Tagged: deer

While following deer trails in snow you'll find pellets of scat and tufts of hair – coarse grey and white hair, hollow in cross-section. A more coveted souvenir are "sheds” – cast-off antlers.

After breeding ends in December, deer antlers loosen at the base. Once-formidable weapons of territorial defense drop with testosterone levels in January. The shed antlers cast by bucks and bull moose each winter are often promptly buried by snow.

I have done a lot of things in New Hampshire.

I have climbed Mount Monadnock in a sleet-storm, ridden a snow machine deep into the woods of Coos County; I have met future presidents, made maple syrup, split untold cords of firewood, battled ice dams, swallowed black flies; I’ve eaten beans that had been cooked in a hole in the ground in Berlin. 

I’ve been to the Isles of Shoals and to Donald Hall’s living room.

I once presented Hugh Gregg with the gift of a sack full of turnips. 

But last fall, after more than two decades of trying, I finally earned real New Hampshire credibility.

I pulled a deer out of the woods in November. 

Okay, I helped. 

Okay, I drove. 

But still.