Interesting how, now that my hunting gear is squirreled away till next year, my sparse venison supply long ago consumed, Mother Nature has dropped two perfect snowstorms for deer hunting in less than a week. The old hag must be looking out for the deer in my neighborhood; at least that’s how it appears on the surface. And I can’t say it surprises me much, either. I guess that’s just the way it goes.

Yeah, I know we got a snowstorm during shotgun season, one that gave us everything required to cut fresh tracks and follow them. But I can remember getting out of the truck that morning, slipping on my coat and orange vest, loading my gun, taking a few steps across the alfalfa field in light, shin-deep Conway snow and saying to my buddy, “We got way more than we needed,” which meant, “Why couldn’t we have gotten 1-3 inches of soft, wet snow instead of a foot? Well, that 1-3 came overnight Monday, following a perfect inch Sunday, at a time when it did local deer hunters no good at all.

Dogging tracks in this stuff would have been a breeze, no resistance as you put one foot in front of the other, no lifting of the feet, and no unzipping your coat and removing your hat to wipe your brow as you made your way through the woods.

Even though it wasn’t ideal, you could live with the snow we got that second week of shotgun before rain fell, crusting the snow and making it noisy, particularly at icy first light; and that’s not even considering the way crunchy snow changes deer habits. Essentially what that thick, noisy crust did was shut down deer movement for five solid days, which was easy enough to figure out. After that crust formed, you couldn’t find a fresh track on the busiest trails you’d been monitoring for weeks.

Well, you ought to see those runs now; right back to where they were before the icy snow; converging on a small standing cornfield from all directions, through people’s yards, across driveways, alongside barns and dog kennels — picking at moist cover crops barely poking through the snow. No fear under dark winter skies.

The good news is that they’ll be back next year, multiplied by two or more. No one did any damage to the deer we hunted, and the herds there will be better for it. In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to settle for market meat … again.