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The goats come closer, like they are expecting to be fed. Instead Bruce McGlenn shoos the white-furred Kikos to the other end of a fenced enclosure. Seemingly disappointed, the quintet returns to munching weeds, oblivious to the hunting rifle slung over McGlenn’s shoulder.
Moments before, the air had been filled with chatter as McGlenn’s eight new pupils met for the first time. Now he stands at the far end of the goat pen some 50 feet away and raises his firearm. The group watches, hushed, while McGlenn waits stock-still until one goat separates from the pack. He removes his safety, the slight click piercing a silence interrupted only by a spring breeze in early Aspen leaves, and fires.
The shot echoes around the surrounding hills, and the goat drops to the ground. Its surviving companions scamper to the other end of the enclosure. McGlenn walks swiftly to the downed animal, kneels and grips a horn with one hand while placing the other on its torso, as if to comfort it. Or perhaps to say a prayer.
For several minutes no one speaks. A father pulls his teenage son, blinking back a tear, into an embrace. Then McGlenn invites us over to touch the animal.
“Put your hand on it and feel the warmth,” he says. We approach gingerly and each reach out a tentative palm, taking turns. The sensation triggers a range of emotions in the group — gratitude, relief, sadness. The father says it reminds him of his mother’s passing.
After the collective moment of reflection, McGlenn pulls out a hunting knife. “Now let’s get to work,” he says.
With a careful incision to avoid puncturing the gut, McGlenn splits the goat in half. We reach our hands in again and feel the flesh, even warmer than the hide, of an animal that had been alive just 15 minutes prior. McGlenn cuts out the windpipe and removes the entrails, periodically handing the knife to students, coaching them through the process of field dressing an animal.
Along the way, he extracts a .22 caliber bullet the width of a thumbnail. The goat will feed a dozen people for meal after meal — and provide a vital lesson in what it means to kill and harvest an animal for food, the first step on a journey to awaken our inner hunter.
The visceral experience sets the tone for our course in deeply rural northeastern Washington. For the next five days, I will be among the motley crew of students learning basic hunting skills while pondering big, timely questions: Can hunting help us tap into what makes us truly human in a technology-addled age? Can it change how we relate to the food we eat in a modern consumer economy?
Students come here based on McGlenn’s real-deal credentials — he’s a lifelong hunter who can stalk an elk through high mountains for days — but also for a thoughtful, emotionally sensitive approach to hunting that transcends crude cultural stereotypes, however real or exaggerated. This course is not the place where you’ll bag a trophy buck and strap it to the roof of your vehicle to show off your prize. Instead, it’s a chance to explore McGlenn’s assertion that hunting “taps into something deeper and more primal in us.”
A philosophical hunting school
Slaughtering the goat, and the attendant ritual of what McGlenn calls an “honorable harvest,” was both a practical and spiritual opening act of Human Nature Hunting, the course the former Seattle engineer has taught since 2016 on his 330-acre mostly off-grid homestead outside Kettle Falls, Stevens County.
Each course brings eight students to a simulation of a hunting camp for three to five days, with prices ranging from $1,600 to $4,900. Students sleep in unheated dry cabins or pitch their own tents, and relieve themselves in outhouses. They share communal meals cooked in an outdoor kitchen and warm themselves in an Army surplus canvas tent heated by a woodstove. Day by day, McGlenn goes over the basics of hunting — tracking, spotting, stalking, orienteering, species identification, fish and wildlife regulations, riflery, archery, field dressing, skinning. Then the whole experience culminates in a proper hunt, during which students put their newfound knowledge to the test in pursuit of wild turkey.
Even as the number of Americans who hunt declines nationally, McGlenn, 50, has built a steady following among the hunting-curious: vegetarians looking for ethical ways to return to eating meat, adults at some kind of personal crossroads looking for a practice that gives them meaning, wayward urbanites looking to reconnect with traditional ways of life.
Our chef for the week, Merilee Bradford, is a role model for the latter. She turns our butchered meat into Moroccan goat chili, goat burgers and slow-roasted leg of goat. A dozen years ago, she was living on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, riding a motorcycle and smoking French cigarettes. But in her heart, the 44-year-old tells me on a break from chopping and dicing, she always wanted to live out “Little House on the Prairie.” She started taking classes at Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, King County, and eventually moved to an off-grid permaculture farm in Southern California, and later to Kettle Falls. In April she had just returned from cooking for an expedition in Namibia where students learned from Kalahari bushmen, or San people, how to hunt and track wildlife.
McGlenn has a knack for attracting seekers from metropolitan areas — prospective hunters who have neither a relative to teach them nor wild game darting across their lawns (unlike McGlenn, who regularly spies grouse, deer, bears, elk and moose from his porch). A few times a year he sets up a table at the Ballard Farmers Market, dressed head to toe in wool and waxed canvas as if he leapt out of a Filson catalog. As Seattleites browse organic rutabagas and wild-caught salmon, he offers to teach them how to hunt for their meat.
That’s where I found him two years ago, before finally joining an April edition of the course as a guest, curious to learn more about McGlenn’s philosophical reverence — for wildlife, for the land, for humanity’s place in the natural world. Human Nature Hunting comes with recommended homework before arrival: naturalist Aldo Leopold’s classic “A Sand County Almanac,” Michael Pollan’s locavore polemic “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and Paul Shepard's ecologically-driven hunting manifesto “The Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game.”
McGlenn asks his students to ponder the notion that hunting and gathering is what makes us human. Over an opening campfire, he stretches his arms wide, his considerable wingspan meant to convey the 2-million-year arc of human evolutionary history. Only the tips of his fingers, he says, represent the roughly 5,000-10,000 years since the Neolithic era when humans trended away from hunting and gathering toward feeding themselves with agriculture.
“It all went downhill with the plow,” he says.
Cast of characters
The aspiring hunters gathered here are looking for something they can’t glean over the gun counter at Cabela’s.
Jack Kelly, a19-year-old college student raised in the Seattle area and a course alumnus, keeps a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” in his truck. After helping out as McGlenn’s teaching assistant for our course, he’s planning to embark on a self-directed three-day vision quest in the Cascades.
Sharon Cunnington a 50-something former tech worker from Bellevue and avid gun owner exploring her longstanding interest in what she calls “pioneer woman” skills in her retirement, compares the course to a 10-day meditation retreat for its introspective qualities like focusing on breathing and stillness.
Jack Friedman, 31, killed three deer on a Texas ranch last year, then returned home to feed his entire Bellevue block with venison. He calls that experience a “country club hunt” designed to tip the odds in the hunter's favor and lacking the rigor of hiking through wild forest, patiently tracking game.
“It was rewarding, but something was missing,” he says.
What’s more, he felt out of place in a lifestyle that trends politically conservative.
“I’m looking to find the liberal hunters,” he says.
Whatever their motivation, each member of the group invested in the $4,900 course (scholarships available) and made their way to northeastern Washington.
“There is nothing offered anywhere in the United States that comes close to what [McGlenn is] trying to accomplish here in teaching people what it means to be an ethical hunter,” says Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Todd Baarstad, one of the course’s guest speakers. “Sometimes people in their adult life discover they have a desire to be connected to the land. We were put on this Earth as hunters and gatherers.”
A better name
The number of licensed hunters in the U.S. peaked in 1982 at just shy of 17 million. Today the figure is more like 15.2 million, a figure that represents an even smaller portion of a larger overall population. Less than 5% of the country hunts, and even less in Washington, a state with 8 million residents with an average of 163,000 hunting license holders, according to WDFW.
Hunting advocates and opponents alike say broad trends have led to this decline: More of the population lives in cities and suburbs without easy access to hunting land. Outdoor activities like hiking, climbing and paddling give people their nature fix without the particular baggage that comes with carrying a firearm. The animal rights movement has made opposition to hunting a more mainstream view.
In the Pacific Northwest, those shifts have contributed to ugly legal fights between pro- and anti-hunting factions on the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission. In Oregon, a proposed ballot initiative that would have banned all hunting, trapping and fishing statewide did not garner enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, but the mere existence of such an audacious proposal arguably pushed the Overton window.
Facing newfound opposition, hunting organizations have launched a nationwide campaign to recruit, retain and reactivate hunters. “It's a tough sell because people have become sedentary,” says Baarstad, “but also there's some big barriers to entry for people that have not participated in those activities in the past.”
Human Nature Hunting helps people overcome those barriers, like Peter Nelson, a 49-year-old product designer who grew up in Redmond and now lives in Spokane. As a teenager in the Seattle punk scene, Nelson says, “I was anti-redneck. Hunting was completely foreign.”
But a nine-month Airstream tour between jobs led him to brush shoulders with hunters at campgrounds. “It threw splinters into my clean idea of what a hunter is, where camo equals Trump,” he says. “Hunters spend more time in nature than the granola crowd.” The realization led him here to this course.
The ingrained cultural bias against hunting is one of McGlenn’s sore spots. “Hunting needs a new name,” he likes to grouse, though he’s yet to find a better moniker.
Portrait of a modern hunter
McGlenn grew up in Bellevue and studied civil engineering at the University of Washington. Hunting buoyed him through his white-collar career, including five years at Magnusson Klemencic Associates, a firm whose portfolio includes the World Trade Center and the Amazon Spheres.
“I would come back after two weeks and feel like a million bucks from walking around the mountains and getting fresh air,” he says. “But I probably wouldn't go if I didn't have the hunt to draw me in. The hunt hones my senses and adds an element I don’t get when I backpack to an alpine lake or climb a mountain.”
McGlenn wasn’t brought up by casual hunters. His father, John McGlenn, served two terms as a Washington Fish and Wildlife commissioner and his mother, Ronni, founded Washington Outdoor Women, a nonprofit that teaches hunting and fishing to women.
“My earliest memory is riding on my dad’s shoulders when I was three years old and he was hunting pheasants in the Columbia Basin. A rooster flushed, and he [John McGlenn] swung and shot. I was holding onto his hair — no seat belt, no earplugs,” McGlenn recalls. “It wasn’t something we were doing all year — hunting season is short — but it was a way of life for us.”
As he sits on the porch swing of the log cabin he built, dressed in leather boots and a wool shirt, it’s hard to imagine McGlenn commuting to a downtown Seattle office and toiling over a drafting table. Lean and tall with salt-and-pepper hair, a sharp nose and a prominent Adam’s apple, he looks like the paragon of health. He claims to visit neither dentist nor doctor.
McGlenn has kept a journal since 1989, cataloging both mundane specifics about hunting conditions and spiritual insights into prehistoric virtues. That material inspired his curriculum, which he developed while earning a master’s in sustainable business at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
McGlenn is an evangelist for hunting, but he’s no megachurch pastor. He teaches a maximum of a dozen courses annually — roughly 500 people have come through over a decade — which seems about right for an instructor who isn’t laconic but deliberate, in his language and his movements.
“Producing more hunters isn’t going to solve anything,” he says. “I’m just connecting people to the land through hunting.”
In 2018, he matched on dating app MeetMindful with Sarah Long, a nurse and midwife. A practitioner of Vipassana meditation, she observed the mantra of not harming any living thing, trapping and releasing mice in her Tonasket cabin rather than killing them.
The two were an unlikely match to say the least. But they bonded over a shared vision of building a nature-based healing center and community farm (Human Nature Hunting is one manifestation of that larger aspiration).
“The kindest, gentlest, most compassionate, calm, grounded man I ever met happens to be a hunter,” says the 38-year-old, sitting next to him while cradling their infant Hazel.
McGlenn moved to the property full time in 2020, Sarah moved in the next year. They were married on the land in 2023 and their two daughters, “my little huntresses” he likes to call them, were born next to the wood stove under log beams decorated with antlers and turkey feathers. The family subsists largely on wild-caught meat and salmon plus produce from their garden. They are modern homesteaders — empty Costco boxes are shoved up against a gun rack and even though solar panels heat their water, the electric grid powers their iPhones.
We are, ultimately, guests of McGlenn’s family during our stay. Sarah and Hazel join us when they can for meals and lectures. Three-year-old Maya wanders barefoot, ever curious. McGlenn exhibits remarkable patience when she interrupts a map-reading exercise on the porch on day three. He gently quizzes her about the deer charm on the necklace she’s wearing. “Is it a buck or a doe?”
Soon she’ll likely be riding on her father’s shoulders, holding onto his hair while he fires off a shot.
‘Dad, there’s a turkey’
Some of my father’s favorite stories are hunting tales. He was raised in a Washington, D.C. suburb, and when he was a child in the ’50s and ’60s, wild land was still within a short drive of the Beltway. My grandfather routinely dragged him through the West Virginia woods or in a small boat on the Chesapeake Bay in pursuit of turkeys, squirrels and ducks.
The stories typically had a similar plot: My father — bored, tired, cold or hungry — would pester his father for something, say hot cocoa, causing my grandfather to miss his one chance he had at their prey. In one oft-repeated saga, they were hunting turkeys and hadn’t seen a bird all day. Finally, my father spotted one in the distance, but my grandfather’s view was obscured by brush. “Dad, there’s a turkey,” my father whispered, then repeated, slightly louder each time, until finally, in his telling, he was practically yelling, “Dad, there’s a turkey!” Sure enough, his youthful excitement flushed the bird before my grandfather could get off a shot.
That story comes back to me on the final full day at McGlenn’s when we fan out for a first-light turkey hunt. At 4:30 a.m. I pile into a Mazda AZ Offroad belonging to endurance athlete Olly Cohen,28, a scholarship student in the course. A vegetarian by conviction, disgusted by factory farming, he’d been fasting for several days when he stumbled upon McGlenn at the Ballard Farmers Market and remarked that he hungered for meat more than anything else. He journeyed to the homestead to explore this unexpected craving.
Armed with a shotgun, digital maps from onX Hunt and a turkey call (a round box with a slate surface that, when scratched with a wooden stylus, creates a screech that sounds remarkably like a turkey), we tramp into the woods on a patch of public land near McGlenn’s property.
Cohen and I are wearing our best forest green hiking clothes from REI rather than the head-to-toe camouflage the other students have on. As trail runners and backcountry skiers, we’re used to constant movement when outdoors, making the slow, deliberate approach of hunting difficult for us to calibrate. Today our goal isn’t to cover ground for the sake of racking up mileage, but to look for clues — a turkey feather, a telltale pile of scat — then stop and listen.
Even the calling, the most active tool at our disposal, requires an unfamiliar pace; we wanted to do something to hasten our success. But, we had been warned by McGlenn and his guest instructors: If you think it’s time to call, wait 10 minutes. Too frequent calls unnerve the turkeys.
I try to channel a line that McGlenn had quoted from the Tao Te Ching: “Do your work, then step back.”
As the morning drags on, a crisp dawn giving way to a warm spring day, we hear turkeys in the distance. We move positions a few times, settle back in against a tree trunk. Eventually, lunch beckoning, we head back to camp empty-handed. Among our cohort, only Peter Nelson, the Spokane product designer, bags a bird — but that small victory elicits a collective sense of triumph.
We dine on backstrap cooked on a skillet — the last of our goat butchery — then go our separate ways through the blooming yellow balsamroot in search of a private perch to make our final journal entries. (Since our arrival, we, too, have been journaling on the nature of hunting and human existence.)
Having gathered our thoughts, the group gathers for one last reflection overlooking the Columbia River. It’s emotional. Nelson reveals he’s recently divorced and hopes hunting will strengthen his bond with his teenage children. A grandfather reads a letter aloud to his son and grandson articulating his unconditional love and pride in how this adventure has made them better people.
The time spent living outside, the camaraderie, the attempts at stalking prey have proved deeply therapeutic. Could another activity — a yoga retreat, a backpacking trip, a fly-fishing class — yield a similar effect? Perhaps, but connecting to an ancient, ancestral human way of living resonates in a way that little else does. Hunting has strengthened our bond with the natural world, and with ourselves.
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