Several elk seasons back. I was unpacking some of my outdoor gear after a mountain trip to store it until the following hunting season. There was a box of stuff in my den that needed sorting and storing, as my wife kept reminding me. I suppose I had put off this chore as much because I didn’t want to admit the season had closed as because of my ingrained procrastination.

    Reluctantly, I dumped the box of tangled gear onto the floor to begin the sorting. From somewhere among the items drifted a single leaf, and it floated lightly to the carpet, catching my eye as it fell from the box. I picked it up by its stem and turned it over to look at its off side as I sat down in a chair. It was an aspen leaf, so out of place here in the Deep South. It had tucked itself away there among the heavy gloves and pullover caps and topographical maps.

    I leaned back in the easy chair, my eyes fixed on the leaf, and drifted back in time some three months earlier to a place in the West where groves of aspen trees stand in tightly assembled regiments across vast mountainsides. Closing my eyes, I could see the quaking leaves of summer flashing a million diamonds of sunlight as each leaf twists to and fro in the mountain breeze. I saw the patches of yellow among the branches as the autumn sun moved farther toward the south each day.

    Even now I see the scene clearly. The white frost glistens in the morning light as September counts down its last days. Soon all the leaves are pure gold, glowing and perfectly still in the moonlight and flashing, sparkling on the daytime winds. The great elk bugle and bark and chirp as they drift among the aspens and take bites from the snow-white bark, leaving permanent black marks as evidence of their passing.

    Mule deer does stare at the landscape, watching for danger as the wide antlered bucks lie behind them in the aspen thickets. I am there again, hunting the animals of the aspens; truthfully just using the hunting as an excuse to be there in that world.

    I hide among the aspens and bugle a challenge to the majestic herd bull and he replies with a scream that thrills me and every life form on the mountain. His call says “I will kill you,” and I believe him. As usual he eludes me, defeats me, but I am not disappointed.

    The day comes when I spot the big mule deer buck standing statue still, watching me from a distance of three football fields. He has seen me first of course and he stands frozen in place as an aid to concealment. My heart pounds at the sight of the big gray deer with the white face and wide ears beneath branched antlers.

    It seems to take minutes rather than seconds to lie prone and brace the rifle against the base of the aspen tree. The rifle and its load are made for such long shots and I am soon stroking the thick, gray coat of the buck, enchanted by the animal’s elegance.

    My sheath knife turns the buck into quartered venison which cools in the evening air. I pack out the meat and the antlers, the beginning of the end of a hunt which replicates those of countless hunters in all of man’s centuries.

    Maybe it was on this day after sundown, as I picked up and washed my knife in the stream, or as I retrieved my coat from the needle grass slope or as I shouldered the last of the quartered deer, that a single, moist aspen leaf clung to one of the items. Perhaps it stuck there through the trip out and remained as I packed the gear for the trip home. And there it is, lying on my carpet; a single brilliant aspen leaf.

    “Thank you,” I whisper to the leaf. My wife enters the room and wonders aloud why I haven’t cleaned up the “mess”. “Why are you just sitting there?” she asks. “And what’s with that smile on your face?”