Spoke with Raymond tonight. I'd called to ask advice about planting oats in the Spring on the fields, and we got to chatting. He saw no problem with oats. Which was good, since the hay man refused to cut our field this coming year, and I'd agreed with the neighbor farmer that he could plants oats in the fields, if he'd leave me the straw bales. Why I want straw bales will have to be the subject of another post.

Raymond is normally a volubly expressive hale-fellow kind of man, with a sensibility honed by years of meeting physical challenges. He'd grown up in this valley, in the days before they had electricity. In those days, a man never spoke of defeat or difficulty. Life was hard for everyone, and the social metier was one of cheerful disregard for setbacks. Even so, there was bright quality to his voice as we spoke. He seemed unusually ebullient. I asked how the hunting was going, since it's been buck season for a few days now. Hit the jackpot.

Raymond said, with scarcely-concealed pride, that he'd got one. "A nice one!" he said. He'd been in his blind, the one we can see across the meadow. This is a first class affair, high above the ground and built by him to include every comfort. Windows, a hot plate for coffee, a piss-pot, cans of beans, even a little stove for heat. Not that you'd use any of these amenities, since any one of them would create an off-putting scent.

"About 4:30," he said, " he came into view and I got 'im." That's right across the field from our born (barn). I remember that afternoon. I was walking the dog at the time and we both jumped a little. The report boomed past us, then came back off the mountain behind us and across the valley and back again from the far hills, like mini thunder. They don't use 22's around here for buck hunting.

He said happily, "Took him down to the taxidermist already." I pondered. When Raymond takes something to the taxidermist, it's something special. At 89 or so, having done this all his life, he's a bit of a buck-hunting snob. Well, that's unfair. A grand connoisseur of bucks, is more like it. He won't bother with young bucks. It's about the points, number of. (Points are the tips of horns, which is to say, relative magnificence of the buck). Rarity of the quarry.

Regarding female deer (ie., doe +s), he said with the expression of one who knows that you both share the same level of unexpressed contempt normally reserved for miscreants such as serial rapists, “Anyone can shoot a doe.”