hunters

This isn’t how Hollywood would’ve scripted the deer season opener: flat light with no hint of shadow. Shots don’t ring out—they merely thud.

From the east, the pop-pop-pop of a rifle being sighted in for deer season. From the west, the roar of Black Friday traffic. Hunters, all.

Overcast. Two ravens glide along the ridge, circle back and land in the treetops. A hunter in gray forest camouflage emerges from the woods.

Snow blowing sideways. A minute after I sweep it, the porch floor is white again. The blaze-orange vests of two hunters leaving the woods.

A few lost snowflakes floating this way and that. A hunter walks up the road, his safety-orange vest printed with the shapes of leaves.

Warm and overcast. It’s the first day of deer season, and the silence seems charged. The sun appears for three seconds. A blue jay calls.

A dark heap on the snow where a squirrel husked a walnut. Two gunshots in quick succession. Soon the mountain will be dotted with gut piles.

The fluting of geese from somewhere above the clouds. A bowhunter dressed in green camouflage walks out of the autumn woods.

A black walnut crosses the yard, powered by the usual gray squirrel propulsion and planting system. A close rifle shot echoes off the ridge.

After weeks of near-absence, crows call and quarrel in all directions. It must be the gut piles, venison viscera festering among the leaves.

A nuthatch scolds something at the woods’ edge. A few distant gunshots. You’d never know the hollow is full of hunters sitting in trees.

The clouds part just above the horizon, where a weak sun glimmers like a bonfire among the skeletal trees. Distant shots ring out.

The boom of a rifle. A small hawk glides through the trees, lands between me and the faint yellow blotch of sun and waggles its tail.

Creak and rattle from the woods. A distant gunshot. Overhead, the shapely cumulus could almost be a summer sky, if it didn’t move so fast.