Shining Tree

By the time this post is published, I will be in Shining Tree, Ontario, which is about half way between Sudbury & Timmins. What am I doing way up there?....Moose hunting. It may seem strange for a female to want to hunt, but it was something I became interested in over 10 years ago. Before that, I had tried keeping rabbits, but I had to have someone else butcher them for me. Don't get me wrong, I consider myself a very feminine female, not masculine in the least.

Now, I like to hunt for deer, moose, geese, ducks, wild turkey and yes, I eat every morsel. I had always like to fish. It was a way as a kid I could get away from the house and be off doing something constructive that wouldn't draw attention. Like reading, fishing was an activity that got me away from the criticism and having to listen to my mother complaining about her life or her health. When I brought home fish, which I would also have to clean myself, my Mother would be quite happy to cook them and declare how delicious they were, always an added bonus to the daughter of a narcissist. Pats on the back don't come along very often.

I have no idea why I had the urge to hunt, why it doesn't bother me to kill something for food. Perhaps my realism in living in the country and knowing how animals are raised and how their quick demise in their natural habitat is so much more humane and logical than the fate suffered by beef steers. Their fate is to be chased, herded and prodded into trucks for a trip of hours or days to the stockyard, where they might sit for more hours or days smelling death and fear until their turn to be herded and prodded into the killing room. Sounds horrible I know. It is. Also quite real. It is how we eat meat. I won't even go into chickens and how we get the milk we put in our coffee or on our cereal. The most humane thing to do would be to shoot an unsuspecting steer as it happily munches on flowers in its field, but this is not cost effective so it's not done.

I am getting off topic. I decided I would like to hunt so I took a course and got my license to be able to hunt. Anyone can take the course and as long as you don't have a criminal record, you can get a license to carry a gun and purchase the various "tags" required to hunt deer, geese, moose, etc. I got the highest mark in my class! Depending on where you live you contact the Ministry of Natural Resources or Fish and Wildlife. Was I accepted by other hunters as a someone serious about what I was doing? No, not initially. This didn't bother me, as I was used to being pushed out of my comfort zone as a kid. Whether it was selling light-bulbs or chocolate bars door to door to raise money for my brothers hockey team, or making phone calls for my father pretending to be his secretary when he was secretly working from home, I was made to do a lot of things that I didn't want to do, and saying "no" was absolutely never an option. I don't mind public speaking or things like that and the adrenaline rush of pushing past the fear of doing the unknown is rather thrilling.

What would you do if you weren't terrified of doing it?