Hunting

On Monday I spent approximately 5 hours in the woods hunting deer. For those of you who don't know about deer hunting, it's not really what you think. You sit in a stand and wait for deer to walk by - you aren't really walking through the woods looking for deer as the name seems to indicate.

I'll be honest with you - most of the time deer hunting is pretty boring. You sit there for hours, usually you are quite cold, and 99.9 percent of the time nothing is happening. But then there is that .10 of time (or is it .01?) when you hear a twig snap in the woods nearby, or you sense movement in the brush, or you actually see a deer. Suddenly your heart starts racing, and the drudgery of waiting is quickly forgotten.

This morning's hunt found me on "Steve's Stand," a stand named after me by my family down here because I am the one who hunts in the stand the most. This morning was a beautiful, cold, crisp morning after two straight days of rain. I was in my stand before dawn, and as the sun slowly began to rise, the trees and ground all around my stand were practically covered with birds of every type. There were sparrows, mockingbirds, blue jays, robins, cardinals, doves, crows, chickadees, brown thrashers, rufous-sided towhees and a few species I could not identify. The birds don't realize I'm in the stand, so some of them fly up and actually sit on the stand with me - it's so cool. It makes me feel very close to creation, and to God.

By the end of the day I still had not seen any deer, but I'll be right back out there in the morning. You never know; tomorrow might be the day a "big'un" walks by. I hope to have a more exciting report tomorrow.... until then, good-night.