Blazing a trail: 'Moonlight Elk' explores 'One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom'

Christie Green of Santa Fe is an iconoclast: She does what comparatively few women in our society do. She hunts elk, deer, pronghorn antelope, turkey, grouse, and she prefers hunting solo.

Green advises that her book, “Moonlight Elk: One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom” is more than about harvesting food for her table and more than about seeking independence.

Blazing a trail: 'Moonlight Elk' explores 'One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom'

It is arriving at an understanding of the human relationship with animals and with the natural world.

As Green writes in the book’s preface, “By penetrating their bodies with bullet and knife as enigmatic communion through blood, guts, hide, and hoof, I began to see myself.”

Later in the preface, she notifies readers of some of the profound issues she will explore in the body of the book: “How can I be a mother and a predator, a woman who gives and takes life? What reason is good enough?

What, still, do I have to learn from the animals? Will the moon ever whisper her secrets into my ear? Will I know how to listen?”

The book is in divided into segments that carry headings named for the phases of the moon — New, Waxing, Full, Waning, and lastly, again, New.

And in each of these segment-phases are “Dream Stages” that Green shares. They are italicized for easy access.

Here’s a portion of one dream that borders on the nightmare: She’s driving on a remote Forest Service road in northern New Mexico when she sees what looks like a mechanical bull, the kind in honky-tonk bars.

But no, it’s the remains of a bull elk brutally butchered. Hunters had cut off his head and antlers. “The spinal cord is exposed, and the hooves have been cut off too — now stumps remain at the end of legs that once ran uphill,” she writes.

An hour after waking, Green thinks that the killing in the dream mimics the tone of killing in Green’s reality. Green asks herself if she can behave differently.

She can, and does.

Hunting alone, Green vividly and dramatically explains her set-up for a shot of a cow elk: “I know that this is my shot, so I range the cow at 153 yards. As I adjust the rifle to fire she turns to the north and takes a long step toward the lake’s edge. This is it. I click the safety forward to the off position. As my index finger inches to the trigger, the other elk steps out into my line of sight. It’s a calf, small enough to only have been born in late May or early June.”

Green is conflicted. To shoot or not to shoot.

She thinks of her hunter peers, who urge her to shoot the cow elk. Her thoughts go to a heartbeat monitor line confirming a pulse. Moving forward in time, Green is her holding hands with her daughter Olivia “in synchronized stride since her birth.”

Green’s decision to shoot? “The mama cow must live. This is my choice,” she writes.

Another episode reveals Green hunting turkey on a Forest Service road near Reserve. She kills a gobbler but runs to its heaving body in this extraordinary scene. “… I lay my torso onto him, knees bent at his breast … Holding him with my full embrace, arms wrapped around his body, my weight pressing into him, I breathe his breath, shudder his last shudder, hold him to stillness.”

No matter how much Green studies the behavior of the animals she hunts, she is surprised at what they do. She said she finds them a blessing.

Because the earth is their home, she argues, they’re more in control than she is.

“Even though I have a rifle, I don’t have the upper hand.

“They have such a deep wisdom. They’re brilliant,” Green said.

She believes there is so much more she can learn from the animals and from the land. Green finds it a gift “to be out there listening, to be observing.”

Green seems to represent what Santa Clara Pueblo author-educator Gregory Cajete, who is quoted by Green, describes as “the hunter of good heart.” That person, Cajete is quoted as saying, is the hunter who is “the bringer of life to his people — he had to have not only an intimate knowledge of the animals he hunted but also a deep and abiding respect” for them.

Green has that respect.

In one sidebar in the book, Green, en route to visit cousins in Texas, zeroes in on the scarcity of water and the dryness of the land on the Great Plains. “No signs of grassland or bison. No remnants of a system once alive with soil, calculated animal husbandry, and stewardship,” she writes.

The cousins have invited her to visit and to hunt deer on their property. Not a challenging event: From a deer blind, she kills four deer over two days. They’re enticed by a feeder that spreads GMO-corn kernels.

“Moonlight Elk” is the first of a planned trilogy. The second is to be about salmon in Alaska, and the third about geologist-explorer John Wesley Powell.

The book also weaves in elements of Green’s life apart from her hunting experiences.