The Old Buck

Most mornings start the same for me. I wake before the sun — sometime between 5:30 and 6 — and go through the small, automatic motions that make the day manageable. Coffee used to be the anchor; now it’s a cold can of C4. Pop the tab, take that first bite of fizz and caffeine, and the day lines up behind it like obedient ducks. It’s little, stupid, perfect. A ritual.

This morning the fridge betrayed me. A bare patch stared back where a silver can should have been. I stood there for a second, feeling the ritual slip like a missed step. Then I pulled on a jacket and drove the three miles to the Exxon.

Barb was behind the counter. She had that tired, honest face old cashiers get — a mouth that smiled like it was used to working overtime and a laugh that showed up when it could. We made the kind of small talk that fills early mornings: “You running today?” she asked. I told her about the missing can, she said the weather looked like rain later, and she rang me up like she’d done a hundred times. I left with the can intact in the paper bag, the ritual unbroken in plan if not yet in practice.

I didn’t crack it in the parking lot. For some reason the habit of opening it in the kitchen hadn’t left me; that final small ceremony had its place. So I tucked the bag on the passenger seat, sat in the dark of the road, and drove home slow — careful with the roads at that hour, careful as if the world was a thing to be handled gently.

Halfway home, at the stretch where the trees lean close to the asphalt, he stepped out.

It was a big buck, older than the ones you see in hunting pictures. His rack spread wide like something made for parades. His coat had silver threaded through it — not the pure brown of youth but a weathered gray that made him look like a man who’d kept a lot of winters. He walked across the road with a slow, thoughtful gait, as if every hoofbeat was an argument he’d won.

I braked and watched. My breath fogged the windshield a little. He didn’t startle or bolt. He moved like someone who had the time to decide things — a creature used to negotiating narrow paths and tight calls. When he reached the ditch, he paused and looked up the little bank, sizing it. For a long second he seemed to be deciding whether to climb. He turned his head, and his eyes found mine through the glass.

That look — I can’t explain it. It felt like recognition, not in that sentimental way people talk about animals “recognizing” them, but like the way two old soldiers might look at each other across a field and know which wounds are fresh. In his eyes was a life of being hunted away from danger, of learning roads and people and storms. He had survived things that would have finished others off.

He turned, eased up the bank, and melted into the hedge. The morning reopened into its ordinary gray. I sat there a long time, the car humming the only sound. The can on the seat was suddenly heavier, as if it carried more than caffeine.

When I got home I did the things that make a house a home in the morning: shoes off, jacket hung, keys put where I wouldn’t lose them. I sat down in the same chair where I always have that first quiet minute. The house smelled like late summer and the faint detergent from yesterday’s laundry. I picked up the can, felt the cold metal press to my palm, and thought of the buck — his slow steps, the gray in his hide, the clean way he chose to leave.

The ritual came together then: pop the tab, a little hiss, a breath of that carbonated smell that always smells like getting ready. I tipped the can and took my first sip.

It hit the way it always does, sharp and ridiculous, a manufactured bite that wakes up your hands as well as your mind. But today the taste carried something else. The caffeine jumped in my chest and behind it a small, quiet awe settled. The buck’s look stayed in my head — not a warning, not an omen, just a plain, blunt report of what surviving looks like. Long winters, close calls, the small compromises you make and the big ones you keep to yourself.

I caught myself thinking about my own rituals: the C4, the routes I take through town, how I stack my day like a man stacking chairs. Habits hold the hours steady. Sometimes they protect you. Sometimes they blind you. The drive out to get the can was a tiny fracture in the pattern, and that crack had let something in — not a monster, not a miracle, just a moment that would have been lost if I’d been exactly on schedule.

So I drank the rest of the can slowly, as if sampling something rare, and let the morning rearrange itself around the new fact: I had seen an old thing still moving. When the can was empty I set it on the coffee table like a votive and sat with the quiet that follows a small revelation. Outside, a trill of birds began the business of the day. Somewhere down the road a truck coughed to life. The world was stubbornly ordinary.

But I felt different in a way I couldn’t name. Maybe it was as simple as being grateful the ritual hadn’t been lost entirely, or maybe it was that the ritual had been amended — a small addition that would follow me forward: get the C4, say hello to Barb, watch the world on the drive home, notice the old things still walking.

A few days later I drove back that way at the same hour, heart a little faster with the hope that he might show up again. I never found him. That’s how it is with wild things. You beg for repeats and the world moves on without asking.

The can was empty, but the morning kept going. The ritual endured and with it a quiet promise: keep moving, keep negotiating the banks, and if the rhythm ever slips again, be willing to take the three-mile drive. You’ll sometimes find a buck, and sometimes you’ll find only the memory of a look that made you feel older and younger at the same time.