I’m a city girl from New York. I’m also 82 and half-blind, so what am I doing deer hunting with my son, Sam, at the end of October in Montana? We’re in the foothills of the Swan Mountains near Kalispell, south of Glacier National Park. For the last four days, Sam and I have been tramping dawn to dusk over tree debris that loggers call “clear-cut.” We haven’t eaten since we left his cabin before dawn. Now it’s snowing, and I’m wet, tired and bloody cold.

Because Sam wanted to make sure I wouldn’t blow his head off by mistake, I learned how to load and fire a .22-caliber rifle in September at a shooting range off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I found out you needed only one eye to line up the sights. But when I got to Montana, it wasn’t a .22 Sam handed me but a .270 Winchester with a scope. He showed me how to haul it up, push it hard into my shoulder and jam my cheek along the stock, but the gun was so heavy I could ­barely keep it still. Even if I see a deer, I thought, how will I aim this wobbling bazooka?

Sam calls hunting “earning your food.” Although I’ve spent a lifetime buying, cooking and eating food, this would be the first time I’d ever hunted and sought to kill. Others had always done that for me.

By noontime on this fifth deerless day, I have seen nothing but snowflakes and ravens. The air has been so milky that I fantasize coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, bears. Sam has pointed out the scat of all these, fresh and glistening, along with deer scat. But the whitetail stay invisible. I’ve liked the challenge, but I’ve also yearned to go home — not to Sam’s cabin but to my overheated New York apartment.