For seven years his rifle has sat in the corner of the closet. A grey suit he last wore to a funeral hangs over the barrel so only the trigger and butt of the gun are visible. The inside of the barrel is dusty with a red coating of rust.
It was the feeder at the edge of the clearing. He fills it with apples he buys by the bagful from the grain store.
In the early morning hours, when he can no longer sleep and the timer on the coffee machine goes off filling the house with the smell of its brew, he sits by the sliding glass doors in his blue bathrobe and flannel pajamas with a set of binoculars to his eyes.
Cautiously the doe leads her fawns to the edge of the birch trees. The mother’s ear twitches in the direction of a branch breaking in the old pines and falling to the forest floor. It is an alarming but familiar sound. She moves closer to the feeder and the apples she knows by now to be inside.
He watches through the shaky distance of his lenses. He is drawn to her grace and her devotion to her fawns, who are now close to her legs and biting at pieces of fallen apples.
He will not admit it, but ever since he began feeding the deer and watching them through the glass door, he has not been able to pick up his rifle.