hunting buck

  He stopped and watched a rabbit move past him and freeze into what would have been an easy shot and a quick kill. Good meat, but he felt confident about the clearing and didn’t want to take a chance. He had become extremely good with the bow, exceptional. Twice now he had taken grouse on the wing, an almost impossible shot. He knew he was good.
  He was good with a bow because his eyes were quick and he saw “inside” things, where the arrow had to go, and “saw” the arrow almost as a line of light to the place where it should hit. Not a target, not for fun. As an extension of his mind, in an almost Zen state, but for one thing and one thing only.
  To hunt.
  To see where the arrow would have to go to make food, to make meat, to make, oddly, life out of death. The Cree family had thought him strange at first because he still used a bow while they had 30–30 rifles. But then they had seen him shoot and seen how much a part of the kill he became, with the bow and arrows he had made for himself, not with these modern laminates and truly straight shafts, and they had thought him like the Old Ones, the ones who knew the Old Ways, and had respected him for it.
  He stopped well short of the clearing, before he could see anything and before any deer could see or hear him.
  And this time he was rewarded.
  There were four deer in the clearing. Carefully, he inch-step by inch-step moved to the edge of the thick willows and parted the leaves with the point on his arrow, nocked in the bowstring, ready.
  Two doe, two bucks, one old with a large rack in thick velvet, the other a young spike buck with small single antlers in even thicker velvet.
  The old buck would be too tough and fat. Doe had the best meat, but he hated to shoot them because there was a slight chance they might be pregnant.
  So it was the young buck.
  The deer did not know he was there and he waited patiently, controlling his breath, waiting, waiting.
  Twenty yards to the young buck, maybe less. Fifteen. A bird flew from the other side of the clearing and the deer were startled by the sudden flight but it was merely birds squabbling and they did not run.
  The buck took a step, paused, stood not fifteen yards now from where Brian hid in the willows, then turned its head away.
  Perfect.
  Brian drew the broadhead back until it nearly touched the bow, sliding the wooden shaft on his finger so it wouldn’t make a noise rubbing on the arrow rest on the bow, aimed just above the shoulder blade knowing the arrow would drop a bit in flight, held for an instant to be sure. .
  Then released.
  The arrow flew clean, left the willows without touching anything and seemed to disappear against and then into the buck.
  The young buck jumped, seemed to arch in the middle, took three faltering steps and lay down on its side.
  Brian waited. The other deer still had not run, were merely watching the small buck as if curious, and Brian stood that way, quietly letting the arrow do its work for a few seconds, and then the buck laid its head over, facing east, as so many animals did when they died, and the light went out of his eyes and he ceased to be a deer and became meat, food.
  Thank you, Brian thought, thank you again, and still he stood and still the other deer did not run although the bigger buck came over and smelled the young one as it lay dead.
  Then Brian stepped out into the clearing and the whole world blew up. The deer exploded in huge bounds that had them out of the clearing and gone in fractions of a second. Brian moved to the small buck.
  He poked it with his bow to make sure it was truly dead. The arrow had gone clean through and lay in the grass on the other side ten or twelve feet away. Brian picked it up and used his fingers to wipe the blood off and squeegee the feathers so they could dry straight.