I just returned from a weekend in the Red Desert for antelope hunting season. Rob was the only one in our immediate family to draw a tag through the lottery system. But driving dirt roads and listening to Wyoming Cowboys football on the radio while seeking a good shot at an antelope is family tradition, and so my father, brother, sister-in-law, Rob and I all piled into our white Dodge pickup on Saturday. My mother stayed at our small cabin to begin winterizing – she has a vendetta against the mice that have found their way inside the walls, though she coos over how cute they are when we see them outside.

I grew up around hunting. Some of my earliest memories of the Red Desert are of bouncing down dirt roads in the family Suburban and waiting with baited-breath as my parents glassed bucks from the front seat. I also grew up eating wild game. I was six when we visited my father’s cousins’ ranch and sat down to a dinner of fresh beef-steaks. Not knowing that most people primarily eat beef, I asked, “This is good – what kind of meat is it?” I thought it was some exotic form of moose or big horn sheep I’d never had. I knew what elk, deer, and antelope tasted like. I knew what they looked like grazing in the distance, fresh-killed on the ground, hanging and skinned in the garage, ground into burger and cut into steaks, wrapped in white butcher’s paper and stacked in even rows in the freezer.

Which is what finally inspired me to shoulder a rifle myself and shoot my first antelope in the fall of 2010. Rob and I were leaving Wyoming for three years for me to attend graduate school, and I wanted to go hunting with my parents and brother before we did. I wanted to learn how to take an animal from field to table by myself, lest I no longer have others to provide meat for me. Rob grew up as a vegetarian and hunting was newer to him than to me. I felt that becoming a shooter rather than an observer would help me not only provide for us, but would help tie me back to Wyoming and my family traditions while I was gone.

I could have started hunting much earlier, when I turned twelve. My brother and most Wyoming youth did. But something held me back, a sensitivity that I hid and nursed like a weakness until my mid-twenties, after I graduated from college and got engaged. I blamed my lack of interest in pulling the trigger on my allergies to antelope and elk hides. I hid behind obligations to high school swimming, a fall sport, and then to sorority duties like recruitment. But the truth is that it hurt me too much to see an animal die. The truth is that, though I held my breath as one adult or another took aim and the rifle ripped open the sky, though I was initially excited to see an animal drop, I hated to walk up on the kill. The blood did not bother me, nor did helping to field dress the carcass. What I remembered always was watching large, brown eyes grow dim, feeling a warm body grow cold, feeling nimble limbs grow stiff beneath my hands.

As I have grown older, after killing three antelope myself and walking beside Rob on his own journey to becoming a hunter, I have learned to cherish that sensitivity. I would not numb this grief. Killing another being should hurt. It should be something we remember solemnly, even if we are proud of our shot or the meat we put on the table. Every fall, I ask myself again why I hunt, if I want to continue. I think that as long as I choose to eat meat, the answer must be yes. I must be responsible to the cost of my own choice, the cost of my existence. I must do that by look at those I eat, to remembering that the meat I stir into a pot on my stove in February was a living animal in September.

If you’re interested in an intricate exploration of whether or not eating meat is ethical, please read Michael Pollan’s essay “An Animal’s Place.” No easy answers here, but this essay helped me to better understand the complex feelings I experience regarding my family tradition of hunting.