The Creaky Chair

I didn’t expect to end the season this way.

I assumed I would take up a familiar stand on a familiar property at a familiar area. Instead, I was in a shooting house in an area I’d never hunted, looking over a thicket and field with which I wasn’t familiar and waiting for darkness. An hour earlier, my nephew Porter had assured me this was a surefire place to see deer and, hopefully, fill one of my remaining antlerless deer tags. With venison already in the freezer and the pressure of the season winding down, the idea sounded acceptable to me. Porter and I hadn’t hunted deer as much together this year as during the