Bear

Climbing into the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia with a muzzleloader slung over my shoulder was a journey back in time. This was the gun that the colony’s first settlers used when they too trod the same ground 400 years ago to hunt deer and bear. It helped tame the state and then the entire country. As I pushed my way through undergrowth at the base of the mountain range by the light of the moon at 5am on a bitingly cold and bitter January morning, unseen branches and briars clawed at my face in the dark. This was the last day of the hunting season that had been extended