The alarm went off at four thirty and I lay there doing the math I have done a thousand mornings. Thirty minutes to the gate if I hit the road by five. A forty minute walk in the dark to the stand. Three hours of sitting before the sun even thinks about warming anything. Then the walk back, then the drive home, then I get to be tired for the rest of a Saturday I was supposed to enjoy. I did the math and I hit snooze and I rolled back over, and the deer I had been telling myself I was hunting stayed exactly where deer stay when nobody shows up.
That was new. For years I would have been in the truck before the coffee finished, because that was who I was. A hunter. I could not say when it stopped being true, only that somewhere along the way the thing I loved got turned into a thing I owed.
The Alarm That Started Losing
Nobody wakes up and decides to fall out of love with hunting. It happens the same way a marriage quietly goes cold, in a hundred small surrenders you do not even notice you are making. The morning I stopped setting the alarm for opener was not dramatic. I just did not do it. Then I did not do it the next weekend either, and I had a reason every time, and every reason was real and every reason was also a small lie I told myself so I would not have to sit alone in a tree for something that had started to feel like another shift at a job I was not getting paid for.
What shook me was not the sitting. What shook me was realizing I had begun to describe my own pastime the way a man describes overtime. The drive was a commute. The stand was a desk. The whole beautiful mess of it had been reduced to a schedule I resented, and I had done the reducing myself with my own two hands and my own endless need to make the thing produce.
Treating a Gift Like a Quota
Here is the part I am ashamed of, the part that makes this whole story more confession than advice. I did not lose the love because the woods changed. The woods did not do anything. The woods were right where I left them, the same timber, the same creek, the same old buck bedding in the same drainage. I lost the love because I made hunting about the antlers instead of the morning, and a man who hunts for antlers is a man who is never allowed to come home empty handed without feeling like he failed a test.
So every sit became a performance. I had to see deer. I had to see a good deer. I had to get the shot, make the shot, recover, drag, dress, post the picture. If any link in that chain broke I had wasted a Saturday, and a man who is scared of wasting a Saturday cannot sit still long enough to let a Saturday give him anything. I would climb down early and move spots because this spot was not producing, and moving spots is what a man does when he is hunting his own anxiety instead of the animal. The deer was never the problem. I was the problem, and I was coming to every morning already tired of the man I had turned into.
The Old Guy Who Said It Out Loud
There is an old man at the gas station on the county road who has watched me fill the truck for fifteen years. He never says much, just nods and tells me good luck and pretends not to notice when I come back through with a full tag or an empty seat. This past October I stopped for fuel on a morning I had already decided was the last one, and he leaned on the pump and asked me how the season was treating me.
I said something clever about how it was turning into a damn job, expecting a chuckle, and instead he looked at me the way you look at a man who just handed you a problem and called it a joke. Then he said the thing I have not been able to get out of my head since. He said a job pays you for the days you do not want to be there. A hunt is the opposite of that, and once you make it a job you have already quit, you just forgot to turn in the badge.
I laughed because that is what you do when a man hands you a truth you were not ready to hold. But I did not forget it. I have not forgotten it once.
The Small Ugly Animal That Gave It Back
What brought me back was not a trophy. It was rabbits, of all things, the way the one comment under a stranger’s tired post said it happened for him too. I read a man online writing about how he hated the standing still and the boredom, how he took up rabbit hunting and it saved him, and something in my chest unclenched when I read it. The cure, he said, was to go be active instead of passive, to walk instead of sit, to chase something small and stupid and delicious instead of something big and impressive.
So one morning in late fall I left the bow in the truck and I followed an old beagle line through a briar patch with a worn little twenty gauge, and I walked and I walked and when the first rabbit jumped I missed it completely and I laughed out loud, actually laughed, alone in a field, for the first time in a season. There is no pressure on a rabbit. Nobody posts a rabbit and calls it a personal best. You just walk and the dog works and your legs get you where you need to go and at the end of the day if you have one or two in the bag you fry them in gravy and they taste like the back forty used to taste before I ruined it with expectations.
That was the whole trick. I had to go be bad at something small to remember how to be good at something big.
What the Drive Costs When You Are Honest
So I got honest with myself, and here is what honest costs. The drive is not the problem. The sitting is not the problem. The cold is not the problem. The problem was that I had started measuring the morning by what came home in the truck instead of what the morning gave me just by showing up. A man can lose a whole life that way, trading every quiet gift for a scoreboard, and calling the trade a bad job when really it was just a bad way to show up.
I still miss mornings. I still get skunked plenty. But I stopped making the tag the whole point of the alarm, and that one change has undone a hundred small surrenders. Now I drive to the gate with an empty seat and I am fine with it, because the drive itself is why I went. The woods were never withholding. I was just standing in them with my arms crossed, waiting to be paid.
The Difference Between a Quota and a Morning
If some tired stranger is reading this the way I read that other tired stranger, let me say the thing out loud since nobody said it plain to me in time. You are not losing your love of hunting. You are losing your love of a schedule that looks like hunting and smells like a spreadsheet. The fix is not to force yourself harder into it. The fix is to go do it wrong on purpose for a while, walk when you would sit, chase something small, bring a kid or a dog or a friend who does not care about antlers, and let the morning be the reason.
Hunting is not a requirement. Nobody is keeping score except the man in the tree, and that man can be fired. I fired him this year, the version of me who resented the drive and resented the cold and resented his own hobby for not being a paycheck. In his place I got back the guy who missed a rabbit and laughed about it. That guy is still around. He was just waiting for me to stop treating a gift like an invoice.