I’ve felt it for a few weeks, the sensation becoming more palpable with each passing day. Watching a single yellow windblown leaf drift down to rest upon the receding waters of a swollen Noxubee River last week as I drove home, I felt a quickening.

The cool evenings and mornings of late seem to have awakened it inside of me even more, which solidifies my belief that it is instinctual, that it is hardwired into who I am. It is a yearning that goes to my very core.

Labor Day weekend, when I took the dogs out at first light to take their morning constitutionals, I could hear shots in the distance, shots that have always marked its beginning for me — a beginning in which I am normally an active participant, but could not be this year as we were moving our daughter, Tate.

Those shots, echoing throughout the silence of the morning, were the shots of dove hunters, and their ringing booms have always signaled the beginning of hunting season for me.

I do not want to rush time, but the cooler temperatures and the turning and falling of the leaves hint that fall is coming. It is a welcomed change. The grass has begun to slow its growth. Farmers are cutting and baling the last hay of the year, and I look forward, with great delight, to my last mowing.

As we age, time becomes more fleeting and more precious, and for me, that inner sense of a quickening becomes more keen with each passing hunting season. Why is this? Why do I feel this almost gravitational pull toward the hunt and the harvest?

Why do I feel it necessary in a world where food is so readily available, for most, to take an active part in the process of providing that food for myself and for my family? I think the quickening that I feel with the coming season speaks to that most boldly. It is, as I said earlier, hardwired into my being.

Author Rick Bass speaks eloquently to this inner longing in his book “The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes.” In the words of Bass, “The blood remembers things the mind never knew. The body leans toward these old invisible things.”

Obviously, things were not always as they are now, and our ancestors took a much more active part in their day-to-day sustenance and survival. We were hunter gatherers, not grocery shoppers and “drive-thru-ers.” It was a way of life, a necessity for living, rather than a weekly chore with a shopping list.

As such, I have come to realize that my quickening is a longing to take a more active role in that process. That active participation has given me an intimate knowledge of the land here at the farm, and I consider that one of the greatest blessings of my life.

In his essay “The Parish and the Universe,” Patrick Kavanagh spoke to this when he wrote, “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.” Each season brings me a greater knowledge and appreciation of these hills and hollers, springs and ponds, and I realize that there is still more to be experienced and learned from them.

My experiences hunting the deer, turkey, ducks and small game that call this little biosphere home have also nurtured within me a much greater respect for each of them and for this place. I have done my best to instill the importance of this into my children and to impart it to those that hunt with me.

This respect for the game and fish we pursue was deeply rooted in the indigenous peoples that hunted these lands long before us, and it stands in stark contrast to much of what is portrayed as “hunting” on social media and television.

The respect for me is, as author Mark Boyle writes in his book “The Way Home,” a “…perspective [that is] similar to the widespread indigenous belief that in taking something’s life, a plant or an animal, you take on a responsibility for the well-being of its tribe… it’s a perspective that recognizes that the fate of every species, including our own, is linked to everything else.”

I have always been and will always be a hunter, and with time, I have come to understand the weight of that. I feel a deep responsibility to care for this place, and it is one I take very seriously. It is one that those of us who call ourselves hunters must feel if we hope to pass this privilege along to others.

Until next time, I look forward to seeing you out there in our great outdoors.

Email outdoors columnist Brad Dye at braddye@comcast.net.