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As I sat in my stand this past deer season, it dawned on me what I had been missing over the last several years.

Having just bid on a new shift at work, I find myself with fifty-two more days off a year and a lot more time on my hands. I took the first weekend of December off which gave me six days in a row to myself. Awesome.

I spent four of those days in the timber, with my seventeen year old daughter alongside for a few hours as her busy schedule permitted. On one of the colder mornings, I left the stand a little early to walk and warm up. As I walked along the lower bottom ground where the wind wasn't chipping away at my face, I was drawn to a spot where a drainage ditch crossed the middle of the field, from one patch of timber to another. I felt compelled to sit in this spot as if someone was telling me to do so. By this time I was warming up more than I wanted to anyway and my stomach was growling for a snack.

I sat down and opened my pack and started nibbling away on some crackers. As I looked out across the field, now wide open and harvested, I visualized the landscape as it stood nearly twenty years ago when I first started hunting this ground.

I could see the big brush piles in the middle of the field which were pushed up after clearing some of the trees away to plant more crops. I could see the group of my family and friends huddled together organizing a plan to drive the deer out of the timber towards the brush piles where someone would be anxiously waiting.

I remembered how we all wanted to be the guy sitting on the brush pile. As I looked closer, I could see my late father-in-law clambering up onto the top of the pile and situating himself as comfortably as possible. I remembered how his nose and cheeks were rosy red from the wind and how he had bundled himself in a big pair of olive green coveralls with a zip up orange vest. I could see the old smooth barrel shotgun in his hands, a shotgun handed down to him by his late father who carried the same name.

I saw myself walking through the strip of timber towards my father-in-law, nearing the edge of the field without seeing a thing when all of a sudden a shot rang out followed shortly thereafter by an excited yell coming from the brush pile. My adrenaline surged and I hurriedly stepped out of the timber into the field, where my father-in-law was standing over one of the biggest bodied does I had ever seen. The excitement in his voice and on his face contagiously drew us all to him and we listened to his

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