I’ve been eating wild game meat for over a decade. Uncle Courtney was the first to feed me some game. But around the same time, when my mom and Clarke were still together, and my little brother was just a newborn, we lived next door to a hunter. Clarke became best friends with our next door neighbor, who’s name was Doug, who was paraplegic after being in a major motorcycle crash decades before. When Clarke explained to Doug what I went through with Cystic Fibrosis, Doug offered to give me some wild game. He inferred that since I struggled to digest fat and carbs, perhaps I could get the same amount of nutrition from the game without the illness. Plus, Doug couldn't cook the game himself, and his caretakers weren't big fans of it. Clarke decided to give it a shot, and for several years, cooked and fed me wild game, which was mostly elk and pronghorn.
The first time I had some of the wild game Doug gave to us, I wolfed it down like nothing else! I struggled with my appetite when I was that age, because eating always resulted in very long and painful bathroom trips for me. Not only did I devour an entire elk steak and then some, but I did not get sick. At the time, I was still eating other food that wasn’t so great for me, so I still had a hard time eating. I only ate well without my parents’ insistence when I ate wild game.
It wasn’t long before I had wild game coming in from other people. Uncle Courtney, Doug, and a few of Clarke’s friends from the oil rig supplied me with all of the wild game I could ask for. In fact, I got so much meat, that when I was in middle school and my mom moved us to northeast Denver, we bought a large chest freezer for the garage, where we kept the wild game. For several years, most of what I ate was wild game.
However, life unfortunately happened. Clarke lost touch with his hunting buddies from the oil rig, so I lost a third of my wild game. Then, Doug suffered an accident that broke his leg and landed him in the hospital, and three months later he was gone too. Doug didn’t pass on without willing all of the wild game in his freezer to me. Also, Doug left us with a possible route to help me go hunting; an organization which helps the disabled and disadvantaged go hunting. Uncle Courtney still supplied me with a few pounds of wild game, but it barely lasted me a week, let alone a full year.
By the time Doug had passed on, I was ready to go hunting for myself. By then, I had taken and passed my hunter's safety education class with a 100% on the final written test. I was the only one in the room full of mostly adults to get 100% on the 100 question exam. After all, thanks to uncle Courtney, I basically studied for the test my entire life. As a reward, Uncle Courtney found me an ad in the local newspaper, inviting any and all youth hunters to enter an essay contest, which if they won, Colorado Parks and Wildlife would take them on a guided wild turkey hunt on thousands of private acreage in the far northwest Rockies.
Personally, I was pretty skeptical that I’d even have a miniscule chance of winning it. The contest invited every and all interested youth hunters from across the country to enter an essay into the contest. But what made my family convince me to at least try, is that CPW would be choosing essays from a few of the most disadvantaged hunters. I’m not one to willingly use CF as a crutch in any way, shape, or form, but this time I decided to include CF in the list of reasons as to why I should be allowed to go on this hunt of a lifetime. The essay was handwritten and no more than a page long, written on some crinkled scrap paper I found in an old school binder. When I was finished, I neatly folded the paper, put it in an envelope addressed to CPW’s northwest office, and waited. It would be a few months before I found out if I was chosen or not.
