Mud, Blood, and Time
By Goo.
A rustling in the underbrush caused Alfred Regani’s hands to freeze in midair. He had been fidgeting in his tree stand more than usual today. Fred had not seen a single deer all season, and it was already Friday. The rustling noise kept coming closer and closer. Fred felt his heart speed up as adrenaline began to course through his veins. “Come on, just a little closer... just don’t be a fawn. Be a big ‘ole buck, c’mon... big rack; or at least big-bodied doe. Heck, I just want something to shoot at!” he muttered under his breath as the noise approached an opening in the forest. The lighting in the forest was very dim due to the sky being crowded with large, gray clouds; but Fred was still able to spot the monstrous buck as it emerged from the undergrowth. “Now that thing has horns!” Fred thought as he quietly shouldered his gun and laid the crosshairs right on the kill zone.
“Baboomm!” The report of the rifle desecrated the silence of the forest. The buck turned and dashed off towards the swamp. Alfred kept his scope trained on the fleeing animal, and noted that its tail was down and that it was not running well. He had definitely hit it. Fred got out of his tree stand and walked over to where the deer had been standing and anxiously began looking for blood. Sure enough, among the crisp, brown leaves carpeting the ground there was a small pool of blood right where it had stood when Fred pulled the trigger. A little further along there was a drop of blood. And then he found another, and another. He set off, following the blood trail that led straight to the gloomy swamp.
After tracking the trophy deer all the way across the swamp, he finally found it. After examining the enormous rack, Fred got down to business and began to gut it out. As he rolled the steaming entrails out of the dead body, he remembered why he never really enjoyed hunting. The rush of adrenaline right before he took the shot was incredible, but after the fact it was not so fun. Fred tied the drag rope around its bloody neck, but before he began his lengthy trek home he stopped and surveyed the terrain he would be traversing. The majority of the bog was covered in a shoulder-high grass which was brittle to the touch and brown in color. A small, scrawny tree clung to every mound of earth large enough to rise above the level of the water. As for the murky water itself, it was not yet cold enough to have frozen over; yet it was cold enough to chill to the bone. Tracking the deer across the swamp had not been much of a problem as Fred had been able to stick to high ground. But on the way back, he knew that the only route wide enough to drag a deer through would be straight through all the water.
His first step landed him in a mud hole that took him three minutes to crawl out of. The next step was hauntingly familiar. Fred agonizingly crawled across the swamp, swatting brush out of his way and trudging through knee deep water. Every several yards, he had to stop to recover from the sheer exhaustion that gripped him before he could even think of moving on.
“Why am I doing this?” he wondered. “How pointless is this? What does a deer really matter in the grand scheme of things, even if it is a twenty point buck? Really, what does it even mean for the here and now for that matter? Not a whole lot! What could I be doing instead of this? I could be at home, clean and warm, reading a book and enjoying the days off of school instead of staggering through a swamp, covered in mud, and freezing my butt off!” Unlike his slow rate of travel induced by the dead weight of the deer, Fred’s mind was racing. “Really, I don’t even enjoy deer hunting. Sure, shooting guns is fun, and killing a deer is even more fun. But everything else, everything else is just horrible. I really just wish I was skiing right now. MM, ah, for the love of snow! What is it that really matters to me? Well let’s see: God is first and foremost, He’s most important. And then comes skiing! Oh yeah, I wisssshhhh I was skiing! Either that or mountainboarding or mountainbiking. Something interesting. Something that isn’t as horrible as dragging a deer through this puke-hole of a swamp!”
He tripped over a small hillock and landed face-first in the trough of water that he was following. The intense physical exertion and the smell of the rotting vegetation in the bog were almost too much for him to handle. He fought to keep his breakfast down while slowly clambering to his feet. After mulling it over, Fred made his decision. “Well, I’ve made up my mind. I’m done hunting. I’m moving to Colorado, and every year when hunting season comes around, I’m just going to go skiing! The payouts from hunting are just not worth the effort. I am finished!” Having resolved his dilemma, Fred turned his mind to his physical battle. On he fought, determined to make it home with his kill, even though it really was not worth it to him. Finally, after an hour of waging war with the watery wasteland, he stumbled onto dry land. He was home free.
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