I posthole to my thighs in places. My ankle tweaks and I have to pull myself up and out by nearby spruce branches. To time it so there’s snow for tracks but not so much you posthole every step. And there’s a sweet spot of weeks to hunt hare up here even though the season goes for months, from October through February. On the Engleman spruce, lodgepole pine, and subalpine fir that circle meadows like flowers on mountain ball cactus that are the first wildflower to bloom, mid-April when hummingbirds arrive from Mexico and turkeys start gobbling in the canyons. In Colorado, the snowshoe hare’s range is limited to high-elevation forests where they feast on conifers.
I should have swung down on the far side of the meadow because now, I have to get there from here, where the wind pushes my 120 pounds back like a hand on a kid’s forehead, when they think it’s funny and that you’re so strong. These windy days are like walking up a river in old Westerns. A hare could have been here five minutes before right now and its tracks would already be gone, wiped clean.
Out here in the open most of the snow has already blown away. Windblown slabs lay upon each other, so when you posthole it feels like you’re in one of those cartoons where the character falls through a building, floor-by-floor. There’s a fresh inch on top of weeks of snow, layered like tiramisu, the melted and frozen crusts like crumbled cookies. I stick to what I know and head to a closed Forest Service road that angles northeast, where the wind’s not as bad as it could be. Weather dictates direction, and right now, the snowfield between me and the meadows seems too daunting. I circled the area, round and round, and I couldn’t find him again. He was a beautiful light brown then with the color hair that on women, shows gray first and fastest. And I saw the hind-end of a hare disappear behind juniper. I was hunting mushrooms and the day was hot and windy, the kind of day a wildfire kicks up.
LOSE YOUR MARBLES CARTOON FULL
I had plans to hunt a new area I scouted this summer, with a maze of meadows full of scrub willow and cinquefoil for cover. I strap on snowshoes, pulling hard on the plastic straps that have stiffened in the cold, grab my pack and shotgun and crunch across the parking area. I know what this will feel like, like you know heartbreak will after the first few red flags. A gust of wind shakes my truck, my rusty old Ranger, rocking side-to-side like standing up in a canoe. A cow moose walked through a pond down below the roadbed and I thought this isn’t a bad place to learn something new.
LOSE YOUR MARBLES CARTOON MANUAL
Society doesn’t want, doesn’t prepare girls, to be alone.īut I dug out the user’s manual from the glove compartment, jacked up the back right, and got on with it. Why, even as I was brought up at the beginning of the “girl power” movement, was I still, by default, taught to depend on men for unpleasant things. Now I wonder why the women I knew, the strong women who raised me, never changed their own flats. Because that meant they were a good person and not a strangler who’d put you in a septic tank on their thousand-acre farm. A dad, boyfriend, husband, stranger who we somehow felt comfortable with because they’d stopped to help. I’d never changed a tire there was always someone, some male along with, a father you could call, a man who came to the rescue. I got a flat from this road last year, but it’s such a washboard I didn’t realize it until I got back on the pavement and my stomach sunk. The sun’s rising and streaming through lodgepoles the way you think a diamond will shine until you see one sitting all dull on a lady-older-than-you’s hand and you realize you never wanted one of those in the first place, you just want to hold fire.
My mother said, “She’s only nine.” My mother said, “It’s just about a horse.” My grandmother said to my mother, “Do you really think that’s appropriate?” I didn’t understand at the time but I knew it was something about a woman’s body. I think about the year my sister got a t-shirt for her birthday that had an embossed barrel racer on the front, her ponytail flying out behind her cowboy hat, with the words “Dangerous Curves Ahead” printed at the top on the front of the tee. No one’s going fast, everyone’s just climbing. Especially now, mid-November, when everything along the Front Range howls.īut the yellow curvy-arrow signs that line the road seem redundant. There’s a particular curve along this dirt road that climbs and climbs where you can tell if it’s going to be windy and it almost always is.