For the first three seasons, I hunted half a forest. I owned a tag and a rifle and a spot that I had scouted until the camera card was full of fat does, and I still never went deeper than about four hundred yards from the truck. I told myself it was because the sign was better close in. I told myself the wind was wrong past the second ridge. I told myself a hundred tidy reasons, and not one of them was true. The truth was that the moment the trail tipped down into the dark parts, the parts where the canopy closed over like a lid, my heart would start knocking and my boots would slow down on their own and I would turn around and hunt the same thin strip of woods I already knew by heart.
The fear was wearing a fur coat I made for it
I live in black bear country, and I decided early on that the bear was what I was afraid of. That was comfortable. A bear is a real thing with teeth, a thing a man is allowed to be scared of without losing any face. So every snap of a branch past my headlamp beam was a bear. Every rustle in the laurel was a bear. Every time the woods went dead quiet, which the woods do about ninety times an hour if you are listening, I figured a bear had just cleared the area and was somewhere upwind deciding whether I was worth the trouble.
The thing I did not want to look at was that I never actually saw one. Not once. Across all those frightened seasons, every animal that ever revealed itself was a grouse or a squirrel or a rabbit yanking my chain so hard my ears rang. The bear lived entirely in my head, and I had fed it plenty so it had grown big and specific and patient. I was not afraid of an animal. I was afraid of being alone in a place where the light did not reach, and the bear was just the costume I hung on that fear so it would look like something I could shoot.
Here is the embarrassing proof. The one night I forced myself to camp out alone, I lay in the tent for hours with a can of bear spray in one hand and my boot knife in the other, so wired I could hear my own pulse in my teeth. Around two in the morning something stepped on a stick outside, one small dry crack, and I invented a nine foot grizzly out of a sound a raccoon makes trying to open a granola wrapper it can smell from twenty yards. I did not sleep. I did not get eaten. Nothing happened except that I spent six hours proving to myself that I could be afraid of nothing at all.
A man with a rifle is not what the woods is worried about
A guy I met at the gas station, of all places, is the one who cracked it open for me. He saw my bow and my camo and asked how the season was going, and I said something proud about the deer moving close to the road this year, and he just looked at me and said, “You’re the scariest thing you’ll ever meet out there.” I laughed it off like he was being nice, but it sat in me like a splinter.
I started paying attention to what actually happens when an animal and I cross paths, instead of what I imagined might happen. I bumped a deer in the pre-dawn dark and it did not circle around to settle a score, it blew and took off so fast the air snapped. I came across a bear’s paw print in fresh mud bigger than both my boots, and it did not make me braver and it did not make me a story, it just sat there being a fact. Every single living thing in that forest was spending its whole existence trying to avoid a thing exactly like me. The animals are not the audience watching me from the trees waiting for a weak moment. Most of them are gone before I ever know they were there. I had it backwards the whole time, and the fear had been holding the map.
The rifle mattered, but not the way I thought it did when I first learned to fire it. It did not make me bulletproof, and it did not make the dark lighter. What it did was let my mind settle enough that I could finally let the woods stop being a movie and start being a place. Walking out with a gun, I was not worried, and walking out without a gun is the only time I ever really thought about it. The gear was not the cure. It was the permission slip to stop rehearsing my own funeral out there and start actually paying attention to the ground.
The cure is not bravery, it is familiarity
Nobody out there got unafraid by being tough. They got unafraid by being out there enough times that the fear ran out of surprises. The first time I made myself walk to my stand at four in the morning in the pitch dark instead of sitting in the truck until first light, I sang. Loud, off-key, whatever words came, a grown man hollering nonsense into the trees so the silence would not swallow him. It was humiliating in the retelling and it worked better than any spray I ever bought, because a singing man is a sound the forest understands, and the act of making noise with my own throat told my lizard brain that I was the thing announcing itself, not the thing being stalked.
What actually changed was smaller and slower than I wanted it to be. I started walking in at first light instead of waiting for it, then a little earlier, then in the dark with no fanfare. I learned the ground by going over it until it was not unfamiliar anymore, because unfamiliar is the real name of the fear. I learned that a grouse busting out of cover will move your heart into your throat every single time, and that is fine, the heart comes back down. I learned that the woods going quiet is not a warning, it is just the woods being woods. And I learned that the only animal out there with a plan, with a schedule, with a reason to be there, was me.
I still get the shiver. It would be a lie to say it is gone, and I do not trust a man who says he has never felt it. The difference is that now I recognize it for what it is, which is just my body doing the math of being a soft warm thing in a dark hard place, and not some sign that a bear is sizing up my neck from the brush line. The bear and I have an understanding. I stay out of his business, he stays out of mine, and neither one of us has ever actually met. The woods got bigger for me the day I stopped hunting half of it and started being willing to walk all of it, in the dark, singing to myself like an idiot, the most dangerous thing I was ever going to run into.
