Moonlight Elk: One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom
In Moonlight Elk, Christie Green shares her journey - spiritual, emotional, and female positive - toward self-sufficiency via hunting. Raw, powerful, and filled with love of the animal world. This book is recommended for readers of Cheryl Strayed.
Christie Green learned to hunt in order to complement the food she grew in her New Mexico garden. As an act of practical agency this fulfilled her needs, yet a restlessness stirred within. A woman longing for a life defined by something deeper than weekly schedules, work roles, and cultural norms, Christie Green learned to hunt elk, turkey, deer, and other animals throughout her home state of New Mexico.
Layer by layer, hunt by hunt, Green peels away societal skins that adhered to a prescribed grid, a manufactured tick of time, a picture of perfection. Tracking and tracing, moving in darkness, watching, smelling, listening, and following the animals, Green sheds the burdens of her domestic self and instead witnesses the animals defying reason as they walk her into their world, ambling her along, straddling night and day, waking and sleeping. Their ways of moving and sensing become her model. In the process, Green eclipses western society’s definitions of her as a woman, mother, lover, and business owner in a male-dominated industry and ultimately finds independence, courage, and a profound connection to the animals and the places they call home.
What she sought from these animals was food. What she found was freedom.
Christie Green harvests food for herself and her daughter and hunts solo in the eight eco-regions of New Mexico, as well as multiple other states.
Praise for Moonlight Elk:
“Moonlight Elk tracks the electric presence of a hunter who ‘burn(s) for belonging’ in the land and among the animals. . . This book will re-map your heart.”—Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors
“Moonlight Elk is courageous, pro-woman prose that unfolds in the crucible of the natural world.”—Holly Morris, director of Exposure and author of Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World
“Christie Green invites readers on a sacred, surprising, and sometimes brutal journey as she explores the deepest of possible connections between herself and the elk, deer, turkey, and quail that she hunts and kills to fill her freezer and feed her family. As she gains confidence to hunt alone as a woman, Green closely tracks the boundary between human and animal, moving ever closer to a place of elemental exchange in the end she discovers that there is no other.” —Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life
“Moonlight Elk is a brave unveiling that takes us to the intersection of what we know and what we sense in a given place with lyrical curiosity, offering an unexpected call to explore beneath the surface of a map or a hunt and expose a life of sensuous meaning. A daring and revealing book.” —Christine Cunningham, coauthor of The Land We Share: A Love Affair Told in Hunting Stories
“Moonlight Elk is a riveting meditation on sustenance and love—in food, in nature, in family. Christie Green’s personal journey is woven with natural history and questions about what it means to be a human animal in the more-than-human world. This book is beautiful, deeply felt, and wise.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
About the Author:
Christie Green is the author of MOONIGHT ELK: One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom published by The University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) in 2025. Moonlight Elk was recently recognized as a Finalist in the New Mexico Book Awards in the Nature and Environment category. Her forthcoming book, SALMON DREAMING: Coming Home to Alaska will be released by UNMP in 2026 and her third book, THE NEW MERIDIAN: Undamming the West will be released by UNMP in 2028.
In addition to her writing, Christie Green is also a clothing designer. She launched the christie nell collection of fabrics and garments, inspired by the animals she hunts and their habitats. These two garments (pictured below) from Christie’s clothing collection are directly derived from Moonlight Elk, the elk in the story, The Last Time. This is her hide that Christie photographed and her heart, both made into fabrics and custom tailored dresses.
Her collection, christie nell, celebrates the scaled, feathered and hoofed, the animals she has tracked and traced along ridges, through deep canyons, across valley expanses and along watershed tributaries. This clothing honors the wildlife whose bodies she has taken into her own as nourishment, sustenance. The mission of christie nell is to inspire reverence for and stewardship of the Earth.
Christie Green is also a landscape architect. With a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of New Mexico, Christie founded radicle, a design-build firm that combines landscape, art, ecology, and activism.
Christie Green resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Kenai, Alaska.
Readers can connect with her on Instagram.
To learn more, visit ChristieGreen.net