Circling the Landing

At the end of the year, reflection is de rigueur. Calendars close. Rituals repeat. Regrets become bygones. People speak in the language of fresh starts and clean slates, as if January can erase what the body remembers. If only. ’Tis the season of good intentions and manifestations. It is the season of hope. This year, I find myself holding on to hope out of habit but seeking something more sturdy. I'm scanning for solid ground to land on.

For the last eighteen years, Christmas centered around my daughter. Never a fan of commercialism, our holidays focused on activity together—exploring the melding of Islam and Christianity in Malta; dancing with Chiang Rai hill tribes and wandering Buddhist temples with Colin; learning to ski in Braunwald; Māori feasts and climbing volcanoes in New Zealand; singing carols in St. Patrick’s Cathedral; or catching first powder tracks in Breckenridge and Jackson—all before French toast and bacon. Each day ended the same way: reading new books by the fire. When your family is just two, Christmas becomes about doing something together you might not otherwise do. It is a time for that elusive and often underrated sacred pause.

This year’s Christmas was quiet. Contemplative. Solitary.

For months now, I have felt myself circling, like the hawks I watch ride the updrafts near the cliffs by Hublein Tower—moving in wide arcs above ground that does not yet feel safe to touch, surveying the landscape, peering into the shadows, all while yearning to touch the sky. Anyone who has flown knows the sensation: the plane keeps turning while conditions below remain unclear. From inside the cabin, the mix of fear and impatience can feel interminable. From the cockpit, however, it is deliberate. Circling is not failure; it is judgment. It is what pilots do when visibility is compromised and a forced  landing could cause harm. Better to wait. Better to get everyone safely home.

Home, I’ve realized, is not a place I failed to find. Home was wherever I was with my daughter. I endeavored to make the journeys themselves our home—to make home a state of mind. When I am asked why I never settled, or reminded that I “made my choices,” this is what comes to mind. I notice the urge to ask why those who say it  allowed themselves to settle, to stagnate, and to grow complacent. I never actually say that out loud. I wonder why some feel it is ok to comment at all. What I know instead is this: after living all over the world, I am skilled at making a home wherever I find myself. Home is not a destination. It is a practice I returned to—sometimes in motion, sometimes in exile, sometimes circling while waiting for permission to land.

We like to tell ourselves that home equals permanence. But permanence is an illusion we allow ourselves so that we feel in control. I learned young what that saying about the best laid plans really means. Coming back to my hometown this year was not a sentimental homecoming. It was a re-entry—a full-circle return after decades of movement. The streets are familiar. The geography is known. There is comfort in that. There are memories around every corner. And yet everything feels subtly altered, as though I had been living in a parallel version of my life and only now crossed back through a thin seam. When I see people I knew in my youth, I am startled by how little they resemble my memory. Then I catch my reflection and remember how much time has passed.

I have lived through uncertainty before—my dad’s ten year cancer journey, Colin’s coma, job loss, war zones, flood evacuations—real danger—and I always believed there would be a safe landing. Learning to sit inside uncertainty is one of life’s harder disciplines. This year has felt like sustained turbulence: no clear altitude, no horizon, no reliable sense of when or how it will end. Like flying inside storm clouds, I have often lost my sense of up and down. What I understand now is that circling cannot last forever. Fuel is finite.

In 2007, I gave birth alone, knowing that I would. I prepared for it like I would have a championship lacrosse game. There were doctors and nurses, of course, but they were doing their jobs. I was bringing a new life into the world. It was powerful. Primal. Sacred. It was April in Aspen—shoulder season, heavy wet snow falling hard enough to close the runway. If something went wrong, there would be no quick flight to a larger hospital. Labor was long. There was meconium. Real risk. Birth plan altered. In the wee hours my daughter arrived quietly and was handled with urgency and care.

The morning after her birth, holding my tiny daughter in my arms, I looked out the hospital window and saw a red fox flash across the bright white snow. It paused—vivid and poised—long enough to meet my gaze before trotting away with a swish of its bushy tail. I noticed it then, and I remember it now. In both Japanese and Irish traditions, the fox is a guide at thresholds, a creature that moves between worlds—spirit and human, wilderness and settlement—without belonging fully to either. It survives through attention, timing, and discernment rather than force. The fox did not linger. It did not look back. It crossed the snow cleanly and disappeared. Its presence felt as if it was noting a crossing already underway. I turned back to the new life in my arms, knowing I would be learning how to guide her across many such thresholds myself.

I turned back to my daughter and named her Niamh—after the princess of Tír na nÓg, the land of youth in Irish mythology. She is the woman who rides over the sea on a white horse, crossing between worlds, choosing both love and adventure for herself over safety and stasis. In the old stories, waves are often described as white horses, carrying her between realms. Tír na nÓg is a place without aging or decay—a place of vitality, courage, and belonging. It held all the things I wanted for my daughter. When Niamh was small, she believed completely that she was that princess. I read her the story so often it lived in her bones. Even her name carries a crossing—Niamh, sounding like nieve, the Spanish word for snow.  She is of the sea and of the snow. A child born between elements. And she is most at home in both.

A week earlier, heavily pregnant, I had stayed alone in a hut at Snowmass Monastery. I slept. I meditated. I prepared. Each evening I waddled past elk in the fields to the stone chapel where I let myself be carried away by the somatic power of monks chanting vespers. I had very little. I had no plan. I was dismissed by my child’s father, by my employer, by my family. And still, I believed all would be well—not because the ground was safe, but because I trusted myself and the love I already felt for the life that was making its way toward me.  

When people speak easily about “the choices we make,” they often imagine a level runway and plenty of fuel. They imagine a warm car waiting in the pickup lane, smiling faces at the arrivals gate. They assume time, support, and room for error. But some decisions are made while circling, with incomplete information and very little margin. In those moments, choice looks less like preference and more like responsibility. You do what you must. You keep flying because you are accountable for the life you are carrying and the future you are trying to protect. Much of my life has been shaped by decisions made under those conditions. I chose love. I chose courage. Not because they were ideal options, but because they were the ones available to me.

In recent years, in the days before Christmas, my daughter and I added Love Actually to our holiday movie playlist. Much of the film is outdated fluff—power imbalances disguised as romance, longing framed as virtue, waiting to be chosen. But the candid opening and closing scenes at Heathrow arrivals have always moved me. Real people filmed without performance. Faces lighting up as loved ones appear. We don’t know their histories or their fractures. What we see is simple and true: people choosing to show up. We are reminded of the privilege it is to be present for someone—and the good fortune to have someone be present for you.

Over time, I’ve learned that love isn’t proven by endurance or by how long someone tolerates absence. It’s revealed by who arrives, and how, without keeping a ledger or demanding something in return. Love, at its most honest, is choosing to show up. Again and again. 

When my daughter was small, we watched Brave on repeat. She loved Merida’s fierce independence. I was drawn to the mother who learns—too late and painfully—how easily protection becomes control. Current circumstances make me wonder if the film was fate’s foreshadowing. In that tale, the mother becomes a bear not as punishment, but through her own fear and misunderstanding. The spell breaks not through conquest, but through recognition.

I have seen bears up close. A grizzly crossed my path on Mother’s Day last spring as I walked around Jackson Lake—massive, alert, looking for food and uninterested in dominance. At that same moment, my daughter was in the sky above, crossing a continent and an ocean back to her father’s home—Ireland. The bear did not charge or retreat. It ambled across my path while I held my breath. Strength does not always announce itself as danger. Sometimes it arrives as a reminder of what we contain within us.

I once heard that some Indigenous peoples believe when humans move too fast, the body can arrive before the soul, and the soul needs time to catch up. I believe this is true. I have felt it myself. I have lived much of my life in motion, crossing borders and systems, always adapting, always arriving efficiently. I never learned how to arrive whole as some part of me was always left behind. Perhaps this season of circling is not failure but reintegration. I was drawn to return here perhaps because this is where my soul knows how to find its origin point. Perhaps pieces scattered across years and places are finally being given time to find their way home to me.

When some say that I made my choices, I don’t disagree. I chose love. I chose courage. I chose to keep showing up without keeping score. I am not here because my journey failed. I am here because journeys sometimes pause.  If there is a landing ahead, it will be because conditions changed. Until then, I will keep circling—not in indecision, but in care. Scanning the landscape for a clearing. Not as a performance, but as a witness. Not as a plea to be chosen, but as a refusal to disappear.

At the end of this year—this year of the snake—this is what I know: I am still here. I am telling the truth in a form that can hold it. I am allowing time for all of me to arrive. And I will keep showing up, because that is what I can do.

 

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Some Days in the Woods by Stephen J. Keating Jr. prologue by Kerry Marie Keating

Prologue

My father wrote this piece in October of 1989. At first glance it looks like any careful submission: clean typeface, a word count at the top, his address typed neatly in the corner. He prepared it for publication. He wanted it to live somewhere beyond his desk, beyond our family, beyond the years he knew he might not have.

He also mailed a copy to me.

At the time, we were not in close contact. I was a college sophomore, overwhelmed and angry, and we had slipped into one of those quiet distances families sometimes fall into—no rupture declared, just a widening space neither of us knew how to cross. I didn’t yet understand what it meant to write into distance, or to send something forward in the hope that it might one day be received with a softer heart.

I couldn’t see then the care with which he built this piece—the way he arranged memory and landscape, the way he placed his own father inside the Catskills and North Africa, the way he saved the quiet truth of what he knew was coming for the final lines, after stripping everything else down to what mattered most. I didn’t yet recognize it as a map of where he came from, or a map he hoped I might someday learn how to read.

Over the years, and after countless moves, I lost almost everything else he sent. But this story survived. Whether consciously or not, this was the piece I kept—the one I wasn’t ready for then, but needed later.

Looking back now, I see how much of my own life unfolded inside the vocabulary he left behind: the walks along reservoirs, the pull toward mountains, the curiosity about distant landscapes, the years I spent living in parts of the world his father once moved through in wartime. Even my writing—rooted in water, memory, and movement—echoes his cadence.

There is a throughline in our family: nature, story, home.

His father passed it to him.

He shaped it into this piece.

I carried it forward without realizing it.

And it continues, altered but intact.

Our family’s story begins on particular ground: the hills and waterways of Ulster County, New York, where the first Keatings and Roaches are buried—immigrants who carried their losses across the Atlantic from Ireland in the 1840s and began again in a landscape not entirely unlike the one they left. My father grew up in the shadow of the Catskills, learning marksmanship from his own father, who served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war, building transport routes across North Africa and Italy. A quiet, practical kind of service—creating pathways.

Last month, I found this manuscript again, tucked among my old college papers. Earlier that day, I had been walking the reservoir trail he once knew, asking—almost out of habit now, and at roughly the same age he was then—for some sense of direction. The timing of the rediscovery felt precise rather than dramatic, like an echo answering an earlier call. Not instruction, exactly, but orientation.

What strikes me now is how intact his voice remains. The dry humor. The attentiveness. The way so many of these stories were ones I heard him tell over the years, especially when family gathered and memory loosened its hold. On the page, he sounds unmistakably like himself.

When he sent me this story, I couldn’t fully absorb what he was telling me—especially the way he closed it, naming what he knew lay ahead. I was young, and the weight of it exceeded what I could hold. He died in May of 1991. Only now do I understand that this, too, was part of his care: not explanation, but truth offered in his time, to be understood in mine.

My father didn’t leave a large archive. A few photographs. A painting he made of me and my cat. And this story. But writers write because they seek witness—because they want their way of seeing to be met, understood, and held by someone beyond themselves.

I share his work now in that spirit. Not to reinterpret it or explain it, but to place it where it can finally be seen. This is my way of honoring him—by letting his words stand, and by offering the witness he once hoped for.

Here is his story, exactly as he wrote it.

Grandpa Keating, Uncle Jack. Taken by my father 1940. New Palz, NY. 

Some Days in the Woods
 Stephen J. Keating, Jr., P.E.
 2835 Words • Simultaneous Rights
 © 10/2/89

Dad, who delighted in hunting whether for deer, pheasants, ducks, partridge, woodcock, rabbits, squirrels,  introduced me to the excitement of the hunt at age 12 along with my brother Jack, age 10. He also made us aware of the sheer joy of just being in the woods, fields, wetlands, and stream courses to drink in their beauty and inhale their fragrance.

Unfortunately for Dad, on that first expedition with us, the deer Jack and I spooked in a fallow, overgrown meadow just below Phoenicia, New York, ran by us—not him and his .30–30.

Dad was a crack shot, especially on moving targets, and passed on some of that expertise to Jack and me. I never did equal his proficiency with snap shots on a leaping, hill-climbing deer, though I did end up as top rifleman in my regiment later; partly due, I believe, to Dad’s insistence that my first gun be a .22 single shot. I had to learn to get the squirrels on the first shot.

When Dad’s reserve Transportation Corps unit was called up in 1942, the hunting—for me at least—ended for three years except for plinking with the .22 when I could get ammo. He, however, through his contacts with the French Colonial Officers in Morocco with whom he was working to put the railroad into operation from Casablanca to Marrakech, and over the Atlas Mountains to Algeria to supply the troops at the front, had some unusual hunting experiences.

At one point some Arab sheiks invited Dad, some fellow American officers, and French Foreign Legion officers to join them in a wild boar hunt. As a young man, Dad had owned a beautiful Arabian mare and was right at home with the horse the sheiks provided. However, the comfortable feeling evaporated when the Arab bearers and beaters passed out a lance per officer—no guns.

In response to a nervous question from one of the American officers as to what happened if the lance broke, was dropped, or the thrust was ineffective, the sheik replied that then the boar (up to 400 pounds of pure, raging meanness with 8-inch razor-sharp tusks to match) got your horse—and you. Now that was sport! The game, at least, had an excellent chance not only of survival but of becoming the hunter instead of the hunted.

Dad came back after service in North Africa, Italy, France, and Belgium/Luxembourg with five campaign stars, but never again seemed to have the same enthusiasm for shooting at living things. I guess he had seen the evidence of too many humans who’d been hunted and slaughtered.

However, we did have some fun times interspersed with a few moments of terror in the woods, fields, and elsewhere. But they actually began before he arrived home from the European theaters, having accumulated the requisite number of service points for discharge.

A friend of mine, Charlie, from the community of Pine Hill in the Catskills, and I, while juniors in Kingston High School, decided to have a try at deer hunting. But little or no sporting ammunition was available as World War II wound down, so we dug out some pre-war #6, 12-gauge shotgun ammunition, and I made a plaster-of-Paris mold of a marble that just fit in the full-choke barrel of my Model 21 Winchester double-barrel.

We then scrounged up some lead from our toy soldier molding kit that we had outgrown and proceeded to pour “ounce” balls, file them smooth until we were sure they fit through the muzzles, and then uncrimped the #6 shells, poured out the shot, and inserted one ball in each shell. For want of any other wadding, we put the #6 cover back in.

And then we went up Belleayre Mountain near Pine Hill, NY in a light snow and proceeded to spook a deer within an hour. Our shots drew blood, but the deer could still run—and did—with us in hot pursuit until the buck ran into another group of better-equipped hunters who opened up en masse.

It sounded like the second battle of the Marne. We arrived at the scene to find a pile of steaming entrails in the snow and the marks left by the deer as it was dragged down the mountain.

Several weeks later, some other high-school buddies and I decided to go duck hunting. Our strategy was to approach a slow-moving, wide stretch of the Esopus Creek near Marbletown, NY from widely separated points and then work our way along the stream toward each other in the hopes of flushing ducks along the valley. This meant low shots as the ducks began to rise, but we felt that we’d be far enough apart that the #6 shot would be harmless before it reached us.

As the first opportunity to shoot at a low target some distance off came and I was swinging on it, a high-flying duck came almost directly overhead and I swung on it instead. As I fired, it exploded and came down in pieces, one wing fluttering to the ground some distance from the rest of the carcass.

Yes—you guessed it. One of the homemade “ounce ball” shells with the #6 crimping had gotten mixed in with the legitimate #6s. There is no question in my mind that this fast, high-flying duck was guided to that spot by a higher power.

Then, when Dad arrived home with several other Transportation Corps officers via a stripped B-17 that hopped from Prestwick to Gander, etc., we organized our first real hunt. Dad and one of his contemporaries along with my brother, myself, and several high-school friends rented a small cabin at the foot of Woodland Valley east of Shandaken and Big Indian in the central Catskills.

Dad, through his many contacts with the “natives,” whom he knew because of his railroad responsibilities (West Shore Division of the New York Central System, the Wallkill Valley Branch, and the Catskill Mountain Branch), found out where the deer were “working,” and after a night of wild poker playing (no drinking) and a few hours of sleep followed by a gulp of black coffee boiled in a large pot with no grounds holder, we went up the ridges in the dark to the saddle passes.

There we waited for the “big-city” hunters to come up at their leisure and with their loud talking and frequent crunching of fallen twigs and kicking of pebbles effectively drive the deer ahead of them. It worked like a charm.

Every man in the party got at least one shot, while two—my brother and his friend “Spikehorn”—got one buck each.

Unfortunately, since Jack and “Spikehorn” were the youngest in the party, they had been plied with tales of how tough the mountain deer were and how hard they were to bring down and keep down. So both went out and got 220-grain soft-nose ammunition for their .30-06s.

Spikehorn’s one shot decapitated his deer, blowing away all but the skin on the nape of the neck. Henceforth he was known as “Cannonball.”

Jack’s deer went down on the other side of a deep ravine but in sight, where it lay trying to get up. At each movement, Jack pumped in another “cannonball.” At least the liver could be eaten. The rest had to be thrown away.

My father missed his chance because he had done his climbing with the chamber empty as a safety precaution and, when he got on stand, forgot to lever in a round. In the time it took to work the bolt of the Model 70, the deer was gone.

Several more mornings of climbs in the frosty dark, standing and waiting, bore no more results—except that probably we all suffered heart damage. Nobody took the time to clean out the three-gallon coffee pot, but instead just left the residual coffee and soggy grounds in it while adding fresh ground coffee and water each night.

After a couple of cups of that at 4 a.m., you could be all the way up the mountain before your heart stopped pounding on the verge of fibrillation.

As a prelude to that Woodland Valley hunt on Cornell, Wittenberg, and Slide Mountains north of Peekamoose, one of the fellows—Fred—found that he could get no ammunition for his .300 Savage.

So, the night before we left for the cabin and while on the way to a semi-formal dance in our fedoras, black raincoats, and white silk scarves, we did a search for ammo. We were all in my dad’s 1934 Packard, a car that was big, black, long, and looked like it came out of a set for The Untouchables.

Being in a hurry to pick the girls up and get to the dance, I was moving pretty fast from place to place, pulling up in front in a roar of tires and much dust.

At one of these places—which we thought was a sporting-goods store—the stop was rather dramatic, and then, to add to the drama, we all jumped out and headed for the place, bursting in the front door to see the several occupants become very still while reaching beneath their counters.

The door to the rear, which was normally closed, was open, and through it I could see a wall-sized blackboard with the tallies from horse races across the country scratched on in white chalk.

We had blundered into a betting parlor (strictly illegal in those days) and were obviously mistaken for hoods from a rival mob who were dropping in to make trouble or demand a piece of the action.

As I took in the picture, I realized very quickly that we could be in much trouble ourselves. So I walked up to the proprietor, who still had his hands beneath the counter, and said in a clear but somewhat shaky voice:

“Do you have any .300 Savage ammo?”

The sighs of relief from their side of the counter were highly audible. We were very sober as we drove on to pick up our dates and go to the dance.

At a later—and, as it turned out, my last—expedition with my father (and youngest brother, Tom), I had the unique experience of having to hitchhike while dragging a dead but still warm deer back to where my father and brother were on stand. They had the car.

As before, Dad had talked to his acquaintances in the Wallkill Valley near Mohonk Mountain to find where the deer were. He then dropped me off in the pitch dark of a frosty late November morning with instructions to walk into the woods a few hundred yards and settle down for a while to let my scent drift away. He had previously gotten permission from one of the Smiley brothers to hunt on the Mohonk Mountain House preserve there.

Almost at first light I heard a scratching sound directly in front, but thinking it was a squirrel, ignored it. Then, as the light improved, I saw that it was a browsing, beautiful, forked-horn buck.

As I dragged it out to the road, I met a party of “city” hunters dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch’s best, who were a bit dismayed at the thought of having lost a deer because they had that extra helping of pancakes at the motel before they left.

The first car to come along picked me and the dead deer up and drove us right to my father’s car, who immediately tied the deer on the right front fender of his ’34 Packard and drove Tom and me down to a diner in New Paltz to have ham and eggs. He was very proud.

As an alternative to Dad’s conversations with “natives” to find where the deer were “working,” I tried spotting them from the 55-horsepower Taylorcraft that I had learned to fly while a junior in high school.

That effort was only marginally successful in valleys where the deer would come out into the cultivated areas and orchards to browse on apples and other produce very early in the morning before they went back up into the hills for the day.

But it was never successful when they were in the woods. Their marvelous protective coloration made them essentially invisible from 500 feet up. And besides, even at that altitude in narrow mountain valleys, I was much too busy staying alive—especially as the upper valleys turned to gorges and ravines—to dwell too much on the spotting of deer.

So Dad’s technique remained our standby.

My last hunt—except for numerous excursions while at St. Lawrence University in Northern New York State to help local farmers rid their pastures of woodchuck—was on Rose Mountain in the upper Esopus Valley above the Ashokan Reservoir in the mid-Catskills.

As I came down off the mountain after an early morning hunt, capped by a sandwich lunch seated on a crag overlooking miles of hills, valleys, and habitations below, in a silence so complete that I imagined I could hear the few, puffy cumulus clouds as they traversed the cobalt sky, I followed an abandoned lumbering road downward.

Well down on the southern flank of the mountain, I saw below me and several hundred yards to the right a group of “hunters” lounging on a small, grass-covered knoll. The “woods” road I was on took me below the knoll into a heavily wooded area about 500 yards from the “hunters.”

The first crack of a high-powered bullet passing close by me was startling, but as they continued, I dove into a ditch alongside the road and there listened to the slugs smack into nearby trees and turf. Apparently the “hunters” on the knoll had seen the motion of me walking beneath large, old, leafless trees but didn’t wait to determine whether I was man or beast—much less buck or doe—before they opened up.

As the barrage continued I realized that with my scoped Model 70, 250–3000, I could have put out either eye of each of them, but decided instead to wait until they tired of their fun and went back to their bottle.

It was at that point that I really began to feel what the game must feel and so, with few exceptions, thenceforth did my hunting with a camera and my woods-hiking out of deer season.

And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it—until the effects of a ten-year battle with leukemia and six years of chemotherapy put an end to the heavy-duty hiking such as I had done in March ’88 in the mountains of Northern California, where the vistas were magnificent, the ultraviolet damagingly intense, and the brown vultures annoying as they made very close rear-to-front passes over my head to sniff and determine if I would soon be a meal.

But I can still enjoy the sweet, pungent fragrances and cathedral-like silence of the woods, the early mornings at nearby reservoirs as the tendrils of mist slowly ascend at the urging of the orange, rising sun, and the mallards, Canada geese, and other species leave their chevron wakes on the mirror surface as they swim out just far enough from shore to escape any possible closer attention.

And then, as I’ve learned to let my trace of Iroquois genes take over, I’ve learned to walk so quietly, peaceably, and unobtrusively that many times I’ve gotten within arm’s length of the Canada geese—even with their young present—embarrassingly close to deer (they are so vulnerable, as long as I’m downwind), families of raccoons, snakes, and very close to many other game species.

They are quick to sense if you are hostile or peaceable and, barring sudden moves, will allow a slow, close approach as long as you have nothing in your hands that might appear to them as a weapon. That close approach permits a much fuller appreciation of the exquisite beauty of their markings and their living bodies.

And you also get to hear the low warning sounds they make (geese in particular) as your proximity begins to make them nervous. Just don’t show any fear—even as you remember that one angry, fully grown Canada goose can break your arm with its powerful wings.

In fact, on a few rare occasions, after I’d sat very quietly on the ground, squirrels and even some bird species have climbed up on my arms or shoulders. This, however, ended abruptly when a squirrel, while exploring my right shoulder and that side of my head, decided that my ear lobe looked like a tasty morsel and began nibbling.

Even in heavy rains, I’ve trudged the trails in my Gortex outfit listening to the drip of the rain as it descends from leaf to leaf. Then the only other humans seen are the mushroom gatherers.

Every moment, to paraphrase the song, has a meaning all its own in the woods as the lighting intensity and angle change, the temperature and precipitation change, and the breeze veers. And as the seasons go from the deepest of winter—with the thick ice in the reservoirs booming as it contracts and cracks—thence to spring, to summer and fall, other dimensions of beauty and tranquility are added.

This cathedral of nature, with its living oak buttresses and its ever-changing rose windows of sky and clouds, is a serene place to meditate on Brother Death as the leukemia progresses and to feel that I’m no longer the enemy of the wildlife, but their friend and brother.