We Are All in the Crosshairs
The deer never knew he was in my crosshairs. Perhaps neither do we.
An October morning in the Kootenays, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, already felt more like winter. The temperature had dropped below freezing. We were on a mountain ridge at roughly 1,500 meters, a spotting scope set up in front of us as we searched the opposite slope.
Benjamin always tells me to bring silence before I bring a rifle.
Nearly seventy now, blue-eyed Benjamin is my hunting mentor and a friend who has become something like family to me. Of Irish descent, dignified and endlessly good-humored, he treats me like a younger brother—or sometimes like an immature nephew who still needs looking after. He is an experienced professional hunter, and remarkably strong for his age.
I have taken deer and bear several times myself, but Benjamin still treats me like a beginner. The difference between us is simple. I hunt as a pastime. For him, hunting is a profession. I don’t eat the game I take. He eats what he hunts, and earns his living from hunting.
It has already been nine hunting seasons since I completed hunter education in both the United States and Canada and obtained my licenses. Yet the blaze-orange vest I wear still feels strange to me.
To stay alive, you have to be seen.
That is one of hunting’s ironies. You need concealment to get close enough to your quarry, but you must also remain visible enough not to become someone else’s target.
Whenever the wind passed through the fir trees, the branches seemed to speak to one another. Benjamin wet the back of his hand and held it up to read the wind.
“Remember, Tom. In the morning, the air rises out of the valley.”
Once the sun begins warming a mountain slope, the air starts moving uphill. If your scent rides that current toward the deer, it does not matter how quietly you walk. Hours of careful stalking can be over before you even know it. It was one more lesson I learned from Benjamin, usually at the expense of my pride.
That is why we sometimes tear off a few strands of dry grass and toss them into the air. It is why we watch even the direction of our breath drifting like smoke in the cold. The moment our scent moves toward a deer, hours of patient approach can become meaningless.
On hunting mornings, we do not even brush our teeth.
We are afraid the deer might smell the toothpaste.
By early afternoon, a mule deer buck finally appeared along the edge of the brush below us. His antlers were magnificent.
As November approaches, bucks begin moving into the rut and often grow bolder than usual. Their necks thicken. Their steps become heavier. They stop often, lifting their noses as though checking the boundaries of their world.
This buck did exactly that. A few steps, then a pause. A few more, then another.
It almost looked as though he were counting the time he had left.
He was roughly four hundred meters away. We followed the ridge and made a long detour above him. Benjamin’s experience had taught him that deer often keep more of their attention downhill, so approaching from above and behind can sometimes keep you outside their field of view.
I took off my backpack, pulled it around in front of me, lowered my body, and began to crawl. First on my knees. Then on my elbows.
Sharp rocks dug into my palms. Frost-covered branches scratched my cheeks. Behind me, Benjamin kept signaling for me to slow down.
“Slowly. Half as fast as what you think slowly means. Slowly.”
Deer are extremely sensitive to movement. They often notice motion before color or shape.
I crawled like an inchworm over two small rises. By then, the trees and rocks I had memorized before starting the stalk looked completely different.
Where am I? Who am I?
For a moment I lost my bearings and looked around in confusion. Benjamin, apparently losing patience with me, pointed again toward the deer.
We kept crawling.
When we had closed the distance to somewhere around a hundred meters, the buck suddenly lifted his head and looked straight in my direction.
I froze like a fallen log.
The silence lasted only a few seconds, but it felt like several minutes. Then the deer lowered his head again and calmly returned to feeding.
We were within range.
It was time.
I placed my backpack on a rock and rested the rifle on it. Through the scope, the deer’s body came sharply into view.
I had been taught to wait for a clean, stationary broadside opportunity. If a mule deer is startled and begins its distinctive bounding run, that is not the shot to take. A poor shot can leave an animal wounded and suffering.
So I waited. The deer needed to stop. Broadside. Still.
I quietly worked the bolt and chambered a .308 Winchester round.
It was not my heart that seemed to be pounding now. It was my fingertips.
At last, the buck stopped and turned completely broadside.
This was the moment.
I eased my index finger onto the trigger.
And suddenly a thought passed through my mind.
That animal had no idea he was standing inside the crosshairs of my scope. His life and death rested in the movement of one finger, and he knew nothing about it.
Come to think of it, I had felt some version of this hesitation almost every time I was about to pull a trigger.
And if I reversed our positions, perhaps one day I too would stand unknowingly inside the crosshairs of something I could not see.
It might be illness. It might simply be age. It might be unexpected violence. Or it might be black ice on some winter morning.
Perhaps that is how we all live—never knowing that somewhere, somehow, we too may already be in the crosshairs.
I let out half a breath and held it.
The trigger broke.
The rifle cracked through the mountains. Birds scattered from the trees, and the report rolled across the valley before fading into the distance.
The buck sprang upward, took a few steps, then sank into the low brush almost as if kneeling.
“Bingo.”
Benjamin came up behind me, smiling, and tapped my shoulder.
A clean shot, he has always said, means ending an animal’s suffering as quickly as possible. That, to him, is the difference between hunting and simply killing.
When we reached the deer, I found myself kneeling beside him. I placed one hand against his side.
There was still warmth there.
As that warmth slowly faded, I said nothing.
Hunting is, undeniably, the taking of a life. But it is also one of the few times most of us ever come close enough to death to feel its reality.
In the city, death usually exists somewhere beyond a television screen or a smartphone. It exists behind news reports, casual conversations, and other people’s stories.
But here, high on a rugged slope in the Kootenays, death had been in my own hands.
Warm and cold at the same time. Severe. Empty. Impossible to deny.
“You have to field-dress it properly or the meat will spoil.”
Benjamin was almost frighteningly matter-of-fact.
Breaking the animal down took longer than usual that day. I saw mountain-ash berries and dry grass among the contents of the deer’s stomach.
Until this very morning, this animal had probably been concerned with nothing more than feeding himself and preparing for winter. Just as we spend our own lives preparing for tomorrow.
And now I would carry part of the life this animal had lived on my back as we descended the mountain.
As I loaded the meat into my pack, my legs began to tremble.
I could not tell whether it was simply the weight of flesh I was carrying, or whether something of the animal’s life had become part of that weight as well.
For a moment, I was confused by the boundary I had crossed—that terrible boundary where one living creature had held another life’s fate in his hands.
As the sun dropped lower, snow began to fall.
Benjamin walked ahead of me.
“Hey, Tom. We didn’t just take a life. We borrowed something from the mountain. It’ll feed someone through the winter, and one day, like everything else, it’ll return to the earth.”
With his Irish accent, I did not catch every word. But I understood what he meant.
He knew that after every hunt, once the field dressing was finished, I usually became quiet. Those words were for me.
And strangely enough, the pack on my back seemed a little lighter after he said them.
By the time we reached the bottom of the ridge, a few evening lights had begun to appear in the village below.
I stopped and looked back at the mountain.
Snow was falling steadily now. Before long, the place where the deer had died would disappear beneath it, leaving no visible trace.
Someday, I thought, I would like to disappear in much the same way. Without leaving much behind.
And yet perhaps remaining clearly in someone’s memory as a person who helped them make it through at least one difficult season.
I thought of my family.
And with that thought, I continued down the mountain.
When, where, and how will fate’s scope find me and settle its crosshairs on me?
I do not know.
The thought frightens me less than it saddens me.
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