Something out there, in the brittle air, calls to him.  He stands in the dark beside the truck, stomping the cold out through the bottoms of his boots in the Citgo parking lot. His daddy, his grandfather, the one they call PapaJoe, and a crowd of rowdy happy uncles fill the truck in the pre-dawn hours.  Coolers groan with ice.  One uncle clangs around the truckbed, squeezing the last drop he can into the gas tank.  PapaJoe tucks his Camels into a flannel pocket and the boy shovels into the cab of the truck along with all the others.  He squeezes in, knowing somehow in his half-frozen bones that growing up itself means sitting here.  The stock of his Savage thirty-thirty.  Grooved frozen ground.  And deer season.  Somebody, Daddy, PapaJoe, an uncle maybe, shoves a large coffee into his hand, coffee Mama says he's too young to drink.  Years later, he'll remember the taste of Styrofoam, steam creased before his eyes in the truck's dark cab.  That much will remain clear.

The field bends in the cold headlight beams and he watches trees he thought he knew by heart recede into the dark circumference of the woods.  Everything lessens to a chilled circle of itself, even farther away in the night when they send him off alone after a buck.  He has followed his brothers here year after year, his feet fitting inside the boot ruts they leave.  He'll sit someday in his office, in one of those still moments, look up from the landscape of work growing there, and stretch his legs beneath the desk, still trying to take the longest step, leave the deepest footprint.  But now, he stops and listens.  PapaJoe's new hunting dogs, bluetick and coon hounds, bark through the trees.  Their bay draws down dawn in the distance, and he can finally see his breath in a lift of purple light.  The sun thaws a frozen glass sky and he steps more surely now.  He wants to see things.  Not the buck, but what the woods collect when he's not here.  When none of them are here.  The red slip of a fox.  Upturned nests.  Broken green glass.  The cold aches through his shoes and up his legs.  So he walks, on quiet careful feet just like he's been taught.  He looks straight up through the trees and wonders how it is that the sun can shine and still not keep him warm.  The deeper into the woods he goes, the deeper the cold settles into him.  He wonders where the uncles are, he wonders if PapaJoe's got a deer yet, he warms himself to the picture of gamy meat steaming beneath his knife, spitting and popping in a pot of deer stew.  Spanish moss curls like an old beard from the bare oak he passes and when he looks up, mistletoe balls the highest branch.

The boy wants to shoot the mistletoe down, even goes so far as to take aim with the thirty-thirty, but he knows the report will bring them all running.  And he'd have nothing to show.  He kicks what he thinks is a pinecone, a thousand memorized pinecones, but instead, he finds a frozen mishmash of feathers slammed yards ahead by the toe of his boot.  He tries to dig a hole.  His bootheel smacks the ground again and again, but it's so frozen, it doesn't yield.  So he squats and scrapes pine needles, sticks, over the fallen bird and walks away, trying not to see the tiny beak yawed open.  He forgets the bird and its opalescent beak in the years to come.  It only shows up in his late-life dreams, but he always wakes thinking he's dreamed a pearl-handled knife.  Or a shred of garlic.

He heads off into a northwest wind.  Then he hears the crinkle of deer traveling on cold dry leaves.  He stops, stands still thigh-deep in brush between two sections of hardwoods.  He doesn't breathe as he lowers himself into the grass.  He shoulders the thirty gauge, watches through the brush; several deer move slowly through the hardwoods feeding.  A movement catches his attention and turning to it, he spots a nice looking six-point.  The buck eats from a bush at the edge of the opening about fifty yards away.  Several does, two yearly fawns, and the six-point move into view.  He's ready, he thinks now, and he takes a bead on the buck.  But as he lifts the thirty-thirty, he hears something else, another deer running.  It is a big buck he hadn't seen.  He must have been following close behind the does.  The new buck charges the smaller one now less than forty yards to the boy's right.  The larger buck hits the younger one and drives him back into the brush.  All the boy hears after the first strike is the sound of the two bucks thrashing through the trees.  The does never look up; they browse, range lazily through the clearing.  He sits, frozen, continues to watch for a bit before he raises the gun again.  Then he sees the big buck come back alone.  The animal circles the does until he stops and stands among them.  He stretches his neck and scents close to them.  The does browse away.  The yearlings follow.

The buck steps across the clearing.  The boy counts, one, two . . . eight points.  The buck's head is large and the boy sees muscle and tendon roll as he turns and looks at him.  No, not at him.  Through him.  Back to the scratched pile of dirt, stick, and straw.  He holds his breath until the buck disappears.

Years from now, he'll have a photo album and in it, there will be a picture of this day.  It will be shoved between other pictures and willed mementos, black paper-tabs torn in the handing down.  PapaJoe grins into the camera, a Camel stuck to the corner of his lip, his blaze cap pushed back so you can be sure and see his face.  Daddy stands on the other side of an eight point buck strung upside down.  Someone has built a fire in a trash barrel behind the truck and the uncles circle the flame, hands poised for all time in midair.  The smoke rises thick and black into the cold white sky and the boy will see himself sitting on the open tailgate, the thirty-thirty still in his hands.  He'll tell stories about the picture, about the hunt, and the cold, about draping the deer across the hood; he'll laugh when he tells about the ride home, how boys like him are aged slow, season by season, rooted to the bench seat, generation after generation of men crowding around him.