Every hunter has missed a deer that  he should have killed. After a miss it’s common to lie awake at night in your  bunk staring at the ceiling while thinking about what went wrong. That can go on  for a week if you miss on opening day.

But when you kill a deer, especially a big one you think about it for a lot longer than a week. You think about where it happened while drinking your coffee. You think about when it happened while driving your car. And you think about how it happened while walking your dog.

I thought about a buck that I killed almost every day for a year. I recalled every detail in my mind. When I finally realized that I killed that buck because of something I didn’t do I decided to write about it. Then the story wrote itself.

I was dogging on Monday morning of the second week. The dog was a hundred yards to my left when it let out a short yip. I immediately stopped and looked at the woods around me hoping to find a spot nearby to run to where I could see better or further.

But it was already too late. The dog let out a long howl. The chase was on. Within seconds I heard twigs and branches snapping so loud and fast that I knew something was coming all out in my direction.

Then I saw the bodies of two large deer racing over a ridge towards me about 50 yards away. The woods were too thick for me to shoot so I aimed at a two foot wide opening between some pine trees that I thought they would run through on their way by.

As I thought to myself – Pull the trigger when you see something brown in that opening - I was already pulling the trigger. It was a doe and it immediately changed direction after my shot and ran broadside to me at 20 yards away. I swung the bead of my gun back on its front shoulder. My finger touched the trigger and I was ready to shoot. But I suddenly decided not to.

That split second decision was the reason that I killed the ten point, 241 - pound buck that was with the doe.

I could instantly see that the doe was not moving through the woods the right way. It did not limp but it was not fluid. It did not move slowly but it was not leaping and bounding. It did not hunch in pain but it was not elongated with fear and adrenaline and speed.

I knew that doe was dead on its feet.

I knew that because of the time I’ve spent watching deer while hiking in the woods before and after hunting season. I knew because I forced every one of those deer to run away when I saw them. I knew because I watched their body language when they ran. I knew because I raised my arms pretending to hold and point a rifle at them until they ran from sight.

I was still holding my rifle upright on the doe that Monday morning when I decided not to shoot again. Instead I slowly moved my head a quarter turn to the left the way a rabbit does to check the blind spot behind it.

I saw the buck standing with his big rack and head and shoulders in the same opening where I fired the shot at the doe. What had been my window of opportunity was now his doorway to death. But instinct told him to stop at the threshold because he was having the same thought I just had. His head was lowered and tilted and he was thinking - something is wrong with that doe.

Then the dog howled and the buck snapped his head back to the sound and I swung the rifle barrel around to his shoulder.

I pulled the trigger as he was having his final thought. It was the same thought that many deer have just before they die.

He was wondering – what should I do now?
Three things made him have that thought, the shot I fired at the doe because he didn’t know where it came from, the body language of the doe because he had never seen a deer run that way, and the howl from the dog because it meant he had to decide which way to run. But he could not decide what to do because he was thinking about all three things at once.

That’s why he stopped in the opening. That’s why he was standing still. But that’s not why I killed him with one shot.

It was because of the shot I didn’t fire.

If I had fired a second shot at the doe the buck would have seen me and would have vanished from that opening in the woods before I looked his way.

I walked over to his body on the ground. His spirit had slipped, maybe in search of the doe. Less than thirty seconds had passed from the moment I saw them coming over the ridge.