I was beginning to think I’d forgotten how to hunt.

I had given up on hunting at Kingsbury, and Jasper-Pulaski was just too damned far away. I had ridden out the rifle season, no luck at either place OR at the slough.

And then, at a dinner given for the wife and her bingo-operationg cohorts, I talk to one of our parishioners that I see every weekend but rarely speak with, and he tells me his nephiew has a small piece of land he leases.

I can afford the lease, and I go talk to the guy. We make arrangements, and I’ve been there every spare minute for a week.

It’s very nice, because nobody ios shooting at me, nobody else is around, in fact, and there are a powerful lot of deer.

Weather is nasty, so they seem to be staying where I can’t shoot at them, of course until Wednesday when the frontstuffer failed on me.

This morning,I was backing out of the driveway when the power went out. So I stuck around until it went back on, just in case I needed to load up the fireplace. By the time power went back on, it was too late to do a morning hunt.

So I went out this afternoon, and sat in the blind, mostly thinking about tomorrow, and a little bachelor herd wandered out of the treeline.

In the last several days, the deer have stayed close to the treeline, but tonight they practically ran into my line of fire. I sighted in on the first one, which was also about the biggest one, and dropped it.

I didn’t kill it instantly, which upset me, but it was dead very quickly. And the White Hunter made short work of it.

So now I have a deer, which has broken my couple years of bad luck. And I have a place to go back next year and hunt all three or four seasons.

Nice.