Devin's First Deer, Part I

Devin crunched slowly through the frosted grass as he made his way down his grandpa’s field, it was the morning after Thanksgiving with a chill that was bracing and real. While most of the state was crowding the stores, causing chaos and just losing their minds, Devin instead was out on his first hunt, just south of the New York border line. His grandpa owned two hundred fine acres, and Devin liked coming to this rural scene, a break from his school and from Scranton, where he had lived all of his years sixteen. On all of his trips he’d seen the antlers that grandpa had up on his old barn wall, noticing that there were more every year, Gramps was not one to miss out on the Fall. He’d though of trying it out himself, but his mother was afraid about guns, until, at sixteen, she had relented, it seemed she had a taste for venison. Some morons at school had given him flack, assailed him with shrill, Hippyish words, they’d never seen what happens to the woods when nobody controlled the deer herd. Devin had seen it, nothing but ferns, the one thing White-tails did not like to eat, stripping off cover from ground-nesting birds, and small mammals that scurried under feet. As Devin saw it, you still had to kill when you pulled a carrot plant from the ground, eating a fruit was a tree abortion, to survive something had to go down. But it wasn’t this truth that bothered him as he approached his grandpa’s old tree stand, instead he fought to calm his pounding heart, and to relax both his shaking hands. He double-checked his rifle’s safety, then up clambered up and strapped into the seat, covered in orange, and fresh scent-killer, an empty field was all that he could see. Time passed and all went on quietly, Devin found it serene and relaxing, Gramps said you couldn’t really count on deer, that failure was just a part of hunting. Two hours passed and the morning sun was climbing ever higher in the sky, Devin wondered if he should pack it in when the slightest flicker of movement he spied. It was an antler behind some thick brush, but it set a fire in Devin’s young brain, ten minutes later a fiver-pointer stepped out, with his mind racing Devin took aim. He put the sights just behind the shoulder, that’s where one bullet would make a clean kill, then forced though a breath to steady his nerves, an action that took almost all of his will... CONCLUDES IN PART II.