Moonlight Elk: One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom

A woman longing for a life defined by something deeper than weekly schedules, work roles, and cultural norms, Christie Green learned to hunt elk, turkey, deer, and other animals throughout her home state of New Mexico. Layer by layer, hunt by hunt, Green peels away societal skins that adhered 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 instead witnesses the animals defying reason as they walk her into their world, ambling her along, straddling night and day, waking and sleeping. Their ways of moving and sensing become her model. 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 business owner in a male-dominated industry and ultimately finds independence, courage, and a profound connection to the animals and the places they call home. What she sought from these animals was food, but what she found was freedom.