The nucleon axial charge is calculated as a function of the pion mass in full QCD. Using domain wall valence quarks and improved staggered sea quarks, we present the first calculation with pion masses as light as 354 MeV and volumes as large as (3.5
fm)^3. We show that finite volume effects are small for our volumes and that a constrained fit based on finite volume chiral perturbation theory agrees with experiment within 7% statistical errors.
