The Great American Antler Boom

Every spring, shed hunters head to the woods looking for deer and elk antlers that may fetch thousands of dollars, or social-media fame.
A person and dog walking through a forest of deer antlers.
Every spring, shed hunters from across the country descend on Jackson, Wyoming.Illustration by Lily Qian

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some antlers are easy to find. A large arch of intertwined elk antlers greets passengers as they arrive at the local airport, and, in town, antler chandeliers hang from tall ceilings at a high-end furniture store. Jackson’s trademark is a town square with four archways; each arch was made from some fourteen thousand pounds of antler. Most of the antlers come from the National Elk Refuge, an expanse of hills and meadows on the outskirts of Jackson where roughly eight thousand elk spend the winter. The animals eat government-funded alfalfa pellets, living in a carefully managed symbiosis with a town that presents itself as a frontier outpost, and which has a median home price of three million dollars.

Unlike horns, which are permanently attached to an animal’s head, antlers regenerate annually. Adult male elk, or bulls, grow their antlers between April and August. During this period, the antlers are soft, cartilaginous, and covered in fine hair—known as “velvet”—and they contain reproducing stem cells. At the end of the summer, the antlers ossify, and elk scrape the velvet off on trees. The velvet is filled with blood vessels, so the process leaves a gory mess; blood stains the hard antlers, and sap, dirt, and tree bark color them further.

Around September, mating season begins, and bulls use their antlers to spar with one another when vying for breeding rights with cows. “There’s a relation between antler size and sperm counts,” Matthew Metz, a wildlife biologist and research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, told me. “It’s an honest advertisement.” When bulls are done breeding, their testosterone levels fall, and so do their antlers. In the spring, the bones are cast off, leaving behind bloody pedicles. The wounds heal, regrowth begins, and people start searching for the antlers that have been shed. The bones are valuable: last summer, top-grade elk antler sold for sixteen dollars a pound. (A large shed antler might weigh ten pounds.) Collectors are known to pay upward of fifteen hundred dollars for a particularly desirable pair of antlers, and tens of thousands of dollars for deadheads—skulls with the antlers still attached.

On the National Elk Refuge, only the staff and local Boy Scouts are permitted to collect antlers, which are sold in an annual auction. But though the elk may eat the refuge’s alfalfa, they don’t have much use for arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries, so they frequently wander onto adjacent public lands, which are managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Each year, on the first of May, those lands open to shed hunters. “You get to put your hands on something no one else has ever touched,” a shed hunter from Minnesota told me. “And then you get to take it home!”

The May hunt is feverish, and occasionally dangerous. It used to begin at midnight, but in 2015 a shed hunter on horseback tried to cross a river and was swept away. The man survived, but the horse drowned. The derby’s start has since been amended to 6 A.M.

On April 30, 2021, shed hunters began arriving in southwest Jackson, at the Teton County Fairgrounds, a designated waiting area twenty-five minutes from where the hunt would take place. They drove trucks with window stickers that said “RISE AND SHED” and “SHED LIFE”; some hauled horse trailers. Many of them were locals, while others had come from Utah and Idaho, New York and Wisconsin. Nearly all of them were men, a good number of whom were dressed in camouflage—an unnecessary choice, given that antlers don’t run. But many shed hunters are also proud hunters, and the physical demands of the two sports are similar: both can require endurance in rough, mountainous terrain. Amid thick deadfall in the high country, every root and bleached cow femur can resemble an antler. Some shed hunters use trained dogs; others rely on expensive optics. That afternoon, workers from a cheese-processing plant in Utah played with a spotting scope—a device that can detect sheds from hundreds of yards away. Nearby, a coed group from Kansas was huddled around a pickup truck, where a twenty-seven-year-old Pfizer employee was holding court. He told his friends that he had run more than seven hundred miles in the past nine months to prepare for antler season.

As night approached, people drank beer and prepared to sleep in their cars. Early the next morning, police officers began escorting vehicles to the east end of town, where the road turned to dirt. The cars sped off, dust and headlights creating eerie weather. A man led his horse, yelling, “He’s gonna go like a son of a bitch!” Many of the hunters headed for Flat Creek, a stream running through hills. They raced across the water and ascended into tawny meadows. One rider was bucked off his horse and injured himself. A teen-ager from Montana alleged that someone stole an antler he had spotted first. One of the shed hunters from Kansas saw a bull elk running full tilt, its tongue lolling. “I felt bad for him,” she said later. “You could tell that he’d been pushed by all these people.”

Back on the road, more vehicles kept arriving until the parking line was half a mile long. A few riders returned from the hills, their horses hauling dozens of antlers. Near a red pickup truck with Wyoming plates, a young man was standing by the head of a dead bull. The man, who said that his name was McKay, had found the bull’s carcass in the creek and decapitated it with a knife. “I got lucky,” he said. The bull’s antlers were crooked, or nontypical, which potentially made them more valuable than a normal set—they could be worth several thousand dollars. But he couldn’t leave his trophy unguarded, meaning that his day was essentially finished. “It’s over already,” he said, glumly. “It’s too bad.”

There are more than a million wild elk in North America, mostly clustered throughout the western United States and Canada. Bulls that live in forests of cedar and fir, like those in northwest Montana or in the Canadian Rockies, often color their antlers with deeper shades than those in, say, the deserts of southern Nevada. Elk wandering through old burns can rub against char-covered trees until their antlers are nearly black. Roosevelt elk and tule elk, subspecies found in Oregon and California, respectively, have shorter antlers than Rocky Mountain elk. Nontypical antlers can result from genetics or trauma; an injury to a right rear leg can result in a warped left antler, a discovery that has mystified biologists. “They’re like snowflakes,” Kevin Monteith, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wyoming, said of antlers. “Every one is unique.”

The U.S. and Canada used to have ten million elk, which roamed across the continent, including in northeastern states like Pennsylvania. By 1880, settlers had hunted the Eastern elk to extinction. Western herds nearly met the same fate; military officers had begun promoting the hunting of bison, in an attempt to subjugate Indigenous societies, and settlers showed little restraint with other species. In Wyoming, Yellowstone National Park offered a degree of protection, but poaching was still rampant, and enforcement was rare. Many elk were killed simply for their teeth. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the New York-based fraternal organization whose members included President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Babe Ruth, had adopted an elk tooth—an ivory—as an emblem, and members coveted the teeth for cufflinks. According to reports, these ivories sold for thirty dollars a pair by the early twentieth century, or the equivalent of a thousand dollars today.

Poaching slowed once the federal government, under pressure from conservationists, passed legislation prohibiting interstate wildlife trafficking. Wyoming enforced stricter punishments for those who killed animals for their teeth, and the Elks, having proved themselves to be neither benevolent nor protective, dropped the emblem. But there was another problem: Western expansion had begun to disrupt elk migration patterns. The Jackson herd had a wide range, travelling as far as Yellowstone, fifty miles north, and perhaps as far south as the Green River Basin, two hundred miles away. Homesteaders built towns and barbed-wire fences in the middle of these migration routes, and in Jackson Hole opportunistic elk found sustenance in the form of ranchers’ hay. The winter of 1909 was especially severe, and starving elk stormed the town of Jackson, looking for food. A large number of elk perished; it was said that you could walk for two miles over carcasses. In response, settlers began feeding the elk hay in the winter, and Congress soon appropriated money for the creation of feed grounds. With the frontier declared closed and Indigenous tribes living on reservations, the federal government saw Wyoming elk as a matter of national interest. In 1910, game managers across the West started importing elk from the Jackson herd to revitalize flagging populations in other states.

“Looks like Broadway’s back.”
Cartoon by Kate Curtis

Two years later, Congress created the National Elk Refuge, which eventually expanded its acreage by acquiring property from John D. Rockefeller and other wealthy landowners. Natural challenges soon arose. One year, there was too little snow, which meant not enough grass for hay the following summer; another year, there was too much snow, which led to winterkill within the herd. Then there were the antlers, lurking beneath the snow—an algorithmically multiplying threat to tires and to the mechanical equipment used by refuge employees. In 1953, the Rotary Club of Jackson Hole addressed the problem by building an arch on the town square with sheds collected from the refuge. A few years later, the Rotary Club enlisted the help of local Boy Scouts to retrieve more sheds. “Shortly, three more elk horn arches rose on the Town Square,” the Jackson Hole Guide reported, “but there are more antlers each year.”

In 1968, town officials planned an auction to sell five thousand pounds of antlers, hoping to attract makers of gun racks and cribbage boards. On the day of the event, nearly all the antlers were bought by two men, both of whom represented firms in Hong Kong. Neither produced cribbage boards. One of the buyers said that his company used antlers for “novelties.” The other declared that his purchases would supply the international medicinal market.

In traditional Chinese medicine, antler is often sliced into rounds and served with ginseng, or crushed into powder. Hard antler is purported to have anti-inflammatory qualities, and in Korea velvet antler is served to children as a growth tonic. Chunyi Li, the director of the Institute of Antler Science and Product Technology, at China’s Changchun University of Science and Technology, studies antler stem cells in an effort to create regenerative therapies. Li recently ran an experiment with mice in which he chopped off their legs and tried to regrow them with antler stem cells. “If you cut off the leg, it cannot regenerate,” he explained. But he noted that, when the wound heals, “it exactly resembles the initial antler regeneration.” Li told me that researchers have used techniques from molecular biology to better understand an antler’s medicinal properties and have identified numerous bioactive compounds. And yet “nobody has been able to link them back to antler efficacy,” he said.

After the success of the 1968 auction, Jackson made it an annual event. One of the top buyers was Jung (Johnny) Wang, who operated a company in San Francisco that sent antlers to Asian countries. He is often credited with launching the international export of antlers from the United States. “Johnny Wang was the godfather,” Don Schaufler, a Montana-based buyer who worked with Wang, and who is now one of the nation’s largest antler brokers, told me. In the nineteen-seventies, Wang claimed to move more than a hundred tons of antler annually, most of it coming from international farms.

Chinese farmers have been raising sika deer for their velvet for hundreds of years. Some spas in Russia, which is home to Eurasian elk and reindeer, offer a treatment in which customers bathe in water mixed with velvet and blood from the harvest. Deer and elk are not native to New Zealand, but European settlers imported deer, and then in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt gifted the country twenty elk from Yellowstone. New Zealand now runs a fifty-three-million-dollar antler industry, exporting velvet to Asia and funding biomedical research into antlers’ potential pharmaceutical uses.

To harvest an animal’s velvet, its antlers need to be removed while they’re still growing. New Zealand mandates that a veterinarian supervise velvet producers. Elsewhere, the process is less controlled; poachers in Siberia have been documented intercepting reindeer that are swimming across rivers in order to saw off their antlers. Collecting shed antlers, on the other hand, does not require a blade, or contact with animals at all. Owing to the density of the Jackson herd, Wyoming quickly emerged as an abundant and renewable source of affordable antlers. For some collectors, Jackson antlers also hold a specific allure; many of the nation’s elk have genetic roots in the area. Peter Peck, a Rhode Island resident who regularly attends the Jackson auction to buy antlers, told me, “It’s just the place. It has to be here.”

The Jackson auction became a theatre where the realities of a globalized economy met with commercialized nostalgia for the Old West. (Some buyers dressed as mountain men.) It also prompted a surge in frontier-like activity. Shed hunting is prohibited in national parks, but people began sneaking in to look for sheds. Rangers, hoping to track down black-market sellers, planted antlers marked with invisible ink.

According to Joe Fowler, a former Yellowstone ranger, some shed hunters looking to thin out the competition resorted to snitching on other poachers. “It got to be, among the horn hunters, sort of a blood sport,” he said. “We would occasionally get telephone calls anonymously saying, ‘So-and-So is going to be picked up with a bunch of horns at the Yellowstone River Bridge at eight o’clock tonight.’ ” In 1982, a man was found drowned in the river. Nearby was a raft towing two hundred and fifty pounds of antlers.

By the mid-nineties, the U.S. was exporting nearly three million dollars’ worth of antler products, and in the areas surrounding Jackson shed hunting had become a high-profile activity. Meanwhile, shed hunters in rural communities throughout the American West collected antlers in relatively blissful obscurity. In Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, which is home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, some residents sold antlers on the side. Others did not, instead using sheds to make art or giving the bones away as gifts. “It’s all in how you were raised and what you see,” Rich Janssen, Jr. (Q’lispé), the head of the tribes’ Department of Natural Resources, said. In northern New Mexico, a hunting guide, George Rael, collected antlers and hung some of them from the limbs of a blue spruce. “Leave them for the gods,” he said.

In 2004, a man named Michael Thomas helped change the antler industry for good. Thomas, who runs a wholesale pet-supply company in Texas, was watching a Dallas Cowboys game at a friend’s house when he noticed his friend’s dog gnawing on a white-tailed-deer antler. “I sat and watched that dog chew on that thing for two hours straight with reckless abandon,” Thomas said. He decided to start marketing antler to dog owners. At the time, he said, “there was a trend in the pet business for unusual and long-lasting chews. That was when bully sticks were taking off. Nobody understood that they were made out of stretched cow penis.”

Thomas reached out to white-tailed-deer farms, which abound in Texas and breed bucks for large hunting ranches. (A vial of semen from a buck with a nontypical rack can cost thousands of dollars.) The ranches kept piles of old antlers, but Thomas did not seek the type that you would proudly display in your home. Antlers are graded by quality. The top grade is fresh, or brown. The next grade is composed of hard whites, which are often a year old, and smooth and unbroken. Then come C-grade antlers, which are sun-bleached and dried out. Last is crumbling bone, or chalk. “We concentrated on the C,” Thomas said. “We weren’t interested in appearances.” He bought them for cheap, then sliced them with a band saw and sold them to retail pet shops, advertising their mineral content. They ended up on shelves for as much as twelve dollars apiece. “We were making ridiculous margins,” he said.

Antler’s specific utility for dogs is as mysterious as it is for humans. R. Terry Bowyer, a senior research scientist at the Institute of Arctic Biology, said, “It’s just a chew toy,” adding, “There’s almost nothing there but calcium and phosphorous.” But in the woods antlers draw interest from rodents, which gnaw on them voraciously. As Janssen told me, “Dogs like that stuff. But all animals like it.” Monteith, of the University of Wyoming, said it’s possible that sheds add essential minerals to natural environments: “Could antlers themselves have some level of ecosystem influence in that way? Maybe. Not for certain. No idea.” (He also said, “I ain’t giving antlers to my dog.”)

Petco and PetSmart started carrying antler chews, and brokers, including Schaufler, began selling their product to dog owners. As competition increased, antlers grew more expensive, cutting into Thomas’s profits. “The antler business has been commodified, and the prices have done nothing but go up,” he told me. (He has since sought new turf, importing water-buffalo horn, a by-product of slaughterhouses in India, to make chews.) Nowadays, most of the antlers at the Jackson auction stay in the country, and a lot of them are destined to end up in a dog’s mouth. “The dog-chew companies have priced the exports out,” Linda Rumsey, an antler broker in Idaho and Wyoming, said.

In recent years, the domestic antler business has been fuelled by another invention: YouTube. In 2006, Eric Chesser, then a twenty-three-year-old former bodybuilder in Utah, began producing videos in which he walked into the woods carrying a camera and discovered an antler. In real life, finding an antler is a small miracle, like stumbling onto a mountain spring. Watching someone find an antler online is about as exciting as buying a bottle of Poland Spring. But Chesser accumulated a following for his content: big bulls, antlers, and muscles. Some of his videos contain advertisements, including one starring Sylvester Stallone’s younger brother promoting a velvet spray that purportedly boosts one’s strength. Chesser now sells autographed antlers to fans and runs a dog-chew company, called RakSnaks. Other YouTubers have followed suit, attempting to garner fame by uploading hunting and shed-hunting videos.

In Utah, those who wish to collect antlers during the early shed season are required to take an ethics course. In 2010, ten thousand people took the course; by 2020, that figure had more than doubled. State and tribal governments are still adjusting to this new wave of interest in antlers, introducing restrictions intended to protect wildlife; Nevada has limited shed hunting in six counties, and Wyoming has created a shed season in previously unrestricted parts of the state. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have instituted a seasonal closure in order to protect a sensitive elk calving ground. “We’re not taught to look at the resource as having monetary value,” Janssen said of antlers. “We gotta battle with the dominant society.”

The confluence of the dog-chew phenomenon and social media has created a uniquely American boom. If the international antler business is built on faith in ancient remedies and the promise of futuristic ones, then the domestic antler business is centered on an illusion of economic freedom derived from the land, and a reality in which performative masculinity caters to the whims of a flourishing pet-wellness industry. Lori Rael, who operates a New Mexico hunting lodge, told me that the sport “used to be way more preserved.” She added, “I’m not a guy, but you know how guys are. They want to be, like, ‘Oh, mine’s bigger.’ ”

Last May, Chesser and Ben Dettamanti, a fellow shed influencer, woke up in the beds of their trucks, where they had spent the night parked near a mountain range in southern Nevada. Dettamanti turned a handheld camera toward himself and started recording: “Plan to be out here for at least three or four days, get some good videos for you guys, get back on this shed-hunting life!”

Dettamanti, who is thirty-seven, is more than six feet tall, with an unruly red beard, and weighs two hundred and sixty-four pounds. “I like to say that I’m the biggest shed hunter,” he told me. On Instagram, where his username is Shedcrazy and he has sixty-three thousand followers, Dettamanti uploads videos that are casual and jokey; he often shed-hunts in an old minivan and likes to make fun of people who wear Patagonia gear. “I want people to share my philosophy, which is not to take the outdoors so seriously,” he said.

Six years ago, Dettamanti was a high-school custodian, shed hunting on the side in order to supplement his income. (Before that, he carved headstones.) He could make twenty thousand dollars a year selling antlers—a good amount, but not enough for him and his wife and children to live on. Dettamanti started producing videos, and Chesser reached out, encouraging him to continue. He realized that, if he couldn’t make a living selling antlers, he might be able to provide for his family by selling the dream of the pursuit. Dettamanti told Chesser that he was considering quitting his job. Chesser suggested that he film himself leaving work for the final time. Dettamanti took his advice, and the video went viral. “The response was just insane,” he said.

The first year after leaving his job, Dettamanti earned around thirty thousand dollars, through ads and sponsorship deals. He has since quadrupled that. “This was always my goal—to earn enough to be able to support my family,” he said. “But then when you get there you’re just, like, ‘Well, maybe I could double it. Maybe we could do a bit more. Maybe I could be rich.’ Eric’s good about keeping me grounded. He reminds me, ‘Four years ago, you were freaking cleaning toilets.’ ”

“You might give him a little wave, sire. He’s your biggest fan.”
Cartoon by Mick Stevens

For all his irreverence, Dettamanti turns serious when it comes to the politics of shed hunting, often using his platform to advocate for less regulation of the sport. Some shed hunters are worried that states might try to end the practice altogether; last year, Dettamanti posted a satirical video predicting a future in which shed hunters are allowed just one antler per year. His role as an activist is precarious: many people in the shed-hunting community blame the new rules on social-media personalities like him, who, by publicizing the sport, have opened it up to more scrutiny. Chesser, for his part, avoids political confrontation. (“Likability is a big thing,” he told me.) He has more than twice as many Instagram followers as Dettamanti.

Before setting up camp, Dettamanti and Chesser discussed the area where they’d be hunting, a series of sagebrush flats and rolling hills studded with piñon and juniper trees. Back when Dettamanti was a custodian, the region was full of antlers for the taking. Now, he predicted, the area will have been “picked over” already by shed hunters. “You just have to blame the damn YouTubers,” he quipped.

On the day of the hunt, Chesser and Dettamanti walked into the morning and separated. (Shed hunting is not much of a collaborative exercise; people follow their impulses and often end up alone.) Near the top of a ridge, Dettamanti saw a forked object: an elk antler. It was grade-A bone, freshly dropped this season. Its main beam appeared thin and rangy, and its color was light; it weighed a little more than seven pounds. He approached the antler and filmed it from all angles. “Fricking sweet,” he said. “So stoked.” Later, back at camp, Chesser measured the antler, calculating that it would produce nearly four hundred dollars’ worth of dog chews. In the evening, the men spoke about the future: they were both concerned that YouTube had tightened restrictions on sponsored videos, requiring users to label branded content as advertisements. Dettamanti said, “Who knows? It could all just fricking go away.”

That summer, antler brokers on the side of rural highways in New Mexico and Wyoming were paying sixteen dollars per pound, and there were rumors that the Jackson auction might bring record prices. The event, which is normally held near the arches in Jackson’s town square, had been moved online in 2020, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Cliff Kirkpatrick, who has helped oversee the auction for the past three decades, was preparing for a spirited in-person return in the fall of 2021. A gray-haired carpenter with woolly eyebrows, Kirkpatrick was the district committee chairman for the Jackson Boy Scouts, who receive a quarter of the auction’s proceeds. (The rest goes to the National Elk Refuge, which uses the funds to maintain equipment, such as irrigation lines.) Each year, Kirkpatrick has spent hundreds of volunteer hours organizing the event. Does he have a particular interest in antler? “It’s really about the Scout involvement,” he told me. “It’s been an effective fund-raiser.”

The past few auctions have taken in two hundred thousand dollars on average, with much of that money coming from Rumsey, the broker in Idaho and Wyoming. She entered the industry shortly after her brother, who had been buying for Schaufler, died, in 1989. (She worked briefly with Schaufler before venturing out on her own. “It’s kind of a dog-eat-dog business,” Schaufler told me.) Rumsey and her husband own a furniture store called Wild West Designs, which has outlets in Jackson and Idaho Falls. The shop is known for its chandeliers made from interwoven antlers; Rumsey sells them for thousands of dollars. But she also exports antlers and sells to a dog-chew distributor. In September, when I asked Rumsey what sort of antler she’d look for at the auction, she replied, “All of it.”

But, with the Delta variant spreading, Kirkpatrick received word that he would have to move the auction online again. The timing—just weeks before the auction—was inopportune; by the time Kirkpatrick circulated the final details, a few buyers had already left their homes on cross-country drives. “I’m overwhelmed and exhausted,” he told me a week before the event. From an office in his home, he uploaded photos and wrote descriptions of pallets. “It’s just lot after lot after lot, and they’re all antler,” he said. “You start describing every one as unique and beautiful, and pretty soon they’re all unique or beautiful.” When I asked why he continued running the auction as an unpaid volunteer, he said, “I can’t find someone to replace me.” He despaired of the decadence in Jackson and noted, “People would rather write a check than volunteer.”

On the day of the event, prices rose to previously unseen heights: online buyers offered more than thirty dollars per pound. A bidding war broke out over a deadhead that had antlers resembling a caribou’s. A heating specialist from Rhode Island won the item, outbidding a heating specialist from Utah. Schaufler placed bids from Montana; Rumsey bid from her Jackson home while a repairman worked on her hot tub. She won the largest lots. Schaufler later grumbled about the exorbitant prices. “I don’t need ’em that bad,” he said. Rumsey had committed $126,827. Later that day, she arrived at the National Elk Refuge, where great piles of antlers lay taped together. She walked over to a folding table and asked the Boy Scouts’ district treasurer, who was sitting there, “Would somebody like a check?”

In the spring of 2021, a group of shed hunters in New Mexico, driving in a truck with a plastic antler hanging from the rearview window, discussed the recent changes to their beloved sport. “The Internet’s ruined everything,” Stuart Church, a thirty-four-year-old hunting guide, said. “The golden years are over for everything.”

Most of the people in the truck, who had grown up together in the small town of Questa, had spent the previous night at a campsite deep in the Carson National Forest. But one of them, a thirty-two-year-old plumber named Zeke Tapia, had been up since 3 A.M., driving more than a hundred miles from Albuquerque to meet up with his friends. He did not appear tired, and he was more optimistic than Church. “If you have respect for something you love, it’s going to respect you back,” he’d said a moment earlier. He looked out the window; there was snow all around. “They’re in there,” he said of the sheds. “They’ll be glowing, boys. They’ll be glowing!”

The shed hunters passed a place that they recognized. “This is where we dropped off Josh and didn’t see him until day three,” Church said, referring to a friend who had chased the antler mirage too far during a snowstorm, and had ended up seeking shelter in an outhouse. At 10:30 A.M., the group pulled over on a snowy roadside and arranged to meet back at the truck at 2 P.M. Each one carried a radio. Tapia, who wore a backpack and had binoculars strapped to his chest, moved quickly. He used walking poles to steady himself, trudging up a hillside where the snow was thigh-deep. He thought that he saw antlers, but they were sticks. Then, in a meadow, a couple of curved tines pointed through the snow; nearby were a few more. He pulled one from the snow, thinking it was a small antler, but it kept coming until it revealed eight points. He grabbed another tine, like a sword in a stone, and yanked. It, too, was an antler with eight points.

Tapia’s voice quavered: “Eight by eight, dude!” He went on, “That is the set of a lifetime.” He bound the antlers together with electrical tape, strapped them to his pack, and kept going. The sun rose, softening the snow. Tapia looked at a map on his phone: there was another meadow ahead where he was sure that he’d find more antlers. He dropped his pack and the sheds under a tree and hiked to the meadow, but found nothing. It was 2:07 P.M.—he was late to the rendezvous. He consulted his map, and identified yet another meadow that looked promising. “I don’t want to turn around and have it in the back of my head, like, ‘What was in that one?’ ” he explained.

The meadow appeared to be half a mile away. “So close,” he said. But, in the deep snow, half a mile might take forty minutes to cover. He felt certain that there would be antlers. He deliberated with himself. Then he thought of his friend who’d ended up in the outhouse. “Dang it,” Tapia said. He’d made up his mind. He turned back and retrieved his belongings. Burdened by the sheds, he plunged to his waist in the soft snow. He crouched down, sliding on his knees. Eventually, he came to a fallen aspen tree and considered using its bark to make snowshoes. Instead, he crawled on all fours. At a rocky outcropping, he stared at the land and said, “Sometimes you think, like, you must be crazy to do this. You know?” ♦