Slow morning
By Nick Simonson
Those days when overcast conditions settle in well before dawn provide a unique time to be outdoors, particularly during deer season. The lack of the pinks and oranges streaking overhead from the eastern horizon and lighting up the sky early makes the anticipation of first legal light even more excruciating, despite the moment being governed by the time on my watch and not by what can be seen on the landscape. The dim grey of a foggy dawn, with clouds hanging so low you can’t tell where the sky ends and the land begins is like something out of a spooky movie. Such a dawn came on the first Saturday of deer firearms season. With my back positioned firmly against a rise along the western shores of a small water body on a wildlife management area, I squinted in the darkness, with the quarter moon occasionally appearing as a white circle of light through the thickening clouds overhead and the ebbing and flowing fog which rose from behind me. The whisps of mist climbed up the hill and spilled down into the small valley below, forming an uphill flow on the slight eastern breezes which filled the ravine of buckbrush, cattails and ribbon of creek with yet another element of cover for the deer I hoped to see, whenever I’d be able
to see them. The damp cold that came with it forced my thinly gloved fingers into my handwarmer pouch, and I set my rifle across my lap in anticipation for whatever light would come. In the foggy conditions, even the morning activity of the birds I’ve come to expect was muted.
