The First Empty October
I did not know a man could go two years without seeing a shooter and still call himself a hunter. I went into that first empty October the way a person walks into a casino, fully convinced the odds owed me something. I had a new climber stand, a rangefinder that I cleaned with my shirt every morning like it was a pair of glasses, and a phone full of trail camera pictures that I studied the way other men study the newspaper. Every one of those pictures was taken at night. I told myself that was fine. Bucks move at night, everybody knows that, dawn is just night that ran late.
The season ended and I had not even pulled my bow back on a legal deer. I had seen exactly one buck in shooting light, and he appeared behind a dead walnut at first light for about two seconds, which is the amount of time it takes a man to remember he left his release in the truck. I wrote that season off as weather. The acorns were weird. The neighbors logged. The moon was wrong. I had a reason for everything, because a reason is the cheapest thing a hunter can afford, and I bought them in bulk.
Confidence Is a Bad Teacher
The second year I got smarter. I hung three stands. I planted a food plot that the deer ignored in favor of a fence line that belonged to a man I had never met. I bought a scent-control suit that made me smell like I had been born in a department store, and I thought about wind direction the way a meteorologist thinks about pressure systems, which is to say constantly and with confidence and a complete willingness to be wrong.
The deer were there. I knew they were there because my cameras were full of them, standing on the exact spots I had abandoned two hours before dark. A shooter came and went like a rumor. I started to believe the deer were reading my schedule, which is insane, and then I started to believe the deer were punishing me for something, which is a short walk from superstitious and I was already wearing the poncho.
Somewhere in that second November I did the thing a proud man does before he does the thing a smart man does. I blamed everything that was not me. I blamed the pressure, the acorns again, the neighbors, the moon again, the bow, the broadheads, the stand placement, the barometric pressure, and once, quietly, under my breath, the deer themselves for not cooperating with a man who had done everything right on paper.
The Squirrel That Would Not Shut Up
The morning that broke the drought had nothing to do with hunting. I was sitting in my climber on a Friday, three hours in, cold and bored and full of the particular bitterness that only a man two years dry can generate. I had not seen a deer in eleven days. I was so far inside my own head that I was mentally writing the Facebook post I would never post, the one where I explain to a hundred strangers that the season just was not what it used to be.
A squirrel climbed the tree next to me and started yelling at me, because that is what squirrels do to a man who has not earned the woods. It went on for a minute, then two, then five. I cursed at it under my breath. Then I watched it. Then something in me, thoroughly starved for any living thing that was not a whitetail, simply watched it move.
It was not doing anything special. It was eating an acorn, then it ran twenty feet, then it stopped dead and froze for four solid seconds, scanning, then it ate another acorn and ran again. Freeze, scan, move. Freeze, scan, move. I cannot tell you why I noticed it that day and not the forty thousand squirrels that had yelled at me before. Maybe boredom finally beat out the prayer. But I sat there and watched that squirrel work a hundred yards of ground, and near the end it sat up, looked directly at something I could not see through the brush, and barked in that low, urgent, you-are-not-supposed-to-be-here way.
Three Feet to the Left
I looked where the squirrel was looking. Nothing. I held still and kept looking, the way you only do when you are not thinking about your phone or your stand or the post you will never make. A minute passed. Two. And then a doe stepped out of the seam in the brush I had been staring at for two years without ever once actually seeing it, because I had been looking at my cameras and my wind chart and my grudge.
She fed in slowly, relaxed, the way a deer feeds when it has no idea you are alive. Behind her came another, and behind that one, at last, a buck. He was not a giant. He was a solid eight point with a short right brow tine and a body like a wood stove, and he walked into a lane I had cut the spring before and then forgotten about, because I had cut that lane for the deer I deserved, not for the one that actually lived there.
My hand found the bow. The squirrel, for the first time in an hour, shut up completely, which is the only good review a squirrel will ever give you. I came to full draw so slowly I could hear my own joints. The buck stepped behind a beech tree at twenty-two yards and I held there, through one breath and then another, while the deer that was supposed to be a rumor stood broadside and waited for me to earn it.
The Part I Had Been Doing Wrong
He came clear of the tree and I let the arrow go before I had fully decided to, which is the first honest thing I had done with a bow in two years. The arrow hit him tight behind the shoulder and he swapped ends and crashed sixty yards into a blowdown, and then the woods went so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and the squirrel started yelling at me again as if to say, finally, something worth watching.
I sat in the stand shaking for what felt like ten minutes. I had told myself for two years that I was doing everything right, and the fact is I had been doing most of it right, which was exactly the problem. I had been hunting a plan. I had been hunting the deer my cameras promised me and the season the magazine articles promised me and the version of myself that closes a tag every single fall like it is a bill at the end of the month.
The drought was never about the acorns or the moon or the neighbors. It was about me sitting in the tree like a clerk waiting for the deer to fill out a form. The deer had been teaching me the whole time and I had been too busy explaining the results to listen. A squirrel, of all the embarrassing things in the woods, finally sat me down and pointed.
I found the buck piled against a cedar, and the arrow had done its job the only way it ever does, which is after you stop telling the shot where to go. I knelt next to him and put my hand on his side, and I said the quiet thank you that I am still trying to get right. The drought was over, but that was never the point of it. The point was that I had stopped paying attention, and the woods had waited, patient as a teacher with a student who keeps turning his paper in blank and calling it a rough draft.
I do not claim some squirrel changed my life. But the next morning I went out without the phone in my pocket, and I watched the ground the way that squirrel did, freeze and scan and move, and somewhere in the middle of it I finally understood that the tag is not the test. Paying attention is the test, and I had been failing it for two years in a row.