would be great under ordinary circumstances but today I got to spend it all outdoors, beginning in a heavy fog.

As I settled down into the stand I could actually see the path I cut through the dense, low lying layer of fog, and i thought, this is what it must be like to be a dog! I can actually see the path I trod for some time after I walked through, the swirls and eddies of the mist betraying my passing.

As the fog burned off and the sun came up in earnest I literally nodded off to sleep. I dreampt of a spectral blue whitetail, like a neon outline of a deer with no substance, just margins. And it looked at me and I at it.

I have still meat in the freezer from last year. If I don’t get a deer this year I will have contributed to the DNR’s fund and gotten to spend several days outdoors in fine weather. I read two of the Travis McGee books- the formula (Travis makes a plan to recover the loot. Travis does something dumb and gets captured/abused by the bad guys. Travis muscles his way out of trouble and saves the day. Travis boinks the girl until they both get tired of each other and go their loving but separate ways)is starting to click, and I will keep reading them all despite an early tendency toward predictability. Shit, I read all the Harry Potter stuff, and it don’t get any more predictable than that.

Anyway, this afternoon I watched all the damned turkeys fly back into their roosts, and man, there were a ton of them. Of course I’ll see a hundred deer during turkey season, but again, a day outside is better than anything else, and this property that has been so generously allowed to me is spectacular.