Beyond providing inspiration, hunting for meat honed many of the skills and attributes that I needed as a writer. One was an appreciation for curiosity. The anthropologist David Meltzer has written about the possible role of curiosity in the rapid dispersal of modern humans following the African exodus of our ancestors some 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Armed with stone weapons, hunters colonized continents at an astonishing pace. While we often associate human migrations with the distress of overcrowding, famine or warfare, the hunter-gatherers who arrived in America left lands with low population levels and no apparent conflict. We can’t dismiss the idea that their wanderings were motivated by a sense of wonder: What animals are over the next hill? What’s across that strait? Do good hunting grounds lie beyond this glacier? In search of answers, we populated the globe.

This type of curiosity is still revered by hunters today. Secret locations and hidden discoveries form the basis of our mythologies. Growing up, I viewed the Lewis and Clark expedition’s discovery of the vast game herds near the Missouri River’s headwaters as the pinnacle moment in American history. Now that I was in that region myself, I could pursue my own paradise. In search of fertile hunting grounds, I forded rivers, drove dead-end roads, walked trails that didn’t appear on maps, bushwhacked through marshes and climbed over mountains to see what I’d find on the other side. I was rewarded with an expanding catalog of regional and biological knowledge. As I searched for writing ideas and a fresh perspective from which to report them, my growing appetite for unfamiliar and rugged terrain became a valuable asset. Exploring a fresh idea, I found, could be as seductive as exploring a fresh landscape. And the outcome was sometimes even more satisfying.

Another important aspect of writing I learned from hunting is patience. As a kid, I would go into the woods in the evening and lean silently against a tree for an hour or so, waiting for the squirrels to forget that I’d invaded their territory and return to their bustling activities in the treetops. A few years later, I began spending long hours every October perched in a tree with a bow while waiting for a deer to pass beneath me. Later still, in Montana, I began trying to hunt bull elk in the mountains with a bow, which pushed my tolerance for waiting to an extreme. I had to become accustomed to the idea that success might come once every few years instead of every few nights — and then only if you tried your absolute hardest.

I worked for a long time to bring this level of patience and tenacity to writing, which can be painfully boring. At its worst, when it’s a seemingly endless string of hours spent waiting for a sensible passage to appear across a computer screen, I recall the silent, lonely and uncomfortable days that I’ve endured in the woods. I imagine that the idea I’m trying to put into words is an elk that’s out of sight but, perhaps, slowly headed my way. In both disciplines, there are things I can do to help bring about the result I want: In the case of hunting, it’s important to maintain silence; in the case of writing, to maintain an incessant clacking of keystrokes. Ultimately, I found that success for each often came down to my ability to endure discomfort and boredom long enough for the desired result to happen along, magically, on its own.