Twenty-five miles southwest of Missoula, Montana, DeAnna Bublitz steered her Subaru Forester into a snowy parking lot. As she stepped into the mid-November chill, wearing camouflage and a blaze-orange beanie, several men looked up from their revving snowmobiles.
“Where’s your rifle?” one asked, teasing.
“I already got my buck this season,” Bublitz said, calmly returning his gaze from behind blue-framed glasses. For her, it was a routine interaction: When she’s out hunting, or at the shooting range, she’s often asked where her husband is, or — despite her gear and confident shot — if she’s ever been hunting before. She answers with hard-won authority.
Bublitz, 39, was out that day not to hunt, but to mentor a new hunter — a role she’s aspired to since she started hunting almost a decade ago.
As a novice hunter, Bublitz faced the usual barriers: the high cost of gear, a complex permitting system and the need for guidance from seasoned hunters. But she also faced additional challenges familiar to women and other marginalized groups, including threats to her personal safety in the woods and a lack of acceptance from the “old guard.”
Bublitz wanted to reduce those barriers for others, and in 2020, she and fellow hunter Madeline Damon founded DEER Camp. The organization’s name — which stands for Diversity, Equity, Education, Representation — is a response to the stereotype of a deer camp as “just a bunch of old white guys around a fire with, you know, some PBR or something at a cabin,” Bublitz said.
DEER Camp is not an official business and is unlikely to become one. Bublitz’s goal isn’t to make money, she said, but rather to create “a little nucleus for people to connect.”
Bublitz moved to Montana from New York in 2012 after earning a doctorate in microbiology and molecular genetics. She didn’t grow up around guns. But she became more comfortable with them after she went trapshooting with a Montana neighbor, who helped her find her dominant eye and grip.
“Just a bunch of old white guys around a fire with, you know, some PBR or something at a cabin.”
Her growing skills, along with easy access to public land, inspired her to take on what she called “the ‘dirty work’ behind meat consumption”: harvesting her own. Learning the local landscape as a hunter offers more than food, she said: The more connected people feel to the land, the more likely they are to conserve it, regardless of their political beliefs. “The only politics that I wear on my sleeve are the politics of conservation,” she said. “I think, for the most part, that’s the only thing that’s important in this sphere.”
Bublitz slowly built her gear collection into a “library” that she has since opened to fellow hunters. She also found mentors, many of whom were men. Their guidance was invaluable, but it also introduced a new challenge — an internal one. “My brain turns a certain switch off, and I just become a follower with them,” Bublitz said. But when she hunted with other women, she noticed that she took on more responsibility, watching out for her companions and hunting more strategically.
ABOUT ONE IN FIVE Montanans held a hunting license in 2020, paying the state a total of about $40 million in fees. That cash, plus a 1930s-era tax on hunting gear, remains the primary funding source for the state’s wildlife agency, after the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would have established additional funding sources for wildlife management, failed to pass the U.S. Senate in late 2022.
Each year, Montana’s wildlife agency uses species population data to determine the number of hunting tags it will offer. It relies on hunters not only for money, but to help keep deer, elk and other wildlife populations to sizes that the existing habitat can support and humans will tolerate.
Fewer than 4% of Americans hunt, however, and that number is declining. Of that diminishing group, a whopping 97% are white, and 90% are men.
But more hunters mean more funding for wildlife management — and Bublitz says that women often find hunting particularly rewarding. “A lot of women feel this sense of being proud that they’re out there, and they can do this thing that’s seen as typically a man’s thing, like: ‘Hell yeah, I can do it,’” Bublitz said.
Most people involved with DEER Camp are women, but not all. Mason Parker, 35, grew up hunting fowl in Oklahoma, and his recent outing with Bublitz was his first large-animal hunt in the Rockies.
Last year, Parker published a collection of essays, Until the Red Swallows It All, analyzing his relationship with the earth as it shifts with climate change. Its dedication reads: “For the roadkill.” Parker thought his politics would put him at odds with most Montana hunters, but he’s been pleasantly surprised by the widening “ideological umbrella under which people hunt.”
In the woods, Parker followed Bublitz as she moved carefully up a steep hill. She pointed out deer tracks and found nests in the snow where the animals had bedded down the night before. By midafternoon, they’d seen four deer, but they were all does. Parker’s tag was for a buck.
As Parker and Bublitz hiked east along the ridgeline, flanked by ponderosa pines and golden larches, they spotted a buck on the slope below, its antlers disguised by fallen trees. They considered their options in hushed tones. Finally, Parker slid forward in the snow, prone, his gun at his shoulder.
But the buck suddenly jumped up and bounded away. Today wouldn’t be Parker’s first deer harvest. In fact, he hadn’t fired a single bullet. Anything less than a clean hit could result in an injured deer suffering a slow death. If Parker couldn’t get a sure shot, he wouldn’t take one at all.
“The only politics that I wear on my sleeve are the politics of conservation.”
NEXT TO THE DARK shelves of canned goods at Missoula’s food bank, a deer carcass hung from its hind leg over a blue tarp. Its head and hide had been removed, leaving a body of lean meat under a shiny layer of connective tissue.
Bublitz had prepped it for a butchering workshop she offers through DEER Camp with the Missoula Urban Demonstration Project, an organization that promotes DIY sustainability. A dozen participants, mostly women, eyed the deer quietly as they trickled in.
“How big is it?” one asked.
“I’d call it three and a half points,” Bublitz said, referring to the number of spikes on the buck’s antlers. As an average-sized white-tailed deer, it would yield more than 50 pounds of meat.
Bublitz handed out a diagram identifying the cuts of meat — the round, the chuck, the backstrap — and grabbed a sharp knife. Wearing blue rain boots, she padded around the hanging deer.
She explained the cuts in layman’s terms. “I call it the football,” she said, pointing out the sirloin. Her chipped nail polish was accentuated with dried blood.
The quarters landed on stainless steel prep tables, where Bublitz set out bowls for different cuts. She saved the least palatable chunks for her dog, Cricket. As the women gathered around the tables to work, the silence broke. They traded hunting stories, laughing and commiserating about their brushes with patronizing male hunters. “Nobody’s coy about it,” Bublitz said later, reflecting on the workshop. “You immediately share horror stories or funny stories or whatever.” As the banter continued, the sterile kitchen began to feel like a warm home.
Jody McLauchlin, one of Bublitz’s students, was excited to learn about butchery. “It’s nice to see other people do it,” she said. “And to see women do it.” She’d always wanted to be more involved in her husband’s hunting trips; in fact, she said, he was hunting that same evening.
As the workshop wound down, McLauchlin checked her phone and announced that her husband had just harvested a deer. Excitement rippled around the room. Later, when that carcass was hanging in her own garage, McLauchlin would be the one leading the charge.
Kathleen Shannon is a Montana-based writer and audio producer who crafts stories about environmental justice. She hopes to start hunting this year.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Deer camp for all.
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