Payback

117

If it had been November rather than early June, Dean would have bagged the biggest buck of his life, a magnificent animal with a rack wider than a limo. Even now, with some months’ worth of growth left, his horns made a magnificent crown at the top of his head.

Dean stared at the animal through his binoculars, no more than fifty yards away, mesmerized by the deer’s haughty stare through the morning mist. Clearly, the buck knew he was here, and yet the beast didn’t seem to care, so assured it was in the wild of the upper Delaware River Valley. It lowered its head slightly, then raised it back upright — a challenge, Dean thought, or perhaps an acknowledgment, before it turned and slowly trotted away.

“Even if it had been hunting season,” Dean told the deer as it left, “I might have let you go.”

He let the binoculars fall to his chest and walked back to the streambed, swollen with the recent rains. He’d come here to clear his head, and he had. What he hadn’t done was replace the clutter with a specific plan on what to do.

He longed for Lia — he could feel the familiar ache in his chest — but where exactly she would fit in his future, he didn’t know. As for everything else, including what he would do for work, all of that would have to wait. For now, he was simply experiencing what was around him.

Something rustled in the bushes ahead. Dean stopped. Before he could raise the binoculars to examine the area, a chipmunk darted out and ran across the gnarled roots of a nearby tree and disappeared. From the noise it had made, he expected something closer to a mountain lion, and he laughed when he realized the tiny rodent was all that was there.

A humbling experience, the woods.