Learning to Hunt Pheasant at an All-Women Retreat in South Dakota

And then, every now and then, the silence would be broken by the sound of fire. One woman turned out to be a sharp shot and brought down more roosters than the rest of us. Another had to be fitted with a smaller shotgun to match her petite frame and struggled through the first two days without making a shot. On the final morning, she took two birds out of the sky back to back so cleanly that the stunned guide beside her just said, “Well, there you go.”

For me, I had trouble remembering the order of things when a bird came up. The whole motion is supposed to happen in a second and a half: Gun to shoulder, safety off, then aim and shoot. So I started singing it to myself like a mantra as we walked to keep my hands and my head on the same page.

Still, when I shot that first pheasant, the uncontrollable tears surprised me a bit, though I’d expected to feel emotional. When I admitted to the tears, Butler told me what I had felt was “reverence” toward something beautiful and alive. I took his feathers, sparkling violet and jewel green and rusty brown, and promised him I would make something beautiful out of them. And later, I took the breast filets Butler had taught us to cut away from the bone, now vacuum-packed and frozen, and promised I would make something healthy and delicious.

For writer Heide Brandes, successfully catching a pheasant came with mixed emotions.

Travel South Dakota

Back home in Oklahoma, I made a stew out of the breast meat with wild rice and mushrooms, and as I stood at my own stove I thought about the field where my pheasant had been hiding. But it wasn’t about the kill.

“I can hunt all day, never pull the trigger, and drive home satisfied,” Butler had told me. “That feeling of being out there in nature and hunting is reverence too.” It was a feeling I’d had to go out and earn myself.