You have to have an eye for what you hunt; your vision must be attuned. Almost aU the world is camouflage, and even what isn't is often meant to draw us away from what's hidden and trying to stay that way. I was hunting chukars once, along the breaks of the lower Salmon River, not far from Riggins, Idaho. I'd been climbing up a rugged, cheatgrassinfested slope for probably 600 or 800 vertical feet, and I was wheezing from the effort. I could hear my heart. My shotgun felt as heavy as a manhole cover, and though it was cool out, the sweat ran down my forehead and burned my eyes just as I crested a knob, a false summit halfway up the ridge from the river. I stopped to rest, to catch my breath, and that's when I noticed, across a narrow sage-clotted swale, that the ground opposite where I stood appeared to be moving. It looked as though it were migrating right up the slope and out from under its vegetation. I blinked. Chukars. A herd of them, a flock on the ground. They were running, and when I swung the shotgun up they exploded into flight, reversed direction, and were gone before I'd even tightened my finger over the trigger. I'd been there on that hump of land, not ten yards away, for close to seven or eight seconds before I saw them going, or before I understood what I saw. And I remember crouching with a friend outside his pickup, as he whispered to me and pointed. "Ten o'clock from that real red stand of sumac there, a buck and two does." He was pointing and I could see the bloody smear of the sumac, but that was all. I didn't want to admit I couldn't see the deer. And then suddenly I could see them. They seemed to melt into place, to shimmer into being, to emerge from the background. "Right," I said, "I see them," and I must have looked away then, maybe at him, to acknowledge my thanks, because then I couldn't find them again, until it seemed to me that I quit looking, until I quit imposing what I assumed I knew to be there and simply saw what I saw. A whitetail buck,