Fate and Food

Until Then, We Carry It Within Us

Mike and Ruth’s old dog Tunes stopped eating in his final days of life. They tried tempting him with everything to no avail. But one day they were eating chile they’d made with deer meat I gave them a few months back, and Ruth tried feeding Tunes a little piece of the meat- to their delight he gobbled it down.

Ruth told me of this out under the tender plum trees in their garden where we share our stories and poems, and with tears in her eyes she said, forgive me- we cooked up all the rest of your venison bit by bit to feed to Tunes, and it kept him going just enough for a few final happy walks out in the sagebrush.

We hugged and cried and, as their new pup frolicked around our feet, I told Mike and Ruth that I could imagine no greater honor for that meat. When I shot the buck, I told them, I had a little moment of ceremony with him before field dressing began. I placed sweet herbs I’d carried from the ranch into his mouth to send him into eternity with a last meal, and I promised that I would use his magnificent body for beautiful things. I believe that hunting and harvesting that buck has set a tone for everything I have grown, bought, gathered, hunted, or generally ingested since then: an understanding that the ultimate act of sustenance is not consumption, but sharing.

There could be no higher veneration to that good mule deer: his muscle and bone nourishing old Tunes into the great unknown, gifting him energy for a few more moments with Mike and Ruth together in the wild West End we love. 

—————

John kept an eye on the big bear for nearly two weeks as he gorged himself on ripe chokecherries. From the ranch barn, we could glass out over the draw where forests of chokecherry bushes thrive, and you could find the bears just by watching the bushes sway and wave as the bears pulled their branches down to strip off heavy drifts of dark berries. It’s a glorious glut for them and no small excitement on the ranch as the bears run amok about the place, leaving great cherry-pit-studded piles of scat around. They stop only to sleep, probably dreaming lusty chokecherry dreams and waking only to do it all again. 

John shot the bear just at dusk one night and had to wait for morning and help to recover it. Luckily the September air was crisp and cold and in the morning, the bear was reposing just yards from where John shot him, a clean and quick demise among those beloved fields of berry bushes. We rendered out his beautiful chokecherry-finished fat and use it now to cook and bake. I developed a chocolate chip cookie recipe made partly with bear fat and it feels like a great sweet miracle to eat one, gooey with the good clean fat and otherwise tasting no different from other cookies, just infused with wildness and bounty like a delicious invisible undercurrent. 

In the state of Colorado, hunters must remit the hide and head of harvested bears to the state Parks and Wildlife for study. Bears in Colorado are a thriving species, and this data analysis allows the CPW to closely monitor bear age, reproductive data, and other information key to managing their populations through hunting. The biologist who inspected John’s bear told us that he’d probably been about 8 years old, a respectable lifetime for a black bear. She found that he was in excellent health although missing a claw from one great forepaw, one little glimpse of his life lived hard and hardy out in the great wild mountains.

John got the skull back and it sits on our bookshelf now, next to tomes on bird ID and immigration and adventure psychology. Its bony mass is like a big toothy Yorick commenting silently on what it means to live and thrive here in the wild West.

Eating bear meat is often a new experience for people, so it’s been a joy to offer this bear with friends and neighbors- to share this magnificent creature to nourish those around us. It’s a joy to cook with, too- unlike most of the other wild game we use, bear actually has a fat content in the meat, so it lends itself well to sausages and savory stews. I’m told bear meat can be gamey but this one is completely mild, rich and healthy with the nutrients from the ranch and all those chokecherries. We’ve been glad to share it with elders and expecting mothers, little tots and ravenous teenagers- all that health gifting itself into the bodies of our friends and our household. I’ve made a lot of ragú sauce with it, taken it to potlucks and to the monthly poetry sharing gatherings that brought our little Rico community together through the dark winter months. There’s nothing like sitting in a warm place during cold long nights, catching up with your neighbors, eating together and feeling the gratitude of belonging to place. Winter is long here and we needed those gatherings to catch up on love and longing, good news and sad news, discussions about ICE raids and talk about drought and funny Christmas stories too. Mike and Ruth came all the way up from Nucla to read us poems about river otters and share stories about the frost that killed all the blossoms on their peach trees.

Those long evenings around steaming bowls of bear ragú taught me something that this landscape teaches over and over again: abundance and loss are never very far apart.————————

Because, you know, sometimes this place is tragedy.

The sky is thick with demise of a thousand trees, and even the sun sets bloody, these days.

We’ve had harsh and rainless years on our mountains and the seams are taut with holding. Fires rage around us, response personnel are stretched thin and underfunded even in these critical seasons, and, tragically, lives are lost.

There’s no easy way to bear witness to these repercussions on our beloved landscapes. But and still, fire has always been a part of Western regeneration. Recently, I had a visit with a burn area from 2025, and it reminded me of how these places can hold both the sorrow of destruction and, somehow, the optimism of rebirth.

Last summer, just as we began our transition from the ranch over to the little town of Rico, a fire raged above Rico in the San Juan National Forest. Caused by lightning, it was called the Stoner Mesa Fire and proved difficult to contain due to dynamic landscape and a heavy load of dead and down fuels. Fire behavior was extreme, driven by prolonged drought, low humidity, and shifting winds. Those days, everyone in Rico sat on edge in the smoke-filled valley, bags packed for a quick exit and praying to the river and the firefighters working desperately to keep the flames from sweeping over the ridge. We were glad we hadn’t moved more than a few tools and necessities over from the ranch yet, and instead could focus our energy on helping new neighbors with brush piles and moving equipment. The fire eventually burned around 10,000 acres of wild land.

A few weeks back, I drove up with friends to visit the burn scar and to look for morels. I forage a lot of mushrooms, but morels are new to me and I wasn’t confident that we’d find a single thing- it’s been so terribly dry and didn’t feel like a good season for coaxing mushrooms from the literal ashes.

To visit a recent burn area is a heavy and holy duty of witness. Though climate change has transformed wildfire into something larger and more destructive across the American West, fire remains an essential force on these landscapes. Where lives and homes are not at risk, it is still part of the forests' long cycle of renewal.

All of this I told myself as we climbed the dirt roads farther and farther into wilderness. Here, the timber soared skyward, huge ponderosas and firs creating deep heavy tangled woods interspersed with aspen groves. Amid this beautiful forest, the burn area arrived like a slap. Everything was blackened, a ghostly shell of forest.

Walking through this emptied terrain, I was startled when a small flycatcher flushed dramatically in front of my face. There, in the chest-high stump of charred tree, was its nest, built gentle with grasses and feathers and sheltering four perfect aqua-colored eggs. Surrounded by the blackened forest it was like a colorful harbinger of hope.

Then, too, there were the mushrooms. Underneath the fallen trees, morels sprang thick and hearty in unbelievable numbers. It took me a while to be able to see them- morels sit close to the ground and camouflage perfectly with ash-laden soils- but suddenly there they were. 

It took me years to understand that morels are among the first healers of a burned forest. Their hidden mycelium survives underground, waiting sometimes for years until the heat of wildfire signals it to fruit. They knit nutrients back into the soil, stabilize ash, and prepare the ground for what comes next. Wildfires burn dead vegetation and fallen needles, leaving behind ash loaded with calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. Morels thrive in the these sudden nutrient-rich soil conditions, and can also serve as rebuilders of necessary organic matter and anchors for shifting topsoils. They reduce erosion and make trapped nutrients bioavailable, which allows new seeds, shrubs, and trees to take root, and returning health back to an emptied landscape.

Slowly my basket filled with mushrooms and overhead, a turkey vulture soared. In Latin, the name for turkey vultures is Cathartes Aura, which translates to A Cleansing Breeze. These birds may not be beautiful, but they serve to clean up the unnecessary, to pick up the pieces and tidy up loose ends. 

Perhaps fire is like this too: never a friend, but an essential part of the living cycles that shape this landscape. All things die and all may be reborn. Our task is to bear witness: to tend what will sustain the future of these wild places, and, at times, to bow our heads before the certainty that death, adamant, comes for us all.

In the basket, the mushrooms sang a little song about underworlds, about the unseen things that exist in silent service of later thriving. In the pan, fragrant and redolent of earth, they hummed about the fire and its necessity in their sustenance. (This was a new song to me. I have yet to learn it all.)

 Preserved in a little butter in the freezer, the morels kept for later like a promise of deliciousness to come despite destruction past. 

———————

Months later, all of these moments of hunting and gathering came together around one long table. 

To mark midsummer, I had a big group of women over for a dinner party. In the invitation I called it Interdependence Day- a celebration of our interconnections, a chance to check in about our year so far and hear from one another about our successes and sorrows, plans and happenings. For dinner I made a big Mediterranean feast with lush tomatoes and squash from a regional farm, fresh greens and herbs from the Rico grow dome. I made a couscous with morels from the burn and Greek-style meatballs with venison and bear meat. At the beginning of the evening everyone laughed hilariously as we sprinkled juicy golden-blush tomato chunks with sea salt and tossed them back like tequila shots: salud to summer! 

Underneath a pink sunset gilded brighter by wildfire smoke in the air, we laughed and cried and heard about each other’s worlds. We toasted to one woman’s injury recovery and another’s business successes, sent good wishes to our friend who just birthed her first baby, shared love with one of our own going through deep losses. Everyone cooked such beautiful food and brought their best specialties, and the feast was immense, a satiating foundation for the heart-full gathering. No one left hungry and I, for one, felt my entire cup running over with appreciation for the landscape of humanity and hope around me. 

Bear meat from the ranch, deer meat from the West End, produce from the watershed, historic miner’s rhubarb from the Rico backyard- food is just one part of our existence, but it ties us all together, keeps our feet on the ground. 

Sustenance comes in so many ways. To be within this place, to eat from it, is a profound and practical tie to everything that is. All of us exist within great cycles of living and dying, giving and receiving. There will always be suffering along with thriving, and we all have some measure of choice in how we work with that reality.

To me, in this sweet dinner-party moment of connection, there arose an intimate appreciation for my responsibility to these cycles. Sustenance roots down far deeper than mere consumption. I can hunt and gather, consume and enjoy, but the final piece of all is simply to share.

——————

The small becomes the entire, my friends. Venison and bear meat, morels and fresh tomatoes are only a thread. When I pull on that thread, though, I can feel the tug out into the wild mountains, out into the scarred Western forest, out to farms and ranches and landscape all around me. When I pull that thread, it also pulls people closer in together. When any of us gather over food, we cannot be disconnected from one another or from where that food originated. As we nourish ourselves, inside us all, the nutrients of the West sing and rejoice: the earth, the air, the plants, the creatures.

One day we will perish. One day we will carry all of this back down into the soil.

Until then, we carry it within us.