Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/575593
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 1 It opened with an illusion, a mere tic of perception that tottered between trust and truth. A tiny flutter in the dense, dark brush at the head of the swamp, that dawning morning last November, when all else lay still. Gone, as spontaneously, within the space of a few seconds. Stiffening, I stared . . . stared until my eyes teared . . . and could see nothing more. I looked slowly away for a moment, tried to blink away the confusion, then back. Nothing. While every wisdom of my hunter's wit screamed caution. I had almost surrendered it to illusion, when suddenly it reappeared, as cryptically as before. A hundred yards out, perhaps a bit more. The slightest contrasting tremble among the leaves, there and gone, like and unlike the flit of a bird. Once, then again. Desperately, my memory fought to shape fit and form to its mystery, but could not. Gradually, ever so gradually, I eased my hand across my chest, felt inside my coveralls for the binoculars. In the lagging seconds it took to get them safely up, to look away and back to be sure, it was gone again. sleepy and blue in the gloom. No breeze moved. But there it was again, and this time I was waiting, with the glasses in hand. And still, it took moments to unravel its secret. A huge buck stood under the dense canopy of the brush, almost wholly screened by the leaves. Intermittently he lifted his head, slowly and methodically working antlers and orbitals about the limbs, declaring his supremacy. Temporarily, the light would catch the tip of a polished tine. That was the measure of the mystery. He was a mature ten- point, high and heavy, and though I had not seen nor felt the power of him before, I knew him well. "He's back," I had told Loretta and no one else, a month before. The little bog was nothing beyond a discrete quagmire of old beaver ponds, a hundred yards wide, two hundred long, fed by small creeks. Carefully I had retracted its northern drainage, wading the creek, stealing my way to its eastern corner. There, by the mouth of a doe trail that ran the distance of a dim, thickly sheltered draw to the cornfields of a neighboring dairy farm, was a massive sign-post rub. I had eased within 40 feet of ike Gaddis and the buck that took a full season plus twenty-seven minutes to kill. M He had pursued the great buck for months, and now on the final morning of the muzzleloader season, his chance had finally come. Meanwhile, moment by moment my apprehension grew. The birth of the morning was yet ahead of the sun. The swamp lay Mike Gaddis i r s t L i g h t F