I tried to reload my rifle, but I couldn’t make the cartridges go back into the magazine. One by one they fell out of my fingers. Finally I said: to hell with it, you couldn’t pull the trigger anyway.

There was a ridge directly in front of me that towered over the ridge my stand was on; I’d watched lots of does come down it before, pawing in the leaves and scraping them away to find the acorns, looking up suddenly when the squirrels darted between their legs. There were not deer on it now. The crying was coming from the other side of it. It was the most pitiful thing I’d ever heard. It made me colder than I already was.

It took some effort, but I knelt in the leaves and scraped my hands together and gathered up the shells I’d dropped. It was impossible to keep from picking up scraps of leaves and bits of trash and tiny sticks with them. I just shoved all of it in my pocket. I knew there wasn’t much time. And there were other things going through my mind. After I found whoever it was, I would still have to go for help. I would have to get Bob and Jim to help me. I might have to run for help on my dead and frostbitten feet. I cursed myself for a fool and for being where I was. I cursed this fool for being on land that was plainly posted and causing me to have to go through this.

There was no one on the other side of the ridge.

It was a shock to me, because I was out of breath and my legs were trembling, and I had braced myself for whatever I was going to find. I’d already thought the worst, that someone had been shot accidentally the day before and had suffered all night, half-frozen, probably wishing for the mercy of death. To find nothing there was unbelievable. I shifted to the east, toward Bobby’s stand. I stood on top of the ridge, panting, bent over, my hands on my knees. I wasn’t cold anymore, but there were thirty or forty pins sticking in the bottoms of my feet. It’s good for you, I said under my breath, it’s good for you. You’re so bad out of shape. You ought to be running five or six miles a week.

The first thing I did was take off my field jacket and my insulated coveralls. I wadded them up tightly beneath an oak and loaded the rifle. I could flex my fingers fairly well by then, but I didn’t know whether to fire the trouble shots or not. The voice kept calling, so weak, so softly: oooooooooooooooo-help