Reduced to possession

Life and death and October

Nothing has happened for hours.

And now everything is happening all at once.

It’s always this way, and I am always surprised.

I do not see them, but sense them somehow, and they’re already close. Maybe it’s that sweet cervid musk wafting up from the creek bottom, rising on the late-morning thermals as golden beams probe through the branches.

I sniff long and deep.

Maybe.

Maybe their odor is an ingrained recognition I can’t always consciously discern, the scent of prey coded in my genes eons ago telling me to get ready.

Maybe it’s the cadence of little cloven hooves—black and dainty, barely heard, crunching with a delicacy so unlike any other footfalls in the forest that I know it must be deer.

My perch is high in a pine tree where I stand peering through needled boughs, trying to laser my vision into the understory like some outsized raptor. I still can’t see them, but I know they are almost within range.

I clip the release to the string undetected. The foliage and contrast are my friends, too.

There.

There they are—graceful forms moving from deep shade to diffused light and back again, a tactic coded into their genes eons ago.

The visuals for me are dreamlike, ethereal, a shifting of gossamer browns and grays alternately swallowed in shadow and reemerging in bits and pieces. I can’t see a whole deer. It’s a glistening eye caught in a ray here. The gentle twitch of a tail there. The white hollow of a swiveling ear. The broken horizontal edges of back and belly in sharp perpendicular contradiction to vertical tree trunks.

The forms meander, plucking acorns from the forest floor where they find them. I hear the nuts popping and crunching in their molars. I watch as they swallow. They take a few steps, and then nose to the ground again sniffing for the fatty mast that will plump them before the cold winds of winter reach these hills.

They feed and move as a unit, seemingly on a mission, though in no hurry to cross this subtle low spot between ridges. In a few seconds, the first three are under me, maybe five steps from the base of the tree. I reach full draw as the largest hints at turning just enough for a clear angle into both of her lungs.

But she doesn’t turn. Instead, she continues on her course to my tree. And that puts me in a pickle. The bow relaxes.

I don’t want to shoot her straight down because the odds of a single-lung hit are high. That makes the odds of finding her body low. So I let her pass directly underneath and unaware of my intentions or that I’m even there.

I look a few steps ahead on her path, notice a small window but one that will open then close quickly. So I reposition a bit (still undetected) and bring the glowing green pin that will direct my arrow into this sliver of space between thin limbs. The shot will still be not even 10 yards from my tree.

She steps into frame just as I’d hoped. Decades of muscle memory come into play as the bow’s wheels and limbs store lethal energy. I imagine her organs under the fur, muscle, and bone. I settle the pin, envisioning the arrow’s path through the middle of one lung, the top of her heart, the bottom of the other lung, before exiting her chest and burying in the thin soil. I squeeze the release.

The arrow does not go the way I envisioned. Or maybe she’s not there when it does.

I’m not sure what happened, and so many things could have. The arrow might have glanced a limb. She might have “jumped the string.” Not a conscious evasive move, whitetails (especially whitetails) often react to the sound of a bowstring released by dropping to gather their muscles before leaping. Whitetails are quick—quicker than the arrow—and sometimes what you aimed at is not there, or sometimes positioned differently, when the arrow arrives. It’s a common cause of misses and poor hits when bowhunting.

Or maybe I just whiffed. Hawks miss sometimes, too.

But I didn’t miss. Not completely.

She bounds once, twice, and then stops, head held high on red alert but unsure as to why. A straight, bright crimson line creases her off shoulder down to her elbow—on the other side of where I was aiming. I’ll never know exactly how it happened, but it did. Looks like a light flesh wound.

She finally bolts, taking a few others with her. I wallow in my frustration, cursing my ineptitude (whether it’s truly to blame or not) that led to not only wounding a deer but also missing out on this precious opportunity for meat.

I hear more hoof steps heading my way.

Another queen approaches, but with much more hesitancy. Aware that something is not quite right about this particular patch of woods, she gingerly creeps forward to investigate. She turns just so and stops within spitting distance.

This time there’s no planning, no strategy, no thought at all on my part. I don’t remember grabbing another arrow from the quiver. I don’t remember drawing the bow. But she’s running away, and already I see blood on the fallen leaves. Already I hear her gurgled breaths. Already I know she’s dead.

I gather my pack, my emotions, myself, before climbing down and investigating the first shot. This arrow is clean. Just a thin scarlet smear on one white vane tells me it never penetrated her body cavity. I walk to where she last stood. No blood here. No blood on the way here. I sweep the area out to maybe forty yards. Nothing. I doubt she’ll ever come this way again, though.

The second arrow tells a different story.

She fell just out of my sight, folded on the ground as if she chose this place to rest. She is mature. A humped Roman nose distinguishes her as a matriarch of the clan.

I think about how she is smaller than I thought when I saw her from the tree, how every deer that’s died at my hands always seems so. It’s not in the vulgar “ground shrinkage” way, the old joke about how buck fever always makes antlers appear bigger in the crosshairs than they are in reality.

This is a reduction not measurable in pounds or inches or my ego. Maybe it’s part of “reducing to possession,” as the hunting regulations put it. She is not the entity I shared the woods and air with only minutes ago. The glowing aura of a forest deity has faded. All that’s left is hide, hair, bones, organs, a bunch of water in various chemical compositions, and meat. Precious meat.

I touch the hoofed toes, scarred and scratched. In only a few short years of existence, she traveled and unraveled the secrets of these hills in ways I could not even if gifted another century.

Grasping those hooves, her body slides down the ridge with relative ease, over the stones and downed trees, through the stands of beautyberry. I drag her to the creek bank and open her with a sharpened blade. The autumn breezes swirl, and the saccharine scent of sycamore melds with that sweet cervid musk now amplified by visceral aromas—the heady fragrance of life and death and October.

When the work is done, I splash cool creek water into her warm inner spaces, those places only a predator would know.