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moose had been found dead from loss of blood because of ticks.
    But in the fall life comes to the swamp; relatively easy life. The bugs are down for the winter, the peat is frozen solid and the land becomes passable.
    John’s great grandfather had made his farm along the edge of this swamp. Far enough away to avoid the worst clouds of mosquitoes, close enough to get good soil. And while Clay had trouble now and then with wolves, the farm had easy access to good deer hunting.
    The swamp was perfect cover for the raising of deer, for hiding fawns from wolves, and that was important. The wolves hunted deer, coursed through them, in the winter, like sharks hitting schools of fish.
    When he was small and came across his first wolf kill, it had bothered John. When wolves killed it was usually in brutal fashion, at least by some human standards—a slow and tearing death. A pulling down and closing off of life.
    But later John realized that there wasn’t aright or wrong way about wolves hunting and killing the deer. There was just the wolves’ way. That was the way they were and had nothing to do with what man thought was right or wrong. John still didn’t like it, but at least he thought he understood it and that helped him when he discovered the fawns the wolves had taken and torn to pieces.
    But because the wolves were so active in the fall, the deer moved away from them and that meant they moved out of the swamp, which in turn meant that deer hunting became very good around the edges of the swamp. John now worked on the western edge. Or perhaps it might be best to say that he was at the edge of the edge, working in.
    Around the outside there were huge hardwood forests that had once been logged off but were now coming back and they were mixed with stands of poplar and willows. The deer browsed in the willows when the snow got too deep for them to get at low plants, and John moved quietly through the willows, stooping and weaving, taking deliberate steps, stopping often to listen.
    Deer are not silent. When they run through the willows in the fall and the willows are dry andhard it sounds like somebody tipping over a lumber cart.
    But there was no sound this gray dawn and John decided the deer hadn’t yet moved this far out of the swamp. Then, too, there were no new tracks in the fresh snow.
    He worked slowly further into the edge of the swamp, hitting the deep grass and the open areas of the bog.
    It was full light now, with the top edge of the sun slipping up over the tree line to the east. Tight cold had come down and he felt it working into his shoulders. He had just rezipped his jacket when he heard the noise.
    It was a releasing sound, as if a branch or tree which had been held had been turned loose—a kind of swoosh —in back of him, back to his right, and he froze, waiting for another sound to guide him.
    None came.
    He turned and took two steps, then two more, and so covered a distance of perhaps thirty yards through the willows until he came to a deer bed.
    It was about a yard across, where snow had melted down to bare swamp grass in a cupped little warm place under a stand of willows.
    Very cozy, he thought. It almost looked inviting.He knelt next to the bed and felt the grass and it was still warm. That had been the sound. A deer had been here in its storm bed—John knew they holed up sometimes when it snowed—and he had walked past it and it had jumped up, apparently hitting the willow on the way.
    It must have surprised the deer, his coming, because the first tracks were more than ten feet from the bed. The deer had bounded up and away. The next tracks were twenty feet from the first ones, out into a clearing and across, craters in the new snow where the deer had run.
    Well, he thought. I was close to one, anyway, even if I didn’t know it. He decided to follow the tracks, or work in the same direction as the deer.
    Better, he thought, to go after one you know is fresh than