Decades of caretakers had planted and pruned the wilderness to maximize the hunters’ returns, cultivating food plots with salt licks and clover and radishes for the deer, and strawberries and oats and chicory for the bears. Visitors to West Heart walking through the southern trails would often remark on what appeared to be pleasant fields of wild b

But their lives are also full of stark efficiencies. In the middle of winter, the area around my favourite beehive is littered with the corpses of the bees that were no longer useful—the most expendable, who were sent on the dangerous mission of foraging; the male drones who were ejected from the hive at the end of their useful lives.

In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind. Women hunted, kids hunted, even wildlife biologists hunted. F