My hands were like claws by then, just wooden lumps that could hardly feel or hold onto my rifle. I crossed my legs on the old, weathered boards and lowered my head. I put my hands in my armpits, trying to shake myself out of the shaking. My teeth were clattering like those windup chompers you see. The only comfort I had was in knowing I had raised a son with enough good sense to know when to keep his head under the covers and stay in the bed. I thought of how warm Mary Annie’s thighs and back and belly were under her flannel gown, of how I could have been lying against that warmth at that moment. My feet didn’t seem to be connected to my ankles any more. They were just vague aches.

When the clouds came over, and the wind sprang up, my heart sank. I almost got down and built a fire. The sun wasn’t going to come out and warm me after all. The temperature wasn’t going to rise much about close to freezing, and the wind was already bringing some tiny sleet that stung my face. I always try to rationalize everything, but there were only two choices: stay in the tree the rest of the morning and maybe not even see a deer anyway, and freeze, or get down and build a fire and give up any chance of seeing a deer once I made all that noise and created all that smoke. I stayed in the tree by rationalizing this: Jim and Bobby were probably no colder than I was, and neither of them was going to climb down and build a fire.

When I first heard it, it didn’t register. It was just a noise that came along with the wind. Trees make their own voices in the woods sometimes, when two grow together and rub their bark away in the breeze. They moan, creak, cry out. Eventually I began to think that I was hallucinating from the cold, and that scared me. Of course I thought of hypothermia then, and again I considered getting down and rounding up some firewood. There were plenty of pine knots lying around. The woods were full of dead branches. But I kept thinking that soon it would warm up, that soon I’d stop shaking. And I was so deep in my own misery that I didn’t even listen to it closely for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Then the wind laid a bit, and I heard it plainly: oooooooooh help me.

My head snapped up. It wasn’t coming from the ground. The voice was in the air. But when the wind gusted, it lessened.