Pesky undergrowth was impeding my travel as I made my way from a large opening in the woods where I had been making hen talk in hopes of attracting a wild turkey gobbler. I had to zigzag through the tangle of mostly bush-size trees laced with vines. I knew the creek lay ahead, but I had to travel the ridge top for a ways before dropping into the hollow where I could wade across.

Dodging thorny vines is not my favorite pastime, but it is hard for me to complain about most any hardship in the woods while hunting. There were others far away that day where there were no trees or vines in sight, only sand, who were hunting with quite a different purpose; and a dangerous one at that. How could I complain about being scratched, tripped and detoured by a few vines and bushes?

Instead, I chose to note the different tree species in the thicket that were causing the inconvenience. Trees are just one of a whole bunch of neat stuff to see in the woods while turkey hunting or hiking or just poking around. Huge beech trees had caught my eye first in the area because they were shedding their spring flower parts that had completed their duty of pollination that would set fruit for the growing season. Little fluffy greenish balls covered the forest floor beneath each of beech trees.

This ridge had quite a diversity of species. Besides the slick bark beeches I found huckleberry, sassafras, various oaks, poplars, elms, bays, maples, sweet gums, dogwoods and of course pines – both loblolly and spruce.

I was enjoying a mental inventory of various trees when something on the ground caught my eye. It was a buck deer skull complete with nicely shaped six-point antlers. I picked up the skull and looked it over. Its story came to mind almost immediately. Because no one really knows its story for sure, my version is just as likely true as any.

The skull lay less than 200 yards from a ryegrass field with a shooting house at its edge. Late one evening a couple of autumns earlier during deer season, the young buck had stepped into the field to graze the ryegrass before departing for a night of rambling. He chose an evening when a hunter was in the shooting house. He also let hunger cloud his judgment, causing him to step into the field before it got completely dark.

Whether because the hunter got a case of buck fever or because the oncoming darkness hindered his aim, the shot was off just a bit and the buck dashed from the field. Or maybe the shot was true and the deer made a typical last dash; flying through the brush while dead on his feet, dropping lifeless within just seconds.

The hunter was inexperienced in the behavior of fatally wounded deer, or he or she truly believed the shot was a miss or the hunter looked hard but never found the deer in the thicket. For whatever reason, the deer was lost and became a feast for the local coyotes, possums, buzzards and myriads of insects and microscopic organisms. Thus it was not a waste. Such a death never is. The hunter didn’t eat, but millions of other life forms did. That’s the way things work out here in nature.

So I brought the deer’s fine antlers and skull out of the woods with me. I nailed it up out back on a storage shed wall to remind me of beautiful bucks and their captivating antlers, and hungry critters that feed where they can, and life and death to which we are all a part.

And a happy day in the woods admiring trees and finding a story there replete with its abundant characters including a principal one; indeed one revealing the very plot of the story. And finally the plot’s appurtenances, like the nearby green planting and its shooting house, strewn all about as substantiation of this, another story of the wonders of nature.