Deer season opened this weekend.

 Friday night I stayed at my camp, nestled in a sleeping bag as the temperature fell through the 20s, and listened to the coyotes howl beneath the stellar sky. At 6 the next morning I picked my way through the dark woods to the base of a maple tree and climbed the ladder stand that leaned against it.
 I sat there for an hour in the dark and watched through the lightening dawn as the woods slowly came to life. The squirrels awoke first, and then the chickadees, and as the sun cleared the hill to the east and its rays hit the top branches of the first trees, the frost from the night air melted and collected and a steady dripping of water spread across the woods until after 8.
 But there were no deer.
 And at 10, bored, I got down and began to still hunt. Take a step, count to 100, take another step or two, count to 100 again. Pushing through a swampy thicket I heard a shot first on the far side and then, an hour later when I turned 90 degrees, there was a shot on the new far side, and I realized that I had pushed the deer from my property onto neighboring land where luckier hunters were waiting.
 In the early afternoon I slung my gun and climbed up a high pine tree and stood in its branches for a couple of hours, watching over a tangled field. I climbed down and went back to my truck and called home and then circled the property and went back to the pine tree where I didn’t climb down until after the sun had set.
 The next day was Sunday and I went to church with my family. But I didn’t stay for the potluck after as I was going back to the woods. Hunting on Sunday is against my religion but I figured of all the things I’m going to hell for this is probably the least onerous.
 And even though I was sinning by hunting on a Sunday I wanted God’s help with what I was doing. I always pray that I will be safe and successful, but as I drove out to my land it came to me that I should ask God where to hunt.
 Up the tree stand, in the big pine, where?
 As I said that silent prayer, as I asked that silent question, a thought immediately came into my head. I don’t know if such things are from me or from God, but I have tried to operate in recent years on the principle that if I ask and anything like an answer pops up, I will act on it. Quickly, unquestioningly, I will just act on it.
 Maybe that’s faith, maybe that’s superstition. Maybe I am a self-deluded old fool, or maybe I am becoming wiser.
 Either way, an immediate thought came.
 It was that I should take a specific folding chair I have – a fishing chair with arms, not one of the armless metal chairs I have through the woods for birdwatching – and sit in it at the head of a ravine on my property. Three deer trails cross that ravine and it came to me that I would have a field of fire that covered all three of them if I sat at the top of the ravine.
 I have never sat in a chair to hunt before.
 I have never considered that ravine as a place to hunt. I had never thought that there was a straight line that you could see the length of the ravine.
 And I had presumed to go back to one of the trees, or to climb a third. I presumed I would spend the hours leading to dusk sitting on a bench in one tree or standing on the branches of another.
 But I had the thought and my plan is to follow such thoughts. Plus, it seemed plausible. There was an immediate logic for why that would be a potentially good place to wait for deer.
 So when I got to my camp I dug out the folding chair and I walked to the head of the ravine and, sure enough, cozied up behind a tree to conceal myself, there was an excellent line of fire right down the length of the ravine. Any deer crossing on the trails would give me an easy profile shot.
 I nestled into the chair, held the gun at a low ready, and sat very still, waiting.
 In my mind, I figured the deer would come soon. I had been led to this place and this tactic and must be God wanted me to have a deer or two. Must be he was going to give me that blessing.
 There were two and a half hours until dusk.
 In the middle of the second hour, I got drowsy. I hadn’t slept well the night before, it had been a long week, I was coming down with a cold, and I started to slip into REM. It was three or four times, those brief moments of semi-consciousness where things don’t look right or make sense and then it blurs and your head snaps as you recognize what’s happening and you wake yourself up.
 I wrestled with that as I watched and waited.
 A little after 5, the woods much darkened, I accepted the outcome of the day and stood up, folded the chair and walked out.
 
I felt badly because this year we really need the deer. Part of our feed-the-family plan is at least one and hopefully two deer in the freezer. And here I had wasted half a day’s hunting during an already short season.
 At that point I reasoned in my head that the impulse of earlier had not been God, it had been me. It was just some phenomenon of auto suggestion, a superstitious fool interpreting his own thoughts as God’s will.
 If God had sent me there, I thought, I would have gotten a deer.
 Which is when the second impression of the day came. Lightning fast, like a mental quip, a simple phrase, almost specific words.
 “Or you could have fallen out of a tree and died.”
 I instantly understood.
 I pray for safety and success. In this answer, I got the former, not the latter.
 Spending a long afternoon in a tree, either standing on a branch or sitting on a step, near 20 feet above ground without a harness or safety belt, one head snap of passing drowsiness and I could easily have toppled to serious injury or death.
 But I hadn’t.
 When those moments of fatigue came, I was sitting on the ground, in a chair with arms, safe from falling.
 God answered my prayer, and he saved my life.
 Or maybe it’s all a coincidence and nothing would have happened and I wasted an afternoon’s hunting time.
 Which it is is a matter of personal interpretation. It is faith or superstition, a belief in God or a belief in hooey.
 I don’t know.
 But I do know the first time I ever dozed off deer hunting I was in the one place where I could do so safely.
 Because I acted on an impulse which I believed to be the whispering of God.
 Because he cared to help even a Sabbath breaker like me.