Mule Deer   The buck was beautiful — eight-, ten-point rack, a silhouette on a hilltop against a dying high-country sky. But a dense thicket of thorn scrub, already near black   with shadow, filled the draw that lay between that buck and us. My God — my father whispered, becoming still. Impossible, this shot — uphill, way out of range — but I’d seen   what my father could do. He slowly raised his rifle, squinched his eye to the scope, stopped breathing, squeezed the trigger . . . CRACK — and time stopped, stunned for just a moment, and damned if that crazy   son of a bitch, that buck, didn’t fly ass over heels and crumple in a heap. We tore down into the draw, Dad yelled, Keep your eyes on him! Unblinking, half-crazed, I   watched the wounded buck stagger to its feet and disappear. We scrambled through the mud, scratched through the thorns, and found only blood spoor in the sagebrush — the bastard had beaten   us. Just then, on the horizon, he crossed another hilltop a mile away, vanished into the ocean of night. I can’t quite say we ever gave him up for lost.                                                for my father     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont December 2009