THE SURF SCOTERS come in fast, dive-bombing our decoys. Rue Mapp pops up from our boat blind and knocks one of the ducks into the water. This is Mapp’s hunt, a 50th birthday present from her mentor, Holly Heyser, but as another sea duck flies by, we get in on the action too.
Then the ducks stop flying over our boat in San Francisco Bay. So we sit and talk—Mapp, Heyser, our sea captain, her boat hand, and me—all women, all hunters who started later in life.
But we don’t talk much about that. Instead, we talk about rendering duck fat, about the whitetail shoulder mount Mapp plans to hang on her living room wall, and about the connection hunting gives her to the land and her heritage.
Mapp is a Black woman who founded Outdoor Afro, an organization that turned into a national movement intended to help reconnect Black people with the outdoors. She’s stood next to U.S. presidents, walked with penguins on Antarctica, and served as a National Geographic fellow. She is the vice chairperson of The Wilderness Society, the chairperson of the California State Park and Recreation Commission, and a board member of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. She just worked with shoe company Keen to launch an Outdoor Afro sandal, and she once took Oprah on a hike. Mapp is also a new hunter—kind of, sort of—who grew up around hunting but didn’t decide to start until her late 40s.
And right