By Dave Workman,
Contributing Editor

Her medium-brown hair is growing back now, and color has returned to a pleasant face that does not reveal the fact that in the past year, Marnie McCausland, champion female black powder shooter and successful big game hunter, has been literally to the doorstep of Hell.

"I've seen the elephant," she observes.

That's an understatement. She has seen the entire herdstampeding in her direction.
In the last year, Marnie was diagnosed with cancer. Her husband of 13 years, Sam, passed away this past winter following a valiant three-year battle against the same disease. She took an extended leave of absence from her full-time job at a Cincinnati gun range, first to care for her ailing husband and then to battle for her own survival. The couple's two pet hedgehogs also died.

"It wasn't a good winter," Marnie observes with a wry but somewhat cheerful tone that hides the full gravity of a string of bad luck by which many others would have been overwhelmed.
Born and raised in Ohio, Marnie (her real name is Marienne) began hunting with her parents as a teenager. She quickly grew to enjoy upland game hunting on a game preserve operated by her uncle.

After graduating from high school in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Marnie attended Cedarville College, majoring in speech and communications. While many young women would be turning their attention strictly to homes or careers at that age, Marnie's focus was on firearms and hunting, even while getting a college education.

"I really like firearms," she explains. "I like the tools, themselves, and the history behind the tools. I have an appreciation of the instrument."

Met In An Elevator
It was one of those "chance encounters" that usually are found only in Hollywood scripts. Marnie was working in an office building when, one morning, a co-worker invited her to go downstairs to get something to eat.

On the elevator, in the opposite corner, stood a fellow at whose waist was a handsome shotgun shell belt buckle. Marnie recalls focusing on that, while mentally noting that the man was nice looking and he had a nice smile, when she made the kind of remark only one shooter would make to another: "Hey, that's a really nice belt buckle."

Marnie remembers the moment: "He looked at me and said 'Thanks, I made it'. I remember thinking 'Whoa! That seals the deal'!"

Before long, Sam and Marnie were dating. They went together for about three years before being married in 1987. And the honeymoon was custom-made for this outdoors couple.

"We went out to Wyoming," she explains. "Sam made all the arrangements, set it up with this landowner, the whole thing. We had a tent way out in the middle of nowhere. You couldn't even see the road from where we were camped. It was out on the grasslands, southwest of Newcastle."

It would be the first of many great hunts and good times together, and Marnie puts it sincerely: "He's the only guy I could have ever married. It was 13 good, happily-married, short years."

Career Turns
An NRA-certified firearms instructor, Marnie's career has taken some interesting turns, in large part due to her fascination with guns. After graduating from college, she was first involved in broadcasting and advertising. She had never dreamed of making a career out of her affection for firearms, but then the opportunity came along to work at Target World in Cincinnati. And, she will acknowledge, it was an opportunity that let her remain in the Buckeye State.

Having developed a genuine love affair with handguns, Marnie found herself in the company of a man named Bob Petersen, who had served with the 82nd Airborne and Army Special Forces.

He worked at Target World, and taught Marnie the intricacies of the Model 1911 semi-auto pistol. Under his tutelage, she built two Government Models.

She also reloads for modern rifles, having worked up a very good load for her .30-06. On that subject, Marnie is very zealous about safety:

"If you're going to be good at reloading," she explains, "so you don't end up with a blown-up gun or bullet stuck in the barrel, you have to look at reloading as a hobby unto itself, not as a way to save money. When people are just out to save money, they can get careless."

She became interested in black powder shooting when Sam gave her a cap-and-ball revolver as a Christmas gift one year. She learned how to shoot it, and from that grew a serious interest in black powder shooting.

"I joined the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association (NMLRA)," she recalls, "and went to Friendship, Indiana."

Friendship is a small community in southern Indiana where black powder shooters from the Cincinnati area built a shooting range many years ago. It has hosted many black powder matches over the years and has become the headquarters range of the NMLRA. This site hosts a spring and fall shoot that attract muzzleloaders from all over the country.

She joined the NMLRA in order to compete in the organization's matches, and when they held their 60th anniversary shoot, Sam and Marnie were present. That's where she won a door prize that would open yet another chapter in her shooting life: A caplock Pennsylvania Hunter rifle from Thompson/Center.

"I didn't know what to do with this rifle," she recalls, but the confusion did not last long. "I had drawn an antelope tag in Wyoming. I'd shot a number of pronghorns and thought this would be a new challenge, so I started working with the rifle, got information on powder and loads, and started practicing with it."

Sure enough, that fall, Marnie stalked an antelope and anchored it with her .50-caliber front-stuffer. She sent a photo of the event to Thompson/Center with a note thanking them for the rifle, and months later, while she and Sam were attending a trade show in Columbus, Ohio, there was her photo in the new T/C product catalog.

Sam introduced himself to T/C's Jim Smith, and advised Jim that it was his wife in that catalog shot. Coincidentally, Smith was putting together the T/C "Pro Staff" program, and took the chance to meet Marnie. Shortly thereafter, she, along with shooter Chad Cleland, became the "Pro Staff."

For the past several years, she has become a fixture at the T/C exhibit at SHOT Shows and at NRA gatherings. Her image has appeared in the T/C catalog, and her marksmanship skills have placed Marnie in the spotlight. But fame has not gone to this lady's head, as she remains personable and friendly, and willing to strike up a conversation about guns, knives or hunting without the slightest hesitation.

In the ensuing years, Marnie has shot that same Pennsylvania Hunter rifle at Camp Perry black powder matches. She has won both the Women's Muzzleloader Rifle championship and the Women's Hunter Championship. In 1997, it was the Muzzleloader title she captured. The following two years, she took both titles. In 2000, she came home with the Hunter championship.

However, the glory of that string of successes would soon be devastatingly overshadowed.

Fighting For Her Life
Over three years ago, Sam was diagnosed with cancer. Marnie recalls having to devote an increasing amount of time to care for her mate, with whom she had shared so much together, starting with that honeymoon hunting trip out west.

There would be ups and downs, and in the final months, Marnie took a leave of absence from Target World that would become not just a time for her to care for her ailing husband, but to fight her own life-or-death battle.

Last August, when working at The Grand American trapshoot in Vandalia, Ohio for Hornady, Marnie began feeling bloated and uncomfortable. She eventually went to the doctor, and she cannot forget the way that series of visits unfolded.

She first was prescribed an antibiotic, and then had an ultra-sound.

"The test results said I had fibroids, and he said I needed to have a hysterectomy," she recalls. "I thought, 'Hey, wait a minute, that's for older women, not for me'."

It got worse. Immediately after being told she needed surgery, she began thinking how long it could be put off, because the fall hunting season was looming. When the doctor told her that, "Next week doesn't look too good," she was stunned.

"I thought to myself, 'Man, he really wants to get this done soon'," she explains. "I hadn't been eating, I was losing a lot of weight and that was not good for me, but I really wanted to go hunting. He told me that if I shot a deer, I was to have someone else drag it out."

Two days into that hunt, she was so weak that she had to cut it short and go home.

"I realized that I could not go down into a ravine, because I would spend half the day getting back out again," Marnie says.

The following Monday, she went in for surgery, and in the recovery room, the news was hardly what she was ready for.

"The surgeon comes in and you expect him to say everything went well, but instead, he said, 'Things didn't go as expected'," she remembers vividly. "Your brain isn't quite ready to hear that."

As it turned out, the primary surgeon discovered cancer, and called in a second surgeon to continue the operation. That surgeon came in later, and explained that she had found cancer widespread. However, that second doctor's attitude encouraged Marnie.

"She had such a gung-ho, clean-it-out, fix bayonets and charge attitude," Marnie notes. "That's what set my mind, I think, in the right frame to fight this."

And fight, she did. What followed was the unpleasantness of chemotherapy, with its physical discomfort and hair loss. But it also gave her time to approach the battle using her experience as a shooter and self-reliant outdoorswoman.

"The mental game of shooting helped me with the mental game of beating cancer," Marnie explains. "I would get a dose of chemotherapy and couldn't sleep too well the next two or three nights. I would run these little things through my head. The cancer cells are the clay pigeons flying by, and you imagine that the chemotherapy is the ammunition in your shotgun and you'd swing and just blast that cancer cell to smithereens."

But winning her own battle was offset when Sam finally lost his.

"The hardest part," Marnie says tearfully, "was losing my husband. That happened right in the middle (of my treament). He was not doing well when I was diagnosed, and I was fighting two battles: trying to get better, myself, and trying to do what you can so your husband gets better. He was slowly going downhill, and I was slowly going uphill. You just keep thinking that it's going to get better."

Finding Your Friends
From tragedy has come triumph, in finding out who her true friends are, Marnie unashamedly acknowledges the great support, both spiritual and financial, she's gotten from her family.
But she has learned that she is part of an extended family. Members of the Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church she attends in Cincinnati have also provided great support. The experience has reinforced her faith

And she also gives considerable thanks to her friends and colleagues at Thompson/Center, including Tim Pancurak in Customer Service, and Eric Brooker in Marketing and Advertising.

"They've been so good to me," she says fondly. "I was able to attend the SHOT Show, and the NRA show. They are very, very supportive. They've been terrific!

At both events, Marnie has performed superbly, without a hint of the ordeals she has faced and is now overcoming. She treats every customer as an old friend, and can swap gun talk with the best of them.

Marnie's prognosis is "thumbs up," and she is looking ahead toward a new hunting season, with great plans and promise

"I'm looking forward to shooting at Friendship and Camp Perry," she says. "I'm looking forward to hunting this fall. I'd like to hunt bear again in West Virginia. And there's an elk hunt on the horizon in Idaho.

For Marnie McCausland, self-reliance has taken on a whole new context. Now in search of a new job, one that hopefully will not take her far away from the shooting sports she dearly loves, this high-spirited Ohioan says that the key to surviving life's troubles is to never give up

"Never get your mind in the direction of defeat," she counsels. "Keep thinking as positively as you can."