Witness

In this essay, the narrator recounts the details of her family’s December 1996 bighorn sheep-hunting trip, which occurs exactly three years before her father’s unexpected death on Christmas Day. She uses this timeframe to examine what she could see at the time, and what signs of her father’s approaching death were present during the hunt, but obscured. Within this paradigm of hindsight, she examines nuances of life and death, hunting and the hunted, and the greater question of sight, reconciling herself to the weight of meaning in what lies between what we cannot see, and what we know to exist.