Zuma's Butte, Montana, 2024

There is a spot somewhere in Montana, a lonely spot rarely visited by anyone but those few who seek out such places for the balm of solitude they offer.

This spot was shown to me by a hawk sitting on a pack rat’s midden watching me watching him eat a freshly-killed Hun. To this day I believe that hawk’s presence was not mere coincidence, but a gift, bestowed upon someone who at the time desperately needed one.

Just beyond the hawk was a gate, and beyond that gate was a parcel of public land, BLM mostly, grass and sagebrush and tall, windswept buttes stretching for miles. And in all that heartbreaking beauty I was alone to the horizon, save for two pointers and one ferruginous hawk.

I waited in the truck until the hawk finished his meal, and then I drove through that gate into a world I could never hope to visit, could never hope to walk and see and feel and experience, if I weren’t an American citizen and that land didn’t belong to me.

But I am. And it does.

I didn’t come back out of that gate for three days, never spoke a word to another human, never saw one either. In that time all that mattered and all that existed was the ground under my feet, the sky and stars above my head, and the dogs running like water on currents of scent, always ahead of me.

It’s not often in life we attain that which our soul truly craves. But sometimes we do.

On the way back to the truck on the day I had to leave, I stopped to pick up a pretty rock from the ground, and on it I wrote, “Zuma’s Butte, Montana 2024” to remember the moment, the time, and the place where I watched in wonder as a pup turned into a bird dog.

And when I did finally drive back out of that gate, I knew that I had left behind something of myself out there in the grass and the wind. I swore then, driving off, that I would return someday to claim it.

All of this on public land. All of this available to every single one of us, whenever we want, and for whatever reason we want.

We just have to care enough to fight for it, to say no to those who can’t stand to see beauty and wonder where a buck can be made and a gate can be locked.