Moonlight Elk
Moonlight Elk
One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom
Christie Green learned to hunt in order to complement the food she grew in her New Mexico garden. As an act of practical agency this fulfilled her needs, yet a restlessness stirred within. She longed for a life defined by something deeper than weekly schedules, work roles, and cultural norms. Could she travel beyond the supposed domain of women and venture into the world of animals, into the wild, where men were said to prevail?
Outside the grip of the human realm, the moon beckons to Green to go beyond. Here, hunting in the wild, the moon cycles through her, rising and falling at dawn and dusk, whispering messages from the dark side. Rather than circle the hot insistence of a masculine sun, Green begins to attune to the more elusive, mysterious murmuration of the moon.
Animals and dreams, lunar partners, choreograph Green through time and space. She longs to dream, toil, live and love at the edges of the fertile ecotones where she can withdraw inward, retreat like an animal into hiding, and then come into full, radiant view on her own terms.
Layer by layer, hunt by hunt, Green peels away societal skins that adhere to a prescribed grid, a manufactured tick of time, a picture of perfection. Tracking and tracing, moving in darkness, watching, smelling, listening, and following the animals, Green sheds the burdens of her domestic self and witnesses the animals defying reason as they walk her into their world, ambling her along, straddling night and day, waking and sleeping. Through them, definitions of gender dissolve and boundaries blur. In the process, Green eclipses western society’s definitions of her as a woman, mother, lover, and entrepreneur, courageously birthing her own independence through a profound connection to the animals and the places they call home.
What she sought from these animals was food. What she found was freedom.
“Moonlight Elk tracks the electric presence of a hunter who ‘burn(s) for belonging’ in the land and among the animals.…This book will re-map your heart.”—Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors
“Moonlight Elk is courageous, pro-woman prose that unfolds in the crucible of the natural world.”—Holly Morris, director of Exposure and author of Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World
“Christie Green invites readers on a sacred, surprising, and sometimes brutal journey as she explores the deepest of possible connections between herself and the elk, deer, turkey, and quail that she hunts and kills to fill her freezer and feed her family. As she gains confidence to hunt alone as a woman, Green closely tracks the boundary between human and animal, moving ever closer to a place of elemental exchange; in the end she discovers that there is no other.”—Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life
“Green has the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet. Her passion for the creatures she encounters and the land she wanders shines through every word.”—Janie Chodosh, coauthor of Wild Lives: Leading Conservationists on the Animals and the Planet They Love
“Moonlight Elk is a brave unveiling that takes us to the intersection of what we know and what we sense in a given place with lyrical curiosity, offering an unexpected call to explore beneath the surface of a map or a hunt and expose a life of sensuous meaning. A daring and revealing book.”—Christine Cunningham, coauthor of The Land We Share: A Love Affair Told in Hunting Stories
“Moonlight Elk is a riveting meditation on sustenance and love—in food, in nature, in family. Christie Green’s personal journey is woven with natural history and questions about what it means to be a human animal in the more-than-human world. This book is beautiful, deeply felt, and wise.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“The author’s capacity to forge a connection to the animals she hunts and the places she traverses is grounded by her meticulous descriptions of environment, ecology, geography, topography, animal behavior, and even anatomy during post-hunt processing. As she sheds the influence of men during her hunting ventures, in a visceral sense she transcends into independence, courage, and connection to place and to the hunt itself.”—Sandra K. Mathews, author of Between Breaths: A Teacher in the Alaskan Bush
Christie Green is a landscape architect, an artist, a clothing designer, and the sole proprietor of radicle, a design-build firm that combines landscape, art, ecology, and activism. She lives on her small homestead in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Preface
New
New Moon Elk
Waxing
Shoot Like a Girl
Thirty-Six Weeks
$1.67
Elk Dance
Full
Five Deer
Gila Jake
Turkey Tail
Waning
Little Bull
Making Tracks
The Last Time
New
New Moon Elk II
Acknowledgments
