Shadowtrekker Adventures

I slipped into the cedar breaks with the muddy creek below and the wind finally right. November had rubbed most of the color out of the country, leaving the hillside carved in tight little cuts—fingerprints pressed into dirt where thorns and cactus wait to remind you you’re alive. I tucked in 60 yards off a pocket of does I was sure would peg me. They fed and looked and fed again, and I held—stone-still, watching their ears as my heart noticably beat. If they didn’t bust, they might be my decoys. If they did, they’d end the day. That’s the bargain.

They didn’t. One buck ghosted in. Then a second. Then a third. Finally the fourth—heavy-chested, head low, riding the edge of those does like a shadow. He walked straight into my lap, never once catching the line my body made against the cedar. Twenty-one yards. I watched his eyes, read his shoulders, let the bow come to full draw like I’d rehearsed in a thousand empty rooms. The quartering-to angle stacked clean in my sight. I found my spot and let the arrow go.

The hit sounded right—a deep, hollow note you feel before you hear. He surged downhill, weaving the ribs of the slope. The does blew behind me, hard, alarmed at the empty space where he’d been. I ran the spine of a steep landslide to get a last look before the ridge folded him away. There—moving stiff, walking away. It looked good. It looked like a deer leaking out of time. I backed out and gathered the crew. John, Mike, and Dan had just hit the bottom of the draw when I reached them. I told them what I’d seen, what I’d heard, how the arrow felt off the string. We gave him time. We gave the clock its due.

When we returned, the hill gave us clues in the dim: first a bright splash, then a run of fine drops, each one angled like an arrow pointing the way. The blood said pass-through. The brush said a hit not low—forward enough to hurt him fast. We found my arrow as if it had been gently placed on the ground, painted end to end. Coyotes started up from the direction I’d last seen him. The hair on my neck rose. We could wait and do this by perfect daylight, I thought, or we could finish the job now and make sure the story ends the way it should. We went.

The trail was honest but dark, and it eventually led us to a bed - the dirt churned by a last circle. My stomach dipped—did we push him?—and then, ten steps below, another spatter pitched downhill. He’d rolled from that bed to the creek bottom, the slope doing what slopes do, until a lone cedar reached out and stopped him with a green arm. Coyotes yipped again. That didn’t matter anymore.

He was there—perfectly still. The last steam of the day had vanished from him. The arrow had driven true, tucking forward through muscle and protection to the life inside, exactly where my mind had drawn the line when my pin floated. He’d passed within a minute. Quick is a promise we owe them; tonight, that promise held.

For a long beat, I didn’t move. And then I made fun of myself—my doubts were past mistakes screaming in my head. You hunt hard and you hunt right, but the moment you lay a hand on him is still a quiet thunder. The stalks, the waiting, the evading of eyes and ears and nose, the quick math of wind and angle and distance—all of it telescoped down to this single, still animal beneath a cedar that grew just tall enough to be part of the story. John’s headlamp swung in; Mike’s followed; Dan set his pack down and let out the breath we were all holding.

Work began. Knives brightened in the beams. We opened him carefully and cleanly, hands warm in the cold, rib by rib giving way to a season’s worth of meals. Meat into game bags, bags into packs, straps cinched until the night felt like it wrapped around our shoulders tightly. Coyotes talked across the creek but stayed away. Maybe it was four men in the dark. Maybe it was the same wind that had kept the does calm and delivered that buck like a secret.

We climbed out through worn cattle trails, a cow’s carcass pressed into a ditch, still reeking of death. We followed the slope’s fingerprints back the way we’d come, each step negotiated, each footfall tested. The cold found every gap in our layers, but now it felt like relief. The stars came out one by one as if they were being counted. Above us the ridgeline held its jagged breath, and the cedars gave off that cracked, resinous smell you only notice when you finally stop thinking about everything else. We moved steadily, no wasted motion, a small convoy of light and halos of breath.

At the truck, the night went quiet again. Packs thumped down. Someone laughed—maybe from relief, maybe because the alternative had kept poking at the edge of our thoughts: to come back at dawn and find coyotes had told a different ending. We’d made the right call. We’d come at it with patience, then urgency, then respect. We’d treated the animal like meat and meaning at once, the only honest way I know.

Later, when warmth returned to my fingers and the steam rolled off the quarter bags in the cold, I thought about the day the way you think about a good book you don’t want to finish. The does that never caught me. The four bucks and the fourth one stepping into range. The 21-yard shot that flew exactly as it should. The moment on the landslide where I saw him moving away and the decision to go slow. The bed and the doubt, and then the lone cedar holding him like a period at the end of a long sentence. The friends—John, Mike, and Dan—who turned the work into a memory I’ll be able to lift and hold years from now.

Finding your buck isn’t the shot. It’s the whole arc: the restraint, the reading of sign, the choice to let time work until time stops working for you, and then the willingness to shoulder the weight and carry it out into a frigid, star-punched night. Out there in that November river country, the story came together exactly the way it should. And when I finally laid a hand on him, it wasn’t triumph I felt most of all—it was a feeling I haven’t found the words for. It’s human.

I crept through the forest, all silent and flat,
In search of a blacktail with my bow & camo hat.
I moved like a whisper, not making a sound,
When a flutter of wings came a-whirling around.

A bandtailed pigeon, all feathers and pride,
Came gliding above like a boss on a ride.
And just as I paused to glass out afar
SPLOT! on my hat… and a little my shirt.

It splashed on my fingers, my sleeve got a splatter,
The deer got away, like it even did matter.
I looked to the sky, gave a sigh and a grin,
“Next time,” I said, “warn me before you begin!”

So here’s to the hunt and the mess it can bring

To wild little moments that don’t mean a thing.
You train and you focus, you plan and prepare…
And get dive-bombed by pigeons without any care.

Finding meat.

I've been too busy.

This felt great.

The end.

I sure do miss my dad. Its been 15 years today.

❤️❤️

The Reckoning Wild

He left the truck behind at the edge of the overflowing river, locking it more out of habit than necessity. The wilderness ahead was shrouded in mist, the trail vanishing between the towering trees like a thought slipping away. He adjusted his pack, feeling the weight of the gear inside—coffee he’d likely drink cold—but it didn’t matter. Out here, the routines were simple: walking, breathing, staying warm. In the simplicity, he hoped for clarity. But clarity rarely came easily.

The silence arrived quickly. At first, it was a balm, a reprieve from the dull hum of modern life. But then it grew heavier, louder, the absence of sound becoming a presence all its own. He stopped on the trail, listening. No birds, no wind, no creak of trees. Just his own breathing and the endless churn of thoughts in his head. He’d read once that true silence could unhinge a person, and he could feel the truth of that now.

For years, he’d sought these solitary escapes, drawn to the wilderness like a moth to a flame. But what he found wasn’t always peace. More often, he found a battle—a reckoning with himself, his choices, his regrets. The wilderness didn’t create these feelings; it simply peeled back the layers and forced him to face them. Out here, there was no noise to drown out the doubts, no distractions to mask the fears. The silence was total.

He walked on, trying to focus on the trail, the mist clinging to his boots, the cold seeping through his jacket. But the thoughts came anyway. They took on shapes, vague but familiar, like shadows in the fog: mistakes, failures, questions he couldn’t answer. He wrestled with them, knowing the wilderness didn’t care. It was just a stage, indifferent to his struggle.

And then, breaking through the fog, came the sharp, haunting call of an elk. A bugle that echoed through the canyon and brought him to a standstill. His heart quickened. The thoughts—the heavy, oppressive ones—vanished as quickly as they had come. He scanned the treeline, his breath catching in his chest.

Moments like this had a way of pulling him out of the depths. Spotting a good buck bedding down in the breaks, fresh s**t on the trail—each one could jolt him back into the present, like a lifeline tossed into dark waters. They didn’t just distract him; they gave him purpose, setting him on a path that only a hunter could understand.

It was this duality that kept him coming back. When he headed into the wild, he never knew which version of it he would meet. Sometimes it was the silence and the struggle, the reckoning that left him hollowed out and exhausted. Other times it was this: the sharp thrill of the hunt, the instinctive pull of tracking and stalking, of being a part of something ancient and raw.

He thought of the prophets—wandering their own wildernesses, battling their demons, searching for clarity. He wondered if they had experienced the same thing: the push and pull of despair and purpose, of being stripped bare and then given just enough to carry on. He doubted it was much different. The wilderness, after all, is eternal.

When the elk bugle faded into the trees, he stood there for a moment longer, his hands gripping a bow. The fog curled and swirled around him, indifferent to his presence, and the silence crept back in. But it wasn’t as heavy now. Not yet. He felt the trail calling him forward, the promise of another sign, another moment to pull him from the edge.

The wilderness doesn’t promise anything. It doesn’t care if you find what you’re looking for. It only reflects what you bring into it. The reckoning never ends. But there are moments—brief, fleeting, impossible to predict—when the fog clears, the silence breaks, and the path appears. And in those moments, the wild shows you what it is.

He started walking again, his boots crunching on the trail, the air cold and sharp in his lungs. He didn’t know what he would find. He never did. But out here, that was the point.

The sun hadn’t crept over the hills yet, but there I was, slipping through the Northern California wild, stalking a shadow the size of a whiskey barrel, shuffling its weight through new acorns and dust. The world was still and loud all at once; every twig snap underfoot was a cymbal crash, every rustle in the brush a bass note rumbling low. I’d been trailing him for close to an hour, this king of the wild boars, this rumbling beast with shoulders like an old Buick and a hide thick as a whiskey-drunk promise.

I kept a distance, watching him through branches and sun, waiting for the moment he’d settle, waiting for a shot. He moved like he owned the place, heavy as a locomotive and twice as sure. Eventually, he dropped into a wallow, easing himself in like a preacher into his Sunday best. I steadied myself at 8 yards. The bowstring felt like it was holding the weight of every hunt, every old tune you hum to yourself when no one’s around.

And then—thunk. Arrow found flesh, buried deep in that big slab of wild bacon. The boar heaved, we faced off, then went still, and the world stopped for a beat. In the quiet that followed, I cut him down to what he’d give, loaded my pack with slabs of meat.

The weight on my back was like a growing migraine, and each step back was a three-and-a-half-mile hymn to aching bones, the kind of gospel that only the wilderness can sing. Just me and the old road, alone with that lonesome, heavy beat.