deer

The deer enters Ben Givens’s story first as an animal whose presence must be inferred from tracks, habits, and terrain, and then as a buck encountered and killed during Ben’s first hunt, when he is ten. This episode makes the deer both a living creature moving through its own winter landscape and the object of a family practice: its behavior directs the pursuit, while its meat and death become the occasion for instruction, gratitude, and a father’s preparation of his sons for a future without him.

Identity and Narrative Presence

The deer is not given a name or a human point of view. Its presence is registered through the details Ben and his family can read: tracks in snow, droppings, the route between water and higher ground, and the animal’s alert posture when the hunters finally see it. The narrative gives those signs specificity. The buck’s track is deep, heart-shaped, and split down the middle; its dewclaws are visible, and its passage through the snow makes an easy meander. The animal is therefore more than an abstract target, even though the account remains within the hunters’ perspective. Its movements precede and organize the human action.

The account also gives the deer a behavioral pattern independent of the hunt. Wright Givens tells his sons that deer move at dusk and dawn, watch their back trails while bedding down, and travel with their noses into the wind. Those habits are presented as knowledge the hunters must accommodate, not as traits invented to make the buck a symbol. The lack of wind on the night of the hunt matters because it changes how cautious the deer may need to be and how the hunters might approach. The animal’s way of moving through the world supplies the practical conditions of the encounter.

Ben’s First Hunt

At ten, Ben rides into the hills with Wright and Aidan just after lunch, with new snow covering the ground. They cross the river at Coleman’s Landing and follow the Colockum Stagecoach Road. The country appears empty: the party sees no one and finds no deer sign in the clean snow along the road. They camp at a bench overlooking the river after dark, tend a fire, and eat elk jerky, dried apples, and apricots. The first part of the outing is thus a wait rather than a sighting; the deer is absent from view, and the hunters must begin again in the morning.

Before sleep, Wright explains that deer are usually active at dusk and dawn and that their caution can be read from their movement and use of the wind. The next morning, the party breaks camp in darkness and rides up Stray Horse Canyon. At first light, Wright points out a buck’s track. He reads it as evidence that the animal spent the night at the creek, the only running water, and is now heading west toward higher elevations. Droppings further along suggest that the buck stopped without being alerted. These traces allow the hunters to reconstruct a route without having seen the animal itself.

The party follows the track while trying not to expose its own approach. Near an opening in the trees, the hunters pause below it in case the buck is watching its back trail from higher ground. They turn their horses uphill so that the track remains below them, then reach the ridge in gathering light and study the surrounding slopes for signs the buck has crossed ahead. At a saddle, they find no new tracks. Wright has the horses tethered fifty yards downslope and returns with his sons to wait at the ridge. The hunt depends not on speed but on reading the ground and holding position.

The Encounter

After the hunters sit with their backs to one another to watch every direction, roughly forty minutes pass. Ben hears his father’s rifle being readied and turns to see a modest-sized buck about seventy yards down the hill. The animal is highly alert, looking directly toward the hunters, with its left flank exposed. The encounter is sudden: Ben has no time to wish events different before Wright fires. The buck collapses and does not move again.

The narrative gives the buck a brief but decisive presence in this moment. Its gaze makes clear that it has detected the hunters; its exposed flank, rather than any lack of awareness, creates the opening for the shot. The scene’s attention moves quickly from the animal’s alertness to the consequences of the hunt. Ben’s heart is beating wildly, and Wright puts a hand on his shoulder as he acknowledges that they have got one. The shift from following signs to confronting the animal is also the shift from anticipation to the irreversible result of the hunt.

Death, Use, and Instruction

Wright approaches cautiously and checks the deer before explaining where the bullet passed and why the animal’s blood should drain and its meat cool quickly. The account does not treat the buck’s death as merely a successful shot: the hunters attend to the body and to the practical work of making the animal’s meat usable. Wright then kneels beside the deer and asks his sons to kneel with him. He says he had promised their mother, and the three remove their hats, lay a hand on the buck, and pray in thanks for the meat and for what they have been granted.

Afterward, Wright explains the remaining preparation, and Ben and Aidan watch. The party carries the deer’s quarters out on the horses, leaving the hide, head, and other remains behind. This sequence connects the animal’s death to food and labor rather than presenting the hunt as an isolated act of marksmanship. The prayer acknowledges that the meat is received, while the explanation and careful handling teach the boys how to carry out the work that follows a kill.

As they ride down the ridge, Wright stops and tells his sons that this is how the work is done and how they will want to do it when he is no longer around. The deer becomes central to a lesson intended to outlast the hunt: the father’s knowledge is passed on through the concrete actions required by the animal’s death. That does not erase the buck’s earlier life as a creature with habits, a route, and an awareness of danger. Instead, the episode holds those facts beside the family’s use of the deer, making the animal’s presence the condition of both the meal and the instruction.

Significance

The episode’s account of the deer is shaped by a tension between attention and use. The hunters must attend closely to the animal’s distinctive tracks and behavior, yet their purpose is to find and kill it for meat. The narrative does not resolve that tension by granting the deer thoughts it cannot know, nor by reducing it entirely to a resource. It remains legible through signs of its own movement, and its alertness is part of the encounter rather than a detail erased by the hunters’ success.

For Ben, this is a formative introduction to hunting as a sequence of observation, waiting, killing, preparation, and gratitude. The buck’s life and death make that sequence tangible. Its track leads the family through the winter landscape; its appearance ends the uncertainty of the hunt; its meat sustains the household; and the work around it becomes a lesson in continuity between generations. The deer’s role is therefore not simply to demonstrate Ben’s childhood or his father’s expertise. The episode’s practical and ceremonial details keep the animal at the center of what the family does and what Ben is taught.