The coy deer, like a misplaced lawn ornament, stands on the trail at the top of a hill, its neck bent to graze on clover that doesn’t exist because I have obliterated anything green by walking this path every weekend. Directly above the deer, in a stand so empty for most of the year I have hardly noticed it, waits a man in camouflage, his neck-warmer covering his mouth like a thief’s. His big black bow looms out before him like some sort of insect antennae. I am startled to have come across another human being in these woods. For some reason—because I don’t want to ruin his hunt or because he looks so official—I don’t say anything, just salute. Then with a whistle, I urge on my confused dog.
In a mile, I spot a doe at the tree-line. Either the dog does not catch her scent or she’s still puzzling over the last deer, which didn’t give chase when she sniffed its knee. This deer turns, her neck bent like a swan’s, and watches us saunter by. A half mile more and we both hear something in the corn, a pounding of hooves on the packed mud. A buck runs out perpendicular to the rows, crosses the trail in front of us and heads for an adjacent field. The dog follows, yelping like a coyote, and is gone for a while. In another quarter mile I see four does. Then six turkeys. An owl. At the end of the trail I turn to begin the walk back. The coy deer hasn’t moved; neither has the hunter.
“See anything?” I ask, the one phrase I know to say to these strange men I encounter during certain seasons in the forest. He lowers the neck warmer. He is much younger than I thought.
“Not really,” he confides.
I tell him about the buck.
“Was it a big one?” He asks.
I want to say yes, but I don’t know the right lingo, can’t zero in on points or estimate pounds.
“I couldn’t really tell,” I say. He nods. I like him much better after we talk.
It is getting dark when I near the trailhead. But light from the open road allows me to notice one last thing: something on the forest floor that doesn’t seem to belong, something I must have stepped right over when I began my walk. Deciduous, like the leaves I find them in, antler sheds--white and rodent-gnawed—reveal themselves to me every other year or so, a little late-winter gift. But this is far too early to be a shed.
When I pick the antler up, I find it’s missing the cauliflower-like burr at the end, the part that disjoins from the pedicel on the deer’s head when the antler is naturally dropped. Instead, this antler is fractured. The inside glistens like quartz, smoky in one part, rose in another. I fantasize that these colors are from blood vessels that recently fed the growing bone. It’s tough to believe this solid thing grew, that less than a year ago it didn’t exist. I try to imagine the rut that broke it off: a smart, firm hit. I exhale, and a few short, bristled hairs on the antler’s surface embark into the air and disappear—like the deer from the hunter for the next ten days, and the hunter from the woods for the rest of the year.
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