Let me describe a conversation that took place in a hospital room at Barnes-Jewish Hospital during the holidays. The patient was a man in his early 80s. The nurse was a woman in her late 20s. One told the other about growing up in a log cabin with no electricity or running water, about attending a rural school so small that each grade consisted of just a couple of kids, about hunting for food.
If you can visualize that scene in the hospital room, you might have the roles reversed. The young nurse was the speaker. The patient, a pal of mine, was once the city editor of this newspaper. He has always had an ear for a story. You ought to talk to my nurse, he told me.
Zahn Thompson was born and grew up in Alaska. She is a traveling nurse and currently lives in a large apartment complex in St. Peters. The most striking aspect of her apartment is the bearskin on the wall. There is a single bullet hole in the bearskin. Often, it takes more than one shot to down a bear.
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There is, I think, a cultural divide between people who kill their meat and those of us who buy it at the grocery store. The hunters have a relationship with their prey than non-hunters can’t share.
Zahn said the most difficult part of a bear hunt is keeping eyes on the bear long enough to know that the target is not a female with cubs. It is illegal, at least in Alaska, to shoot a female bear with cubs, but listening to Thompson, I had the sense that her concerns had as much to do with morality as with legality. You don’t leave cubs without their mother.
In fact, on this particular hunt, Zahn and her father were ferried into a remote lake on a float plane. They then hiked up a mountain. It does not sound like a place where you might run into a game warden.
Still, she saw the bear and she watched it. And she watched it. Only when she was satisfied there were no cubs in the area did she shoot.
Zahn’s story really begins in the small Missouri town of Canton, 30 miles upriver from Hannibal. Lynn Thompson and Stacey Zahn were high school sweethearts. His dad had a farm. Her dad owned the local sawmill.
Lynn went to Northeast Missouri State University — now Truman State — to study engineering. Stacey stayed in Canton.
During one college summer, Lynn went to Alaska to work at Denali National Park. He was smitten with Alaska. He graduated from college and married Stacey. They moved to Alaska where Lynn worked as an engineer for a mining company. They built a cabin near Denali National Park. The cabin had a wood stove. Also propane lanterns. But no water, no electricity.
They had three daughters while they lived in that log cabin. Zahn, the middle child, remembers those days as magical. The kids took a school bus 30 miles to the small town of Healy. The school had running water, bathrooms. The family went hunting together. They killed and ate all sorts of game, but the best, said Zahn, was moose. Moose tacos, moose roast, moose ribs.
Early fall was moose season, and sometimes the family would be gone for a week. How old was Zahn when she started going on the moose hunts? Since I can remember, she said. She loved those hunts. I never missed moose camp, she said.
Her parents also trapped. Her mom sewed beaver hats and gloves.
When Zahn was in sixth grade, the family moved to Fairbanks, which represented civilization, but was still Alaska. Zahn had friends who competed in the Iditarod dog-sled race. Lynn eventually left the mining company and worked as a hunting guide.
In Fairbanks, Zahn took up hockey. They played on frozen ponds. If they played at night, they could sometimes hear the distant howling of wolves. She played high school hockey and received a scholarship to play hockey at University of Minnesota Duluth. She was a winger in high school, and she played defense in college.
She earned a nursing degree at Duluth.
Her parents and sisters moved back to Missouri, so Zahn found a nursing job in Springfield. COVID brought a slew of opportunities for nurses. That’s when Zahn became a traveling nurse. She worked in Colorado, Idaho, Washington, Arizona and North Carolina before coming here a year and a half ago. She is now studying to be a nurse practitioner.
The weather is a bit tame for her. I visited her shortly before Christmas. Snow was not in the forecast. She was disappointed about that and said her two dogs — husky-pomeranian mixes — could use some cold weather, too. I asked if she missed Alaska.
“I’d move back in a heartbeat,” she said, “but I’d have a hard time convincing the family.”
Her folks are in Canton and her sisters are in Kansas City. One of her sisters just had a child.
“I can’t imagine not being around my family,” Zahn said.
Even if it means going without moose meat and the howling of wolves and a certain sense of adventure. On the other hand, her stories can transport a patient to a place far from a hospital room. That is a gift.
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