Outfitters

By Carmen White

Fall 2006, my family bought a hunting outfit in North Central Idaho with absolutely no clue what we were getting ourselves into. The results: great friends, a closer family, more than one near-death experience, and this book. The dirt and grit of outfitting as told by a 15 year old girl who lived it and survived... Me. Real life behind the scene stories about camp, the horses, the pack rats, the bears, the broken trailers—and why we love what we do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carmen White
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781956229066

Book preview

Outfitters

Stories

Meet the Outfitters

Prologue

My First Pack Trip

Shopping

Ace, The Camp ‘Dog’

No String Attached

The Natives: deer, pack rats, chipmunks...Trent

FIRE!

Tracking

A Girl and Her Horse

Scott and the Pack Rat

Keith’s Bear

Glossary

Outfitter Lingo

Acknowledgments

Meet the Outfitters

Dad—the Outfitter.

Call Handle: Ridgerunner

Mom—the Camp Cook.

Call Handle: Momma Bear

(Don’t tick off the cook.)

Me—Camp Manager and 'does whatever Dad tells her to person'.

Call Handle: Ghostwriter

Liesl—my totally awesome sister/horse whisperer.

Call Handle: Snowshoe

(She is also the illustrator for this book!)

Trent—the Guide

Call Handle: Marlboro Man

Scott and April Richardson

The previous owners and all-around experts in hunting; Scott, who lives off cola and beer. He has been known to walk trails that even deer fear to tread; April, who finally, after thirteen years of helping clients bag their trophies, shot her first elk during her last year of outfitting

Prologue

After three hours of bumping along the worn road to the point where you feel like you’ll be doing it forever, you finally reach that last bit of dirt and gravel that leads into camp, a swerve, a turn, a dip, and there it is: The sun-worn tents are pitched and the electric fence restrung. The metal roofing has been set over the saddlery and hay shed. Every fence and trailer has been placed in the same spot year after year to the point where it’s hard to tell whether everything didn’t just grow out of the ground like the trees themselves. Even the light-gray smoke rising from the cook tent stove seems a natural part of the forest.

Everything looks peaceful, perfect even. It’s a photo straight from the brochure you took home with you months ago, but the glossy print is only one side of the story. While you’re writing home about food, hunting, and horses, I’m the short, blonde, teenage girl tracking down bears and let me tell you—it’s an entirely different story.

Seventy-five percent of what we outfitters do is hidden in the background: It’s the miles of trail clearing, the cords of firewood gathered, and the constant prayers that the storms don’t blow in. All this and my family jumped into our new profession like skydivers. It has given us experiences that your side of the story is missing, the sort of things we only tell stories about weeks later because, by then, they're actually funny. It’s all the dirt and grit of actually outfitting: the horses, the pack rats, the bears, the broken trailers, the monthly trips to town—Where did all these people come from?

It all becomes part of the love/hate relationship we have with what we do.

These are stories that tell what it’s really like to be outfitters.

My First Pack Trip

When I was somewhere between eight and nine years old, my dad told me a secret: we were going to buy some horses. I can honestly say that at that point in my young life I only barely knew what a horse was.

They’re like unicorns, right?

Whatever they were, I liked the idea so much that I happily blurted out the surprise announcement to the one person in our family who hadn’t been told yet—Mom.

Despite the horrified look on her face, we ended up with horses by the next year. They were two beautiful mustangs with as little idea how to be ridden as we had to ride them. Of the two, Dad’s favorite horse—strong, wild, and as cold as ice—became his pet project. Over the years, Ice and Dad went through a lot together: Dad broke his leg, fell off a trail, even came home one time with a concussion. As we worked with more and more horses, we were thrown, rolled on, run with and, sometimes, just fell out of the