I walk in from different point from road. I cross a draw dividing ride and set up along a trail that runs with curve and lie of the other side in parallel with elevation.
I sit beside a tree that looks familiar—and there’s reason that it does. Set up, I turn around, and there is the stand Owen hunted from just two days before!
Oh well, it’s still an adventure—even when we find ourselves, by chance, returned to familiar place. There are many ways to the same destination, and maybe this is where I’m meant to be: beside an old cherry oak with wide spreading top amongst hickories that reach more straight.
I kicked up three deer walking in. Maybe the hunt is blown already; but I don’t really care. It’s nice to be out—to sit with the silence and thoughts in my head (though writing in this form, I am not entirely divorced and stilled from diversions and distractions; but isn’t creating better than scroll and consumption?).
I listen to the sounds of different steps: staccato scratch and jump of squirrels through leaves, creak and soft percussion-twang above when they move in the limbs. The deer are mostly silent, a whisper you think you hear—then decide you don’t—and from nowhere they seem to show.
Human sounds are different: steady and strong as we’re taught to be that sound alarm in the woods that we do not belong; and maybe that’s why in life as well, when we fail to pause and stop and still and change—pressing steady on, no introspection and deeper self aware—we feel out of place (or not ourselves) as well.
Sun falls and casts long shadows of the trees striping the timber floor in shadow and sun—dark and lighter brown.
Maybe a deer will show. If not—that still is fine. I’m learning to enjoy escapes again—adventures because I can. My youngest’s taught me this again: the wonder and magic that is all around when we go in seek—slow and still—and allow ourselves to see.