It’s pushing toward dusk on a pleasant summer evening and I’m returning from my nightly trip to the top of the hill where I run my dogs. I round the corner and approach the scalped, lime-green hayfield where the bales had been removed earlier in the day. There it stood — a solitary, erect, tawny deer, side profile, head turned and staring me square in the eyes from some 70 yards away. Cruising slowly, I let up on the gas pedal a bit to get a better look and can clearly decipher the three-inch velvet nubs sprouting inside his vertical ears, full alert. Sure enough, a buck soon to be grazing under The Full Buck Moon.

Also called the Full Thunder or Full Hay Moon, the full moon of July is more commonly known as the Buck Moon because bucks’ new antlers typically push through their foreheads coated of velvety fur this month. The antlers will be fully grown by September, when the bucks will rub saplings and larger immature trees in the forest to scrape off the velvet to a rock-hard sheen.

This particular animal, wearing it’s reddish summer coat, didn’t look particularly large, although it’s difficult to tell when it’s standing alone in a scalped hayfield bordering an infant silage cornfield that provide nothing to compare it to visually. But it’ll be interesting to follow the development of this animal, which will be seen again, and again, and again on my twice-daily trips.

I believe I’ve now seen this animal thrice; once crossing the road in front of me at midmorning, again standing behind a thin sumac stand in an open field, again at midmorning, then last week. What drew my attention to him the first time and twice since was the fact that he’s always been alone, not in a small herd as does most often appear. I’ll clearly see him again, probably alone, now that his antlers will allow me to differentiate between him and the does I more often encounter.

He may turn out to be a spikehorn, maybe even a 6- or 8-pointer by the time he becomes fair game. Perhaps he’s the pronghorn I missed with a slug in the blackening woods last December. Who knows? But this much we know for a fact: the animal’s made it through at least one hunting season so far, and the longer he survives, the tougher he’ll be to hunt without the aid of the Rutting Moon, which whittles away at a buck’s innate cautious skills.