Having left the age behind when venison was our essential meat, we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed deer. In some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters. They are directly influenced by human civilization. In turn, civilization is dependent on them to the extent that they provide the basis for a multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is our hunter’s right that deer should exist, but we are not the hunters that we used to be. What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline, clothing, ammunition, whiskey? The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be more to our advantage than any claims we make on them. They are afraid of man and keep their distant beauty from him. The heritage _they_ keep is wildness, which still has the power to arouse fear in us, and sometimes pity, as we may pity all life, including our own, that is cut short or broken by the inexorable laws of the universe. On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and the sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some distance ahead of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two cars had just roared by with hunters in them, before she made her appearance. She seemed either wounded or exhausted, going very slowly, pulling her hindquarters stiffly behind her. When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew up and she went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only moderate speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs under the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men, who turned up their car heaters and sped away. Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked, and a hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass. I could see the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore road, waiting with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind, getting in and out of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,” sounded across the way. After a while a number of them began to hurry ahead, almost tumbling as they ran, to converge on a deer which had apparently run to the bottom of a hollow. They surrounded the hollow on all sides, many men standing on their car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether there was actually a deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to escape, I never learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood for comfort. The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the sea, not too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat--a very rough trade on that day for common flesh and blood--rocked forward through the waves. After a while the darkness began to fall, with a thin smoky yellow and pink band on the western horizon and a new blanket of gray clouds mounting overhead, so that all of us began to turn in under the cold breath of night.