The buck and I met for the final time a little after 8am, and the shot was fired among the thick, yellow gorse as we faced each other on a late spring morning. But this is not the story. The story started some hours before, as I sat in the deer hut, the door open to the departing night, listening to the owls in the distance calling hauntingly over the open Breck to a dark horizon.
This early morning followed a fitful night of sleep on a bunk; the corrugated sheets above amplified the nocturnal noises, and I had woken intermittently feeling it was time to rise, only to find the clock’s hands had remained stubbornly positioned in the early hours. I drifted back into fitful slumber to the sound of the gentle breeze swaying the pines overhead. Finally, the alarm sounded, and
