After a weekend of boring nothingness, I was eager to get back into the woods on Monday morning, but I was admittedly a little apprehensive due to deer season being only 3 days old.

You, of course, can’t hunt within the confines of the park, but bullets fired from hunting rifles tend to travel far, and from what little I know about ammunition, they also don’t know how to read.

But I had a plan! I would start in the dark and stick to the trail away from the parts of the park that border private property, or at least the parts that aren’t open and flat. Thus, ensuring that it would have to be one hell of a magic bullet to climb up a hill, then down, then navigate through the woods just to kill me. If it can do that, it was meant to be.

Sadly, this plan had some holes in it (no pun intended), because a half a mile into my lumber, still in darkness with my headlamp on, I heard the first gunshots. Dude must have been using his Night Vision Patriot Goggles® he had left over from the January 6 riots.

Having said that, I would only hear 3 shots over the course of my slightly shortened 5.16-mile loop. So, I guess that’s not bad.

While the first half of the lumber was absent of wildlife, the second half greeted me with a few small deer scurrying deep in the woods, geese overhead, some photogenic black capped chickadees, and, with a mile to go, I saw a familiar-looking buck still on the prowl (good luck, Henry, stay safe, my man!).

These days, I aim for 6 miles per lumber, but am happy to shorten things up for a week or so if it means I’m still getting out and getting something in my feetz and not getting shot.

Later.