November was the hardest month for Ellen because the shooting made Nick terribly anxious. She could hear him stirring, around before daylight, keeping watch for the groups of hunters who occasionally gathered on the village green to go out in a posse. When such a group turned up, he was dressed and out without even a cup of coffee, and disappeared as soon as he got an idea where they might be bound. Ellen was afraid someone might notice how queer her son had become about hunting and hunters, but luckily Nick was not a talker, fled at the approach of a stranger, and kept his mouth shut on the rare occasions when he had to do an errand for her at the village store. And luckily he knew every brook and trail and rock, every hollow and rise, within an area of five square miles. He had hunted it all himself—hunted hedgehogs and rabbits, woodchucks and squirrels, since he was a boy, and when Rufus was alive he and the boy had hunted deer, coons, and bobcats, but that was before the war and before whatever happened to Nick had happened out there in the Pacific islands.

By mid-November Ellen felt some relief—the open season was almost over In a week or so “they” would be out of the woods. She smiled at her little joke as she bent to her sewing.

On weekends Nick left at dawn and didn’t come home till dark—stuffed a sandwich in his pocket and went off, silent, absorbed as an Indian scout. Sometimes he came home flushed and ravenous and said, “Well, I got some men from New York way off the trail of a buck, and they didn’t have the sense to know there were does just up the rise in a little hollow of hemlock, and that the buck had been leading them off.” At such times Ellen said nothing but gave him an extra helping of stew and held her peace.

Some years back she had tried to reason with him. “After all, Nick, hunting is limited, and people need the meat. We can’t be overrun with deer, either.”

He had left the table, and his pie half eaten, and gone out. When he came back an hour later, he had thrown his cap down on the table and said quietly, “I know I’m crazy. But I can’t stand the blood.”

And then to Ellen’s dismay he had sat down with his head in his hands and wept. She sat frozen in her chair, and picked up her sewing while he got hold of himself. She knew very well that a man’s tears are no relief to him, unlike a woman’s. They tear their way out of an open wound.

When Nick had got hold of himself, he said, “Have you ever seen a deer dying? Tears roll out of their eyes.”