for the moon landing on these desolate lava beds. As I travel south, the elevation rises, and a mat of snow blankets the ground.