There was an arrow in the light. It was a flickering shaft that danced through the golden glow of late afternoon in the far mountains, cutting a graceful arc toward a target that it never hit. It snapped past the deer and disapperared, lost in the depths of the shadows and the forest floor. The deer raised its head, curious at the strange sound, the muffled hissing that an arrow makes as it drags its fletching through the air. But the deer never saw the arrow. And it never saw me. And I did not shoot again. I stood quietly behind some brush and watched the deer as it searched for food at the edge of a stand of timber. I blinked my eyes, and at the end of the blink the deer was gone, instantly, quietly. I never saw it again. I don’t know why I never hit the deer. I could hit other targets with my arrows—old paper cups, bits of dead wood, clumps of grass—but I never hit the deer. Chaser tried to explain it to me. “If you kill the deer,” he said, “the hunt is over. And for you the game is in the hunt, in the process, in the journey, in the stalk, in your mind. You don’t want it to be over. It is important to you that things stay in balance, that the deer stay in the forest, that the arrow stay in the air. You are most alive when the arrow is in the light. Oh, you wouldn’t mind too much if you actually killed the deer. You are, after all, a hunter. But you won’t kill the deer.” For years, I did not believe that. I was, after all, a hunter. When autumn came to the mountains of West Virginia and the air turned to a pure, cool liquid that flowed across my face and into my chest, when the turning leaves painted the high ridges with color that caressed my eyes, when the fragrance of the moist forest floor drifted magically through my mind and stayed there, to be renewed year after year with the coming of another autumn . . . When autumn came, I became a hunter.