The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were loaded with whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking up and down offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside from the two men that I could see in the boat, the shore was a world unoccupied, bright, wide, and cold, one about which the mass of us might care or know very little. On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the bay, black ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers rode the choppy waters. The bay also ran hard with whitecaps; and the wind with a bare fury roared head on at empty summer houses facing the north, and drove across headlands glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes in its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking and shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought the whole north with it and the gulls that hung there or rose steeply into it, were allied with its violence in a way that was hard to understand. Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of human preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in December, and the pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of guns like the hard slamming of doors, and down the highway at least every other car was loaded with hunters dressed in red, and on nearly every sandy side road several cars were parked. Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff looking out to sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in that direction. Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out of their cars like spectators at a football game, they seemed as covered with neon lighting as a city street. In fact many of them do come from cities to the north and south of the Cape, which can now be reached in much faster time than used to be the case, and they follow the same pattern as many of the summer tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who live away from streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The lookouts stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the woods where I live. The guns resound from all points of the compass. Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game birds. One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning from a hunting expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless. One man had managed to shoot a partridge on the way, but he ruefully admitted that someone had stolen it from the back of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started straggling back, while guns were still going off in what seemed a completely indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion. “Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great cheerfulness.