One Clear Shot

Oct 18 2011

I had the deer in my sights.

Squinting through the glass, the circle of light

it filled my vision.

As if all of existence

had constricted down

to a single beast.

A magnificent buck

8-points, scarred from the rut

pawing the ground

snorting steam.

It swung its head slowly

to and fro,

testing the air

perhaps vaguely aware

of my presence.

It stood motionless,

balanced on the thin black line

of the cross-hairs,

as if on the cusp

of life or death

and I would be the instrument.

Knowing a bullet is simple

my distance, safe.

I had intruded into his woods,

the fugitive snow, the wet and cold

branches skeleton-bare.

This wilderness

all he’d ever known,

the territory he’d fought for.

I watched

as if privileged,

held him in my sights, lost all track of time.

At the zenith of life,

his feral power

fierce

with testosterone.

When a branch snapped

and he looked directly at me,

a dominant creature

unwilling to flee.

I could not pull the trigger.

The buck went free.

Which is when snow began to fall,

soggy crystals

clouding the lens.

I never hunted

again.

This poem started with a piece by the novelist David Adams Richards, published in the Globe’s Focus section of Oct 15. It was entitled A View to a Kill, and I think it was an extract from his just released memoir Facing the Hunter. Either that, or a teaser for it.

Anyway, the story is all his. But I process things differently, and his prose style just didn’t seem tight enough for me. So I have shamelessly appropriated his experience, but rewritten it in my own way. All credit goes to David Adams Richards; while I will assume modest credit for this small poem.

I used the same technique here I used in a previous poem about a deer, which may have passed unnoticed, or seemed unintentional The subject starts out “it”, but in the 4th stanza transforms into “he”:  as the hunter becomes obsessed with awe and admiration for this magnificent animal,  the generic “it” will not do. The buck becomes personified and honoured with the more exalted “he”.