For months he watched the deer as he drove by. They were up on a hillside he could see on his way home from work. The deer were never in the field in the morning, and he knew this because he scanned the field every morning on his ride to work. Afternoons, late afternoons, that was the thing. They came out from a secret field north of the fence line and they scattered across the lush grass, green as any color green could ever be, the deer enticing in their deliberate predictability.

He worked at West Point, and he had lots of experience, and he went on bear hunting trips to Maine and elk was like a verb, but the deer were standing right there!

Thousands of people saw this field as they drove the state highway and everyone knew about the deer and the clean expanse of the slightly sloping field, sloping westward to catch that late afternoon sunlight, which was often rosy, or orange, or yellow on the green blending it to a blue grass. Numerous hunters stopped to ask the landowner if they could hunt there, and his answer was always no. The owner, on one level, liked the deer, especially when young, but on another level, a practical one, he disliked them with a passion most people reserve for rats. The deer hoof-crushed his pumpkins and ate their tender insides, learned to eat tomato plants and potatoes, ate his rye and trampled his garlic rows. The landowner had put up a fence around the produce, but the rest of the lovely hayfield was left for the deer. The herd was sometimes 25, sometimes four or five, and the herd often joined up with a second family coming from the south, crossing the state road and making a trail across the Methodist’s land to get to the open field on the hill. This hillside was open and mown and viewed by thousands; some stopped to photograph the round hay bales in the sun, or the grey clouds, or watch the eagle hunting or sitting in the dead ash near the peak of the hill.

After this field it was all village and redlights and traffic for 90 miles until the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. It was the last countryside people would see and they looked at it with nostalgia, or love, and they tried to count the deer as they drove and almost everyone wanted it to stay the same, not to change, to be a field.

In the end, to help pay the taxes, the farmer, the owner, broke down and rented the hunting rights to who, in his Yankee frugality, he thought might be the highest bidder and the safest hunter, competent enough to hunt without damaging the field, other hunters, the public, or himself. He rented it to the West Point guy.

The bow hunter put up deer stands in the late summer, and he had a popup camo tent he could move around the field to any point he thought might deliver the best results. For weeks the hunter watched the deer from across the state highway and saw how the herd moved, minute by minute, across the field in the sun, or the clouds, and he judged where they might be when, like a family of goats on their daily trek. Rainy days, stormy days, the bevy kept bedded down and they did not like especially windy days either and often were missing in action when windy.

The first day of a special early season “management hunt”, an early season for does only, sanctioned by the state to reduce a burgeoning deer population well out of control of any big game specialist, the hunter was in his pop-up tent. He was early and had a jug of water and the tent had a southern view of the field, a “cross” view as he looked across the hillside and the rangale would need to graze up the hillside to pass close enough for him to get a shot. He sat quietly, and after receiving a couple texts, turned off his phone.

The buck surprised him because it was coming down the hill, not up, and once he realized it was there and well within his range, he sat as still as he could in his agitation that it was a buck and not included in the early season. Twenty yards. It would be an easy shot. He watched the buck eating grass and soon they both became aware of a second buck across the field near the far hedgerow, the southern side, coming from the Methodist’s land.

Each buck grazed with its head down, but their bodies were somehow drawn directly to the others, and they pretended the other was not there until they were so close they could not ignore their intertwined existence, and they both raised their heads and shook their racks and hit the ground with their front hooves. The hunter saw the sun shining on the polished antlers. It was war. But too early, it’s not even rutting season, he thought.