Last week I wrote about the challenges of restraining one’s self in the deer stand; that is, taming the powerful impulse to shoot when shooting isn’t allowed.

This week the story is a little different.

This morning, December 12th, at 7:44AM, I shot my first deer.

As you might imagine, it has been an exciting, messy, and exhausting day, full of all sorts of contradictory feelings.

But first, the story of the hunt itself.

To this day, I still haven’t seen a buck on our property– or on our neighbor’s — other than the eight-pointer I winged on the opening day of rifle season last year.

I was prepared for that, though, and with my doe tag tucked safely in my pocket, I waited with great anticipation for December 7th to roll around, the opening day of doe season. I was confident I’d finally have a shot at one of the many does I’d seen since December 1st, roaming the nearby meadows and woods all week, tantalizingly close and achingly still, as they nibbled the winter vegetation in easy range, as if to taunt me with their legal immunity.

In the five days that followed the 7th, thanks to bad weather, a Sunday, and worse luck, I was skunked.

But this morning, my luck changed.

The temperature hovered around 15 degrees. After about an hour of crisp stillness, I saw a blur of brown in the woods about 70 yards to the north. Two does, decent size. I singled one of them out with my scope and followed it. Seventy yards is not a great distance for an experienced hunter, but it seemed awfully far to me, especially with a racing heart and trembling hands. The doe was in some light cover. Perhaps I should have exercised more patience and waited for it to come into the clear, but the cumulative force of last year’s disappointment and this year’s weeks of waiting and frustration were overwhelming: I took the shot.

The two does jumped out, crossed the lane, and climbed a steep grassy hill that brought them much closer to me, about 40 yards, give or take. They paused in the open. One of them was clearly wounded, so I took a second shot. The doe staggered a few yards, then collapsed at the edge of the woods.

Unlike last year, when the adrenaline rush literally impaired my vision in the minutes after I wounded the buck, I was calm. Or rather, calmer. After all, there was the doe, lying unmoving in the woods. I could see her clearly through my binoculars. What could possibly go wrong?

Imagine my chagrin when she wasn’t lying in that spot when I got there! I’d waited a good ten minutes before going over to find her. To pass the time, I tried to track her from the site of the first shot. I should have just stayed put and kept watching. That way, I would have seen her get up and move.

I was furious with myself: it was happening again, just like last year! But I kept my head, and eventually stumbled across her in the woods.

My relief didn’t last very long. There was much unpleasantness ahead. I did my best with the field dressing. I’d been hoping to shoot a deer on a Saturday, when my neighbor would be around to give me some guidance. But it was a weekday. He was at work, and I didn’t want to disturb anyone else. So I went it alone.

Let me just state, for the record, that gutting a deer is a lot harder than it looks on a Youtube video. All the studying in the world isn’t much help when you’re confronted with the heavy, slippery, stinking reality of a deer’s innards. But I managed, and I know I’ll do better next time.

Still ahead are the skinning and butchering, but that’s for another day.

As dusk falls outside my window, and the deer of St. Peters Church Road are finally as safe from me as I am from them, I’m left to absorb the fact — so commonplace and banal — that the animals we eat were once living creatures, whose lives we literally incorporate into our own.

It’ll take me a while to sort everything out, but I’ll leave you with a few of the day’s indelible images: the empty black softness of the dead doe’s eye; a violent red heap of organs on bloodstained leaves; the hibernating box turtle I unwittingly uncovered with my mucking boot while I was kneeling by the kill; the satisfaction I felt on finding the wicked little skinning knife I’d mislaid in the leaf litter; the sight of steam rising in the sunlight over the bed of the pickup truck; the hollowness of the animal when I was done; the elation that slowly, over several hours, gave way to self-satisfaction, and then to a strange species of regret, the feeling of having reached the end of a difficult thing that, for whatever reason, I’d told myself I needed to do.