She was of that indeterminable age between 18 and 25, grown up but still carrying around some of that youthful innocence. Blond and fair, with long hair carelessly swept back from her face, she had too many curves, but most boys wouldn’t mind. She was our waitress in this log cabin restaurant just outside Glacier National Park in a very rural setting. To get an idea of how things are for residents, there are less people in Montana than in Central Florida, and you could put the whole state of Florida inside of Montana. And right then, we were in a sparsely populated section of Montana. Turns out that she had been raised on a 1000 acre farm surrounded by her whole extended family. She went to a one room school house with 30 other kids and already had ‘broke a horse’ and ‘rode a bull’, but to me she was just like one of my kids, wanting to be on her own, getting away from her mother and find a man that wasn’t just a rodeo clown. She explained that the green stuff we saw growing everywhere was alfalfa and how it was harvested and about hunting on her cousin’s 10,000 acre farm in east Montana. I said that the only deer I had seen were right in the middle of these alfalfa fields and that would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. We both laughed and then she said “Well you have to be up higher, like on a hill or it’s all over. Last year, there was one female that looked around and saw that all of the other elk were gone and she was left behind, and she probably thought that nobody cared about her. She was wrong. I put one right between her eyes and now she is in my freezer!”
Goosebumps crawled across my arm as I realized that my kids are the innocent ones…
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