5/10/2023 0 Comments Day one outdoorsThe shapes were about the right size to be deer. In time, half a dozen dark shapes materialized over 200 yards away, in the gray morning mist, where I knew the meadow abruptly ends and yields to spent brown goldenrod and standing yellow hay.īut it was still too dark to see any of that. The clover changed slowly from black to green. Gradually on this day, it revealed the margins of the meadow carved out of the north field, the hard, straight edges delineated by a plow. It is only the hunter who must know what he is doing, and why.ĭeveloping light is almost musical in its profundity, and it has startling power. Some people can't understand why we would want to do that, but that's all right. And on this opening day, we hoped to kill a few deer off his land. He spends a lot of time clearing brush, planting crops and building tree stands. He works hard at making the wild land a richer, friendlier place for a deer herd. Now the north field, along with the rest of the remote 400-acre parcel, belonged to Steve. It was just there that I shot my best buck ever. And off to my right, the slender trunks of the poplars became individuated in the grayness. I strained my eyes, trying to identify the stone wall where I sat late one afternoon years ago, in the midst of a raging snow squall, laughing out loud at how amazing it was, just being there. And with any luck, deer are part of the tableau. But inevitably, the inchoate forms multiply, and a landscape emerges from the dark. The shapes are much more like the patches and blotches children playfully make themselves see by squeezing their eyes shut. And I knew that some time soon, in 2 minutes or 4 or 8 or 10, I would begin to discern shapes.Īt first, it seems impossible that those shapes represent concrete objects, much less the corporeal reality of living things as beautiful as whitetail deer. I sat in the sturdy tree stand built on the edge of the north field on Steve Renehan's mountaintop property high above the Delaware River, watching the darkness. It seemed that dawn finally decided to take a day off, but that's how a hunter always feels in the early-morning hours of opening day of deer season.
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