A Day in Parts

  A buck fawn and the bent horn buck across the creek.

  Sick of hunting.  Hard to believe but there it is.  Miserable with branch-butt, skulking around in the half-light.  Sore feet from foot-walking around the watershed in soft rubber boots.  Sitting like a snag in the biting wind.  Rattling.  Taking a day off.

Notes:

  Dead rabbit in the front wall of the brush blind.  WTF?

  Sneed watches a prancing doe, a micro-buck and a distressed fawn parading around the pasture.  I'm across the way in the big pine watching the woods and miss it.  They cross behind me around an oak still holding its leaves.

  Opossum, probably female eating...something.  Taste-y along the woodline.  Just munching and munching while appearing deshabille from life.  Ears tattered, hair tufted.  She switches sides and shows bloody scratches and bites around her eye on the left.  Unlike Rachel I'm a possum fan.  Why hasn't she found the rabbit?  What nearly got her?

  Hawks screaming overhead.  They are hunting, but why all the screaming?

  I get back to the bluff cam and it blinks a message:  Hibernating.  Hibernating?  What the hell?  Are we bears now?  There's no hibernating!  No photos.

  Scrapes unworked since the rain.  Why?

  Three raccoons in the top of a 100+ foot pine.  I'm just looking up for hawk nests when I spot them.  No way up.  No way down.  They are curled up sleeping as the treetop rocks in the wind.  They must be better climbers than I think.  Three of them.  Woods full of hollow logs, slanty trees.  If you slip at 70 feet...

  Speaking of climbers we see a tail-less squirrel crossing the street in town.  Looks like a rabbit.  Throws the whole gestalt.  Very strange looking.

  Across the creek to pull the card for the first time since the big Monday rain.  The trail is twiggy and submerged in leaves.  Deertracks chewed up the creek crossing.  I count.  Four going one way and one coming back.

  Deer track in town on the art museum site property.  In town.  WAY in town.  Fresh.

  No deer as the wind and the light fade Saturday night but close off the bluff behind me in the trees a deer catches my scent and snorts.  And snorts and snorts.  And snorts.  Won't give it up.  Directly downwind.  Sounds close enough to shoot at the sound.  I put a pump of doe pee in the wind and slip off into the gloaming.