Moving quietly through the woods over fallen leaves is a nearly impossible task. Despite this, we pressed on to our rocky overlook. Here we made our home. We sat, leaning our rifles on the boulders, stuck deep into the earth. Our view was a lake of darkness, nothing but cold wind moving through emptiness.
But joy comes in the morning ‐ as the sun slowly rose, the blackness turned blue, then blue-gray, then gray-brown, and then yellowish. The light was not yet pouring over the mountain ridge, but we saw clearly the gorgeous meadow-forest bordered by a lazy river. It is to this piece of land that we tied our fates. We watched, we froze, we hoped, and we waited for the opportunity for thunder to crack the air and harvest to be made.
As I sat in the woods of Virginia this past autumn, it became clear that what we were doing there was much more than waiting for a deer to show up. The woods, the cold, and the time all revealed that hunting can be about much more than sport and subsistence ‐ it can actually be a habit of virtue cultivation and character formation. And that is something we all desperately need.