New Year’s Eve Bucks – When Late Season Deer Made My Year – Especially One Twilight Encounter

The temperature took a noticeable dip as the afternoon sun sank low, its light and warmth fading to the west on this New Year’s Eve. Trees that had been noisily raining melting ice and snow on me all afternoon grew silent as the mercury slid lower into thermometer. College football games were on television. Cold beer waited in the refrigerator. A lit fireplace would quickly remove the damp chill settling in my toes and nose. It was the early 1990s in Virginia’s Piedmont.

I slowly swiveled my head and scanned one last time the adjacent fingers of land funneling into a thicket-choked, marshy creek bottom at the U.S. Army’s Fort Pickett and quietly muttered,….READ MORE.