DESERT CATHARSIS

Miles of sagebrush and grasslands slipped past during the 10-hour drive between Bozeman and Denver.

- Story and Photos by Jodi Stemler

Sophie’s first semester at Montana State had gone remarkably smoothly, though those months hadn’t been easy for me. Far beyond the challenge of empty-nesting, I had unexpectedly lost a dear colleague in late September. Barely a month later, my aunt and father passed away within five days of each other. Then my mother’s childhood home, a 125-year-old farmhouse that had been owned by the family since the late 1890s, went under contract to a developer and was slated to be torn down. Only a few weeks after all the chaos, this mother/daughter time in the car was precious.

“Did you know, that the first thing Grandpa shot when he was a small boy was a native bobwhite quail?”

I had just finished transcribing the voice recordings my dad had left us, and one of the last was his memories of becoming a hunter. Those days wandering the woods behind his childhood home in New Jersey left their mark on him as he went on to become a renowned professor of wildlife ecology at Rutgers University. Being a hunter had always been part of who he was, but that first bobwhite was a new story for me.

The native bobwhites were long gone by the time I was learning to hunt on our farm, and upland bird hunts could only be found on preserves. But my love for Brittanys started in my teens with a little female dog that my dad had hoped would get afield, but they never had any birds to hunt. Dad always loved to hear the stories of our escapades on wild grouse and pheasants with our Brittany, Mesa. That dog, now 13, got me back in the field and built the love of hunting in Sophie.