The Deer Hunter.

The aluminum tip of the arrow could split a hair dropped on it in the morning twilight. He kept all his weapons of the hunt in peak condition, very much including his mind and body.

His mental functioning peaked around dawn. He didn’t know why, but it always had. His instincts and primal drives were always sharpest in the early morning.

The morning breeze on his chiseled face left a feeling of vigor in the ancient blind he and his granddad built so many years ago to pass on their timeless art of survival, something hailing from the earliest days of man in the mists of millennia past and never to be trifled with.

He had a solid feeling today. That buck he was tracking: sinewy, nine points, plenty of evidence of past fights and territory marking too. He felt the awe-inspiring beast deep in his bones. It was near.

In the blink-of-an-eye there he was. The hunter slowly raised his compound bow and got the light death machine of an arrow — the sharpest aluminum on the market — into position, aiming for the buck’s neck for a quick and merciful kill.

Deep breath in. Increasing pressure on the bowstring. Letting the metallic dog of the hunt go with a deep exhale. A sudden woosh! and the aging animal king of all he surveyed in those woods fell as a mighty oak would for winter firewood.

He stood in his garage. It was expansive, he had a few jeeps, a 1990s Chevy suburban, and an AMC Gremlin 410 which he restored to immaculate perfection and still purred like a tiger in heat. Warrant’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin“ blared throughout the concrete space on a powerful FM transponder carrying the by-now ”Classic Rock” that nurtured his generation in their youth.

The wife and two kids were gone by now, grocery shopping. He was too, in a manner of speaking.

He could never do this without crying. Every bit of the animal was sacred to him. Nothing would be thrown out beside the “trophy”.

Trophy hunters chase trends proving a fragile “manhood”. They were weekend warriors, not real hunters thankful for the catch of venison and the nourishment it provided. In fact, they often throw perfectly good meat out before heading back to cushy jobs in cities like St. Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

It sickened him to even think about being associated with that crowd. Keeping the “trophies” never sat well with him. It ran counter to everything his dad and granddad had taught him about hunting, the woods, and respecting everything in it.

Trophy hunters offended the natural order of things through spinning on its head how man was supposed to find his food, his protein, to grow his non-lizard brain and become something more, something beyond a bloodthirsty savage with a single-minded desire to maim and murder and gain status in his tribe by gaudily showing off his kills.

He brought his kill to the garage and began the procedure the best way he knew how. He started clinically with the nine-point buck that had lived a good life. That type was the only type of deer he would ever track and kill.

He thanked the animal for giving its life to sustain his life and that of each member of his young family. Then — as every time he dressed a kill — tears flowed down his rugged face.

Tear by tear he did what he had to do with his jawbone knife, gutting and packing that season’s venison for the brutal and unpredictable Midwestern winter to come.

Wess Haubrich is a freelance true crime journalist who recently branched out to short fiction after a hospital stay from shattering all the bones in his wrist and ankle on the dominant side of his body. Follow him on Twitter here.