Waiting in the Woods

Because he has to admit it’s a lot of trouble, just the preparation alone each year, sighting in the rifle, remembering to buy the license, packing up his gear and laying out his clothes the night before, and every year, misplacing his knife, searching for it high and low throughout the house, and finding it in weird places, on the shelf above the washing machine, or in his sock drawer. Barely sleeping with the anticipation of it all. Why does he do it, year after year, waking at 5 a.m. and driving the half hour in from town to his cousin’s property, parking his truck at the bottom of the ravine and hiking up the meadow to the base of the tree stand, and then, with the rifle slung over his shoulder and his coffee mug tucked into his jacket pocket, he begins his ascent, inserting the toes of his muck boots into the space between the ladder rungs and climbing, ever so carefully, one foot at a time, up the ladder, pausing every so often to steady himself and catch his bearings, until having ventured all the way up the ladder he arrives at the seat of the tree stand, perched twenty feet up in the air among the withered November leaves, at which point he must execute a delicate 180 degree turn to place his rump down in the seat, almost like a ballet maneuver, but a ballet maneuver performed twenty feet up in the air, in the dark, and the thought occurs to him, as it does at every stage of this process, what if he slipped, what if he fell backwards and became one of those ridiculous tree stand fatality statistics in comparison to which catching a stray bullet from a fellow hunter seems almost glamorous. Yes, he follows safety protocols, it’s true he wears a harness, but still, he can’t help thinking about it, falling, he pictures himself lying at the base of the tree with his spine broken or his skull caved in, and always in these gruesome imaginings there is a ten-point buck that steps forward jauntily into the open meadow, it appears suddenly and stands there in the meadow and stares at his wounded and helpless body lying prostrate on the ground, its soft ungulate lips curling into a smile (yes, a smile!), as it taunts him by presenting the perfect angle of the shot he might have taken. Oh, the irony, so delicious that even a simple animal brain like its own can apprehend it, why does he risk it, why does he go through the trouble each year, the cold, the bitter cold, always worse than he expects it to be, each year he seems to get more sensitive to the cold so that each year he discovers new layers to wrap himself in, sweatpants, coveralls, thermal underwear, nylon leggings, waking in the predawn darkness and piling on the layers and catching sight of his inflated profile in the hallway mirror and thinking that with the headlamp he looks like a coalminer or a spelunker, and then venturing out, moving across the frozen moonlit countryside with the ambling gait of a stiff, leaden balloon man, his outfit redolent of the snowsuits his mother used to bundle him into as a child, those snowsuits which always made him feel so cramped and overheated and weirdly nauseated. Nor is he a trophy hunter, he’s of the philosophy that you can’t let a good thing go to waste, on the few occasions that he’s hit a deer with his truck he’s gutted it right then and there on the roadside and brought it home, he doesn’t enjoy killing things for sport, nor is he prey to the gratuitous fetishization of firearms that is so endemic among his countrymen, he thinks of the rifle as a boring technical tool to get a job done, akin to a saw or a shovel, that’s it, nothing more, so he can say with certainty that it isn’t blood lust or an appetite for violence that draws him into these barren hills each November. So why does he do it then, sitting here in this tree stand for hours at a time, his eyes scanning the perimeter of the meadow where the grass meets the trees, searching for colors, movements, a flash of tail or the tawny outline of an antler, what does it mean that he has been returning to this spot for so many years that every inch of this view is mapped in his mind, the meadow with its divots and tufts, the tree-covered hills in the distance, the lichen on the branch to his left, and everywhere the soft grey light. Year after year, sitting here and zeroing in on one sensory detail after another in an attempt to ward off the static background noise of physical and mental distractions, the dull omnipresent buzz of thoughts, worries, speculations, fears, memories, the coldness of his limbs, the discomfort of the tree knot digging into his spine, and sometimes he must contend with the inclement weather, with the rain, with the snow, and above all, he resists the algorithmic siren call of his phone, fighting against the temptation to pick it up and scroll. Keeping his eyes trained on the far side of the meadow, his gaze alighting now on one spot, now on another, waiting, because that’s mostly what this involves, just sitting and waiting, working to make himself as small and quiet and unnoticeable as possible, a mere whisper among the trees. And yet always the deer surprise him. They surprise him with their stealth, their uncanny habit of appearing suddenly in his line of sight when he least expects it. Why is it that he always seems to be looking for the deer in the wrong places, focusing his attention across the meadow, say, on a little clearing in the trees, and thinking, that spot seems promising, that seems like the type of spot from which a deer might emerge, staring at the little clearing until his eyes hurt, expecting a deer to emerge from it at any moment, its ears twitching, its snout sniffing the wind (he’s a dreamer, it’s true, he can’t help but litter the universe with his wild hopes), but eventually he must concede that no deer is coming, there is no deer emerging in the little clearing, there is only this wide globe of unmoving space filled with the same trees and rocks and grass and sky that he has been staring at all morning. So he shifts his gaze to a new spot, and he repeats the process, and it continues like this for hours, watching, waiting, staring at various spots, until finally it happens, there is a flutter in the corner of his vision and he turns his head and looks, and there it is, he sees a deer, it’s in a spot he hadn’t been watching at all, it’s right there in the center of the meadow, how did it get there, he wonders, do the deer travel in the wind like ghosts, like spirits, and he raises his rifle, he steadies it against the metal frame of the stand and he fixes the deer in the crosshairs of his scope, he tamps down the adrenaline, he wills himself to be calm, he only fires the shot when he’s good and ready, needing to kill the deer instantly because he’s colorblind and he can’t follow a blood trail through the woods. So he is patient, he takes his time, clicking off the safety and controlling his breathing, calculating the distance and the parabolic arc of the bullet, and then firing, the noise and violence of the kickback always startling him, and in the aftermath, watching the deer jerk sideways and collapse to the ground, its little white hooves pawing the air for a few seconds before its body goes inert. Next, climbing down from the tree stand and tagging the carcass and texting his cousin to bring down the four-wheeler, his cousin asking him, every time, don’t you want a photo of yourself with the deer, and him saying, no, he hates those types of photos, don’t you want a photo for Facebook, his cousin asks him, no, fuck Facebook, he says, every time. Next, loading the deer onto the four-wheeler and hauling it up to his cousin’s garage where he hangs it by its hindlegs on a gambrel and gets to work, so much work, this process of dressing the deer, such a ridiculous euphemism, dressing, sometimes he wonders if people who eat meat ought to be required to do this at least once in their lifetimes just to understand what’s involved in the process of putting food on their plate, but ignorance is bliss, he supposes. So much work, his cousin’s kids bobbing around him the entire time, screaming at him, peppering him with questions, is that the deer’s blood, is that the deer’s penis, yammering at him as he tugs downwards on the deerskin with all his might, struggling to remove the skin from the carcass, like unwinding an incredibly tight stocking from off a leg. Why do they never seem to grow older, his cousin’s kids, every year it’s always these same little blond heads dancing around him in a circle as he works to butcher the deer, the kids crowding around him and screaming pull, pull, pull, as he strains with every muscle in his body to detach the deerskin. And when it’s off, disemboweling the deer and cutting through the breastbone and opening the steaming chest cavity, breathing in the intimate earth smells, the whiff of chyme, the ammoniac odor of bile, it’s tough work, he’s not young anymore, he’s not in the best of shape, he’ll be sore in the morning. Dropping the organs into a plastic basin and decapitating the carcass with a hacksaw, then going at it with a deboning knife, slicing out the prime cuts and reserving the rest for the meat grinder. Wrapping the hunks of meat in foil and placing them in a cooler. Dumping the deer skeleton in the woods to be gnawed on by vultures and coyotes. So much work, why does he go through with it each year, if he put a dollar value on his time, it wouldn’t surprise him if it turned out to be cheaper to just buy pork from the butchers, even in these inflationary times. But there is of course the novelty of it, he does love to cook after all, paté from the liver, herb-crusted venison eye-of-the-round with red wine reduction, venison chili, venison tacos, venison stew, sous vide venison backstrap seasoned with spicebush and juniper, true, he is a foodie, but he doesn’t think this is quite it either, the thing that compels him to keep hunting each year, since he can easily buy meat in the supermarket, he doesn’t need to hunt it, and in fact he does buy meat in the supermarket on a regular basis. Nor does he think it’s the wildlife management angle, he’s familiar with the arguments, he hears hunters bring them up all the time, in fact he himself has deployed some of these same arguments, he’s no stranger to the threat posed by a superabundance of whitetail deer to forest ecosystems, but still, he can’t quite buy this idea that he’s some kind of civic hero out here, fighting to protect the world from plundered gardens and tickborne diseases and damaged Toyota Camrys, and besides, to really address the overpopulation of deer, the single best solution would be to reintroduce wolves. So what is it then, the impulse that drives him into the woods each year to sit for hours with a loaded rifle cradled across his lap, waiting, which is after all perhaps a better word for it than hunting, waiting, because it does occur to him at a certain juncture that the time he has spent shooting at deer all these years is vastly outstripped by the time he’s spent sitting quietly in the woods and patiently observing his surroundings, so that this is perhaps a better description of what he’s doing than hunting, he’s just waiting, and maybe he likes the waiting, maybe there is a kind of ritual pleasure in the waiting, sitting out here alone in the woods in a state of heightened mental expectation, maybe there is a kind of rapt and prayerful discipline to it, watching the honey-colored dawn creeping slowly up the meadow, hearing every click and snap of the forest amplified in his ears, time slowing down so that the gentle downward spiraling of a untethered oak leaf through the chilly November air is an event of luminous intensity, maybe the waiting is the thing, maybe the trick is to forget the object waited for and revel in the essence of the wait itself, and not for the first time he wonders if this is the year he finally decides to give it a try, sitting out here without the gun, and simply waiting.

Seph Murtagh is a writer living in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. His fiction and essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Socrates on the Beach, minor literature[s], and the Missouri Review. He is a previous winner of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize from the Missouri Review, and his work has been cited as notable in Best American Essays.

Published April 15 2025