Mule Deer   The buck was beautiful -- eight-, ten-point rack, a silhouette on a hilltop against a dying high-country sky. But a dense thicket of thorn scrub, already near black   with shadow, filled the draw that lay between that buck and us. "My God --" my father whispered, becoming still. Impossible, this shot -- uphill, way out of range -- but I'd seen   what my father could do. He slowly raised his rifle, squinched his eye to the scope, stopped breathing, squeezed the trigger . . . CRACK -- and time stopped, stunned for just a moment, and damned if that crazy   son of a bitch, that buck, didn't fly ass over heels and crumple in a heap. We tore down into the draw, Dad yelled, "Keep your eyes on him!" Unblinking, half-crazed, I   watched the wounded buck stagger to its feet and disappear. We scrambled through the mud, scratched through the thorns, and found only blood spoor in the sagebrush -- the bastard had beaten   us. Just then, on the horizon, he crossed another hilltop a mile away, vanished into the ocean of night. I can't quite say we ever gave him up for lost.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont December, 2009