He followed his uncle out the door and into fresh snow that swirled like fog beneath their boots. He could see faint traces of his father’s tracks, already disappearing in the wind. His father’s footprints forked to the right, toward the path that led to the ravine and the creek. The creek was Timmy’s favorite part of the property. The stone dells from which this part of the country took its name blossomed above the flowing water like great mushroom lids. It was easy to imagine people from ages past finding shelter beneath these shelves of rock green with moss in summer or tipped with icicles this time of year. It had been in a tree stand within sight of the creek that Timmy had spent the earlier part of the week, sitting with his father, waiting for bucks to come and drink. They had seen several does, some with fawns, but so far the bucks, with their thick winter coats and prized antlers, had proven elusive. In fact, the only bucks they had seen so far were strapped to the hoods of trucks at the roadside diner four miles down the county road, where they were displayed in the parking lot with no small pride before being shipped to processing plants that would carve the carcasses up into stacks of meat wrapped in white butcher paper. More than enough to fill an outdoor freezer.

They passed an abandoned bird feeder. The ground beneath it was normally scattered with seed shells, but by now the songbirds had all gone south. An inverted metal cone was attached to the steel pole beneath the feeder to discourage foraging squirrels. Timmy had seen them from the windows, scrambling up the pole and somehow clawing their way to the top, doing the impossible for a few forgotten seeds. He admired their pluck, their singleness of purpose, and silently hoped that his uncle wouldn’t make good on his promise to shoot the next one he caught “stealing from the birds.”

He followed his uncle’s footsteps in the snow through ragged white rows of corn stalks in an otherwise empty field. The sun-bleached leaves rattled in the wind. Ears of seed corn half-eaten drooped from broken stems. Having grown up with the rhythms of planting and harvesting, watching corn plants shoot from the ground in spring and summer as he rode in the cab of his father’s tractor, the sight of these desiccated skeletons never failed to move him. In his nascent conception of the order of things, in the end, winter always won.

He took a few quick steps to catch up. His scarf was already wet against his nose and mouth. He pushed it down beneath his chin to speak.

“Why do we plant the corn? Is it for the deer?”

His uncle did not slow his stride.

“Yep. Deer bait. They get hungry once it starts snowin’.”

It seemed sneaky to Timmy, to feed the deer the way one might feed a pet, then turn around and shoot them. It seemed a little bit like lying. He kept these thoughts to himself.

At the end of the field they veered right and walked along the edge of another long clearing once used by his grandfather as an airstrip. Timmy vaguely remembered the one time he’d ridden with his grandfather in the plane. He’d cut his hand on the door frame climbing into the craft and had spent the short flight sucking blood from his fingers. The noise of the engine had been so loud that he couldn’t make out a word his grandfather was saying. He remembered pretending to look at whatever his grandfather was pointing to on the ground, the whole time wishing that instead of using his hands to point at things, his grandfather would keep his hands on the controls.

The deer blind wasn’t much, just a short shed made of leftover lumber with no door and rectangular holes for windows. His uncle had to crouch to enter and could not stand up straight once inside. There were two wooden chairs with plastic yellow cushions whose foam stuffing had been chewed by mice. The floorboards were made of knotted pine that had aged the color of ashes. His uncle rested his rifle across his lap and searched his pockets for a box of shells. Timmy sat next to him and watched him feed the bullets into the chamber and ratchet back the lever. His uncle leaned forward and made a sweep of the field through the scope.