"Waldo travels with a small group," she says, and the excitement in her voice is unmistakable now. "He leads them away from the main herd when resources get scarce."
I know that look. It's the one I get when tracking becomes personal, not work anymore but obligation.
I pull protein bars and trail nuts from my pack, offering them to her. "You should eat something. We've got hours of tracking ahead."
She reaches for the offered food, then stops, her hand hovering in the air. I watch her face cycle through a series of expressions—hunger, consideration, then something that looks like her principles reasserting themselves.
"I have my own trail mix," she says, retrieving a bag from her pack that's labeled with some organic brand name I don't recognize.
I watch her examine the contents—dried fruit, nuts, seeds, granola—then take a measured portion. It's factory-produced health food, probably triple the price of my homemade mix, and it's missing the protein that provides sustainable energy for this kind of work.
"That's not enough protein for what we're doing out here," I say, keeping my voice neutral.
"It's fine," she replies, but there's a defensive edge I'm starting to recognize.
I hold up one of my protein bars. "Beef jerky, almonds, dried fruit. Designed for extended wilderness work."
She shakes her head, and I catch something almost pained in her expression. "I can't watch it happen."
"This isn't wild meat. It's made from ranch-raised beef."
"You hunt animals. I can't …" She trails off, color rising in her cheeks, making her look younger and more vulnerable.
The logic gap opens up between us, and I'm starting to understand the moral framework she's operating from. She'll eat factory-farmed beef dried into jerky and pressed into a protein bar, but she draws the line at anything that comes from someone who actually harvests their own meat. It's a boundary city folks create to feel better about their choices, arbitrary lines that let them maintain their principles without examining the actual consequences.
"So you eat meat from animals that lived in feedlots but not from animals that lived free in the wild," I say, genuinely curious about how she reconciles this.
"That's different."
"How?"
She struggles with the question, her jaw working like she's trying to find words that make her position make sense. "Those animals were raised for food. They wouldn't exist otherwise." It's the same line she used over the stew, and from the way her mouth tightens, she hears it too.
"And the deer I took last fall lived his entire life free, ate what he wanted, went where he wanted, until I gave him a clean death that lasted seconds instead of the slow starvation or predation that kills most wild animals."
"And the tags in your pocket?" she fires back. "The quota that decides how many bulls this valley can lose without collapsing? A scientist counted that. Someone like me sat in a cold office with bad coffee and made the math work so there would still be caribou for your grandkids to track."
That stops me. I think about the harvest reports I file every season, the population surveys that set the limits I live by. I've never once thanked the person who ran those numbers.
"Fair," I say. And I mean it.
Discomfort crosses her face, then anger, then something that might be unwilling recognition. She knows I'm right but admitting it would mean reconsidering everything she's built her worldview around.
"I can't," she says finally, and there's honesty in her voice that I respect. "I know it doesn't make logical sense, but I can't."
At least she's admitting the hypocrisy instead of trying to defend it. Most people would keep arguing, trying to justify the unjustifiable. Her acknowledgment that her position isn't logical earns her points, even if it doesn't solve the practical problem of keeping her fed out here.
"You're going to get weaker," I say, watching her portion out another small handful of trail mix. "This climate burns calories fast, and you're not taking in enough to sustain the work we're doing."
"I'll manage," she says, but I can already see the effects of inadequate nutrition in the way she moves, conserving energy she's not sure she has.
I shoulder my pack and check the GPS coordinates against the terrain around us. "We'll follow the tracks for another hour, then we need to find a place to set up monitoring equipment. Weather report shows a front moving in tonight."
She nods, packing away her tablet with movements that are slower than this morning. The hunger she's fighting is starting to show, and it'll become a safety issue if she doesn't adapt. But pushing her harder right now would only make her more defensive.
We remount the snowmobile and continue deeper into country that doesn't care about principles or moral positions. The tracks we're following remain clear and consistent, leading us up a gradual incline toward a ridge that will give us a view of the valley beyond.
"Hold on," I call back to her as we approach a steep section.
