DOUBLE DWN

First kill of deer season times two. And the usual magical implements weren't even utilized. No stop at the Flying J for a honeybun and hot brown water sold as "coffee." No talk of the wind speed or moon phase or what should or should not happen that morning in the span of two hours. No hopeful incantation: They will be moving; we're gonna get into some deer; if the camera shots hold true.... We went through the gates and rumbled over hills of freshly mowed clover and geared up, pulled hats down over ears, hoods over heads, sprayed scent-off on clothes and boot bottoms and watched our breath ghost about ink black air, the moon a glowing bow of bone.

Hike to "Zero Stand" is a wake up. It's down and up hills, through creeks and wetland, and up a ridge that sticks a thumb in Newton's eye. Pluses are many. It looks down upon creeks and wetland. It lords over buckbrush and trails worn into mossy runs from frolicking deer. It gives a shooter a near 180 degree shot and makes a morning easy, even if you're sweating your fat ass off by the time you've climbed the rungs and set in its seat. 30.06 loaded. Safety on. Sit and wait and watch the black turn to amorphous shapes and then focus sharply into trees and brush and the heavy blackblue backlit into white and pink and red and then first light. Squirrels hopping through leaves. Geese honking far off. We hear the sounds of firstlight rifle crack. But it sounds like cannonfire from our cold hard distance.

They are moving. We will get into some deer. The camera shots held true. Three does come to my left. Safety off. Find them in the scope. Watch them smelling, stomping out caution call. Still. Stoic. Then moving again. Lose first two in brush, but the third stops, showing broadside, eating acorns. Crosshairs on her shoulder and trigger squeeze. She's up in air, flipped, a slingshot of gray and white into the wood, blood about unreal and red and purple, like stageblood poorly fixed and unstable. She staggers and drops 30 yards off. I'm pelted in the dome with acorns for the kill. Squirrels savage the boughs above me. Handwarmers have died and it's cold as it can be, sitting static, breathing, looking.

Buddy to my right in a climber stand and I talk for a minute. Think about getting down and call it a day. There's a doe, he says, pointing, laughing. She's coming right at you. She didn't hear us talking? I ask. Guess not, he says. Take her if you want to. Pick her up in the scope. She moves broadside into the rifle fire. No leaping or flipping or running off to bleed out. She falls there in the thicket, gone. Half hour later I'm holding her long purple backstrap in my sticky bloodstained palm, warm as my son's forehead when he's running a temperature.