"When you come to my house and eat the caribou stew I’ve made, I want you to feel the rifle heavy as lead in the grip of my hands, the shiny brass bullet between my fingers, and how smoothly the bullet slid into the chamber. I want you to feel how fast my heart beat as I crept a little closer and flicked the safety to “fire.” I want you to understand how sure I was that I was going to shoot that animal and how overwhelmingly awful I felt five seconds before the shot, when I knew I couldn’t miss.You may wonder how a suburban East Coast girl arrived at a point in her life where she was pulling herself uphill through head-high grasses and belly-crawling around rocky outcrops to stalk, and hopefully shoot, a caribou. It would be fair for you to ask what I was doing hunting caribou, anyway. Maybe I was unpacking some of the luggage I’d brought to Alaska—not the backpack and the duffle bag, but the pile of strongly held beliefs that I’d lugged up here as well. One of those beliefs was the assertion that it was wrong to hunt. How could anyone kill something as beautiful as a caribou? That’s what my mom told me when I told her I was going to learn to hunt.

[.........]

 I want you to understand that we stalked that bull for hours up the steep ridge, along grassy knolls and around fins of rock. I want you to feel the adrenaline that I felt as I was pursuing this animal, how I felt like a kid clawing over rocks and ducking under bushes. How fun that was, how completely exhilarating, until I got close enough to shoot it and knelt down. I want you to feel what I felt then: crusty black- and mint-colored lichens crinkling under my knees, my hip pressing into a sharp rock, the loaded gun resting in the groove between rock and tundra. I want you to understand how beautiful that place was: purple monkshood, a tinge of red on the lupine leaves, sunshine on my forearms, a gentle breeze smelling like pure clean air sweeping across an immense green valley to my left, a wild caribou beside a band of rocks.

I looked through the scope of the rifle and lined the crosshairs on the caribou. Before I could take a steadying breath, the bull stepped forward and lay down behind a fin of rock. Through the scope, all I could see was the tip of one antler. I knew that when it stood, I would be in position to shoot it. I flicked the safety “off.” Matt shimmied up beside me, crouched behind the rock. We waited. Matt held the caribou in view with his binoculars. I breathed and waited, wondering if the caribou had just sat down for a moment or if it was in for a solid afternoon nap.

Next to us a ptarmigan clucked and dashed toward a rock. We looked up. A hawk circled the still air above our heads and dove down toward the bird. The ptarmigan scampered beneath a mottled rock and nervously looked for better protection. I whispered to Matt that I couldn’t believe they were doing this within ten yards of us, as if they didn’t know we were there. If the hawk swept down and grabbed the ptarmigan, I was sure we’d hear talons closing around downy feathers and fragile bones crunching. The hawk continued to circle, but we didn’t have time to watch. The caribou stood, broadside and motionless. A wave of panic washed over me. This was my moment.

“I’m going to shoot it,” I whispered to Matt. “Should I shoot it? I’m going to shoot it. Oh my god.”
I pressed the butt of the rifle into my shoulder, aimed the crosshairs at the lungs, held my breath, and gently pulled the trigger.

I want you to understand the incongruence of what happened next: a gun firing, like thunder in your chest, deep, cracking. The noise wrecking the peace of the mountains. The caribou flicking its head twice, as if trying to dislodge a fly from its nose, before staggering backward and down. I was completely out of breath the second I stood and tried to run to the animal.

When you bring that first bite to your mouth, I want you to feel how warm that caribou was in the August sun, lying in a rock-filled gully, his tongue sliding out the side of his mouth, light red foam frothing around his lips. How soft and beautiful the young bull was that day—vibrant, feisty, pulsing with energy. It was still pulsing there on the rocks when I ran over to it and knelt beside the fallen animal. Blood sputtered up from the hole through his lungs and speckled his gray-brown fur with tiny pricks of bright red blood. I smeared the blood along his neck as I pet him, crying over and over, “You’re so beautiful. I’m sorry I killed you.” Probably a dozen times I said that. With the back of my hand I wiped the tears from my cheek."

 From “The Caribou” by Adrienne Lindholm on the Rumpus

this is staggeringly beautiful and has left me reverentially speechless...