He tells me to go to where the trail forks, to set up there in the corner. From that spot, he says, I will be able to see down both lanes: the right running to an old food plot, the left dead-ending in bedding. The deer, he says, are likely to come from anywhere. ¶ So midafternoon I slip in a good two hours before the evening movement. I find the place he’s described and tuck in to a thicket of stickseed and green briar where I’ll be concealed in a chair on the ground. I can see down the right lane to where the trail swells into a fallow opening. But down the left side, I can see only thirty yards to a bend, and past that is where I convince myself the deer will be. ¶ The problem is, I don’t know the first thing about white-tailed deer. I’ve never killed one. I’ve never seen one in the woods while hunting them. I’ve come from small-game stock, from houndmen with kennels of rabbit-crazed beagles, old men who kept squirrel dogs and Savage 24s. For the most part, I was raised by fishermen. No one hunted deer except a great-uncle who lived on the opposite
