Fair Warning. This is a slight column, and this month I am asking it to bear the first of two exploratory parsings of hunting on public lands. There’s a lot to consider there — health of land, taking of animal life, juxtaposition of wild land and suburbia — but before you think, “Spare me the deep thinking,” I offer you a promise: My exploration arrives via story, via one of those little experiences that, if we’re lucky, animate our lives.

So. October arrives, and its first day shines like a found silver dollar. As afternoon deepens, I put away my work and drive a few minutes to Crystal Spring Farm, the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s gift to us all of a nearby wild, fitted attractively around a working farm and (when we all figure out COVID-world, and it can move back to its original site) a popular Farmers’ Market.

I get to hunter-parking along a field’s edge first; Rob, who has generously offered to take me on his evening hunt, arrives a few minutes later. It is archery season for deer, and BTLT gives permits to a small number of hunters to hunt on selected properties, Crystal Spring among them.

Rob gets out, zips on a jacket with the broken patterns of camouflage, dons it a like cap, and retrieves his BowTech Fuel with its three arrows. I know already from an earlier meeting, that this bow has a 50-lb draw (with which I struggled).

Five minutes later we arrive at a small corral of oak branches still clothed with dead leaves and set back in some field’s-edge woods. Why here, I wonder, and as if anticipating my question, Rob points to two faint tracks that join some 10 yards in front of the corral at the field’s verge. Now alerted, I can see where deer have walked. Rob pulls aside some branches, we walk into the blind, and he pulls the branches back in place. When I unfold my chair and sit, I look over this wall of leaf and wood and can see clearly a 20-degree stretch of field right where the faint tracks cross. Rob settles onto the stool he’s brought and whispers a little more orientation to me. In short, we’re here for roughly two hours until the end of legal light.

“I always assume,” says Rob, “that the deer hear or see me arrive. So our first job is to let them forget we’re here.” The woods seem to agree, as they have gone utterly silent; only the wind offers a light rustling of leaves. Twenty minutes later the forest relaxes: birds begin calling, squirrels and chipmunks begin nosing through leaves; I feel myself taken in a bit, accepted a little.

We whisper a bit, and Rob explains how he will scan what’s before him and pick out points at various ranges, so that, should a deer (or turkey, both are in season) appear, he can gauge how far away it is without moving. Which brings up the whole subject of range. “Bowhunting is intimate,” he says, looking out. “I couldn’t take an ethical shot much beyond the fringe of that row of carrots.” That is not much more than the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate, where, as a once-upon-a-pitcher, I could put a ball right into the small circle of the catcher’s mitt.

The ethics of shooting an arrow at an animal require lots of self-sorting, but they turn also on the fact that hitting a point on up to 80% of a deer’s body can create injury without killing. And that can create the hunter’s nightmare of an animal running off wounded and suffering. If, says Rob and my reading about hunting ethics, you decide to hunt, you owe it to your prey to be good at it. That means no wild or distant shooting at what might be a deer, which is a stereotypical fear among the non-hunting public.

All of this feeds my sense of expectation, which floods my awareness. I scan the open 20 degrees of field and far forest fringe. Across the field, shadows suggest animals shapes. My hearing amps up — birds, field insect trill and drone, anything that might be a step in the leaves.

What does appear is a reminder that we are “in town,” on its near edge. Voices come from the woods across the field. The two women and two children and two dogs, emerge where a green post signifies trail. They are at ease, buoyant as they cross the field’s edge. We hear them again as they pass some twenty yards behind our blind. The woods seem to hold their breath again. But not for long; soon the birds and insects resume. A chipmunk scoots through the blind. “The good news,” Rob whispers, “is that their dogs didn’t scent or sense us.”

My concentration on what’s before me resumes, seemingly naturally. A half-hour of nothing much happening (and, of course, everything happening) eases by. The light shifts a few F-stops; the pines across the field begin to look like upside-down paintbrushes dipped in yellow light. The insect chirr — chiefly from katydids and crickets — grows more audible. In the blind, it’s near dark.

Time dwindles, and Rob whispers that he’s heard some steps in the woods to our rear, and that he’s going to use a fawn call he has looped onto a string around his neck and see if a doe appears. The call bleats out into the falling night. Rob pauses, listens. Then the call bleats again. More silence, as if every being within earshot mulls this over. Then the mixed song of chirr and tweet and rustle resumes.

No animal appears. But clearly, I think, everything is near.

Next month: How conservation and hunting fit together.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. His book, “Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains,” was published by University Press of New England in April, 2018. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com