Where do you enter a circle?
When there is no beginning where do you break in?
Say November. Here. Enter through the emptiness…

Five o’clock: almost dark. Chimney smoke lies down,
crawls across the meadow like a slow, soft snake.
And he, just come in from the woods, stands watching.
The cold fog is silver on his woolen shirt…

Quiet. Quiet. Still.
In the darkening afternoon
watching stove light flicker…

The long night steps slowly over the mountains.
The sky steals light from both ends of the day.

— David Budbill, Judevine

The old logging road leads me by a secluded beaver pond. Eddying along the shore, wood ducks ripple a mirrored sky filled with granite clouds.

After hiking two miles, I find what I seek: an oval patch of earth pawed from an abstraction of hardwood leaves.

More scrapes pit the ground under a row of beech trees further on. Broken twigs dangle from low-hanging branches. Stamped into the freshly exposed soil is the blunt-toed track of a large deer.

The trail dead-ends at a log landing overgrown with brambles. Ringed by hills, the land forms a bowl. Cold air sinks down the ridge-tops and pools in the glade.

I settle behind the latticed boughs of a wind-thrown pine eight yards from the edge of the clearing.

Overhead, chickadees dart busily, grasping bare branches like huge insects. Dry leaves rustle behind me and a yearling porcupine waddles past.

The forest is quiet. I sit until just before dark, then shoulder my gear and return down trail.

Faint rustling through a regenerating stand of birch halts me. I listen hard, stock-still. A short, throaty grunt reverberates in my eardrums. Footsteps again.

The ebbing autumn light is almost gone.

From the timber, a shadow passes ahead, followed by rattling as the buck rakes his antlers through hemlock limbs.

An owl’s call sends nocturnal rodents scurrying for cover in the pupil-black woods.

***

Days and nights pass.

Below a waning gibbous moon, the ice-blue landscape smells metallic. Frost crunches under my feet as I walk through the backyard.

A sudden white flash as a cottontail bounds into a goldenrod thicket.

Beyond the woven-wire fence, nine ghostly forms appear in the lunar-lit pasture. The deer, all does and fawns-of-the-year, graze placidly on crystal-sweetened vegetation as if they were manatees feeding on coastal eelgrass.

A slight wind stirs, and a doe snorts an alarm as my scent reaches her nostrils.

Stepping toward the pasture, I reveal my presence. Instead of bounding away, she cautiously approaches with her twin fawns, their ears pricked forward, noses up-turned, tasting the air.

Curiously-close now, the three animals stop mere feet away. The moon’s craters reflect in depthless black eyes. Their noses glint with moisture.

If bone-white antler graced my head and cast tree-like shadows upon the frozen ground, might the doe allow me to stroke her?

Alas, metal wire and branched evolution split destiny.

The spell is broken. Dawning danger rises into consciousness and sends the deer wheeling toward the privacy of the forest.

***

I call it the “witching hour,” that fleeting stretch of eventide when crepuscular animals are on the move. Eager anticipation warms the blood.

A cloudless sundown. The western horizon quickly embers from finch-yellow to cobalt, flaring long enough to silhouette a skein of geese angling river-ward.

I scan the pasture’s edge from a window.

Conjured perhaps, a heavy-bodied deer feeds head down behind a small rise. Peering through binoculars, I can’t tell for certain, but it must be a buck.

Moments later, the deer comes up for air. It’s a buck alright — four tall tines jutting from one antler beam and five points on the other side. He stares ahead, intent on a doe grazing nearby.

I’ve not seen a deer of this age and size here since a chocolate-colored twelve-pointer stood in the same spot on a snowy Thanksgiving afternoon seven years ago.

Biologists and deer hunters will tell you that older bucks tend to “court” females more subtly than younger bucks.

Likewise, this doe, a mature deer in her own right, looks unperturbed by the buck’s presence.

The pair become difficult to discern in the dwindling light.

The buck starts walking, stopping to look over his shoulder and cup his ears toward the noise of a distant motorcycle. Ever vigilant; senses primed for survival.

As twinkling stars blossom, he lowers his head, and like a collie herding sheep, shepherds the doe — who leaps the fence — toward the cover of woods.

Over two-hundred pounds, he springs effortlessly over the man-made obstruction, and — midair — cocks his wide crown between a narrow passage of grape vines and rose briar.