I’m what you might call a mini-adventurer. I’ve climbed rockfaces, rafted rivers, backpacked into the wilderness and once slithered through a cave tunnel so tight that the only way through was to lie flat, turn my head sideways and push with my toes.
I’ve never done anything as daring as free-climbing the 3,000-foot granite wall that is El Capitan or skiing spine-tingling mountain peaks, or winning a thirteen-leg Alaska survival show but I know women who have. These are fierce women, confident women and if you’re lucky enough to hang around any one of them for a while, you might start to feel their beautiful power rub off on you.
Go for a hike with one of these women, for instance, and pretty soon you’ll be thinking about adding a few more miles to your regular trail run—because why not? Put on skis and chase one of them around a mountain and you’ll begin contemplating the idea that a slope that once frightened you might actually be doable. Or you might end up scaling an 800-foot cliff you didn’t even know you wanted to climb until you got there.
I think so many of us spend our lives trying to mitigate risk, huddled inside our self-imposed walls where we believe we will be safe and free from hardship. These women defy those boundaries. They embody the idea that comfort isn’t necessarily a virtue and that we don’t know our strength until we test it. Risk, they’ll tell you, has its own rewards. These women are humble and confident, strong and vulnerable. They have inspired me to let go of fear and try harder, to quash ego, to accept discomfort, to embrace the experience. I love these fierce females. And, I love fiction that features women like them.
Here are five of my favorites:
In Lauren Groff’s compelling The Vaster Wilds, we only know her protagonist as “the girl” but we quickly come to realize she is so much more. Fleeing from an early American colony where famine lives hand in hand with violence, “the girl” plunges into the wild in search of freedom and is soon swallowed by a beautiful and unforgiving landscape.
She steals from the dead, roasts baby squirrels, robs honey from a swarm of angry bees, gobbles mushrooms without being certain if they are poisonous or not, and feasts on salmon she catches and smokes. Her shoes and clothes rot. Starvation and danger hunt her and, yet, the girl faces her suffering, not with surrender, but with determination. I was moved by her trials, which Groff renders in gorgeous prose, but also inspired by the notion that giving up at the first sign of an obstacle is the bigger failure. I quickly consumed this book.
Likewise, I devoured The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne.
Dionne’s protagonist Helena Pelletier was raised in an isolated cabin in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She doesn’t learn until she flees her home that her father, both loving and heartlessly cruel, had abducted her mother as a girl and held her against her will for years. Now a mother herself, with her past hidden from even her husband, Helena discovers her father has killed two guards and escaped from prison and that, in order to protect her children, she must now hunt him.
Helena is one of those unforgettable characters who knows how to hunt and fish, to skin animals and to savor the taste of boiled cattails but finds the civilized world a mystery. She suppresses her wildness in an attempt to fit in until, one day, everything changes and that animal-like fierceness is resurrected. With her daughters’ lives in jeopardy, Helena takes her dog and weapons and goes into the marsh after her father.
Dionne’s protagonist is troubled, sure, but she is also ferocious and resolute, a woman who does not shy away from risk. Danger forges her resolve. She is a warrior in the wild.
Warrior women in the wilderness are also central to Diane Les Becquets’ riveting novel, Breaking Wild, which features not one but two women whose courage and persistence in the face of bitter cold, biting winds and deep snow rival any cowboy-hero another writer might dream up.
I was on the edge of my seat for the entire read as Amy Raye Latour, married and the mother of two, ventures out into the Colorado backcountry to bow-hunt elk and, instead, finds herself lost, injured and alone as a blizzard sweeps into the mountains. She is a woman haunted by her past and yet her skills and will to survive in a desolate country outweigh every problem she had in the civilized world. Meanwhile, Pru Hathaway is another force to be reckoned with. A single mom and law enforcement officer who works for the Bureau of Land Management, she teams up with her search dog, Kona, to try to find the missing Amy Raye. Both Pru and Amy Raye don’t give up. They find both physical and mental strength in their discomfort. They forge ahead. It’s a good lesson that no success comes without suffering.
What list of tough women in the woods, meanwhile, would be complete without mentioning Dana Stabenow’s returning Aleut PI Kate Shugak? Smart and independent, Kate lives with her dog, Mutt, on a 160-acre plot of forest and river in southeastern Alaska. She’s as tough as the landscape and yet carries a vulnerability that sets her apart from male-centered mystery books. She knows loss and love and loyalty to family. It’s not a flaw. It’s a superpower. Novel twenty-three in the series, Not The Ones Dead, is compelling and satisfying but you won’t go wrong picking up Stabenow’s first Kate Shugak book, A Cold Day For Murder, and diving in.
Nor could I help diving in to Blair Braverman’s Small Game, a spell-binding tale of a survival TV show gone bad. Author Braverman is an accomplished outdoorswoman herself. She is a dog sledder and was a contestant on the TV survival show “Naked and Afraid” which is about both being very naked and sometimes being very afraid. Braverman’s heroine, Mara seems a natural to win the substantial money prize being offered—she teaches survival skills after all—but when the fake survival show turns into real survival, Mara’s layers of protection are peeled back and she eventually finds her true self.
That’s the thing about a wilderness woman. She lets go of her ego. She find strength in adversity. She doesn’t fight discomfort. She releases pettiness and lives fully. Just like I want to do.
***
