“Waiting on a Buck”

Impatience gripped a belle of the woods as she sat hidden behind an upturned maple’s root ball. Up the steep slope in front of her, forty paces distant, three white-tailed does with nary an inkling of her deathly presence followed a meandering trail. The last kept looking back, offering the hope of a rutting buck’s pursuit… Tamara Neely, mid-1790s, one swamp east of the River Raisin in the Old Northwest Territory.