You're up at 4:30 and reach the edge of the woods before daylight. The wind is high in the trees, the stars look like snags of cotton on a black velvet cape. The world looks bigger in the dark, in the woods.

You're with your father, or you're thinking of the times you were. Just you two, the world no longer so complex. The tradition is what keeps you coming back.

Not the hunt, though the hunt has its own, primal rewards. And not the kill. The kill brings its own issues. Death is never without meaning. Forty years after your first hunt, killing a magnificent animal is still an ambiguous mix of triumph and sadness.

Hurry now, quietly. Down the farm lane, into the pitch-black vastness, to the tree stand before the sun comes up and the deer start moving.

Up the tree, silently, the way lit by a thousand stars and as many memories. Some fathers take their sons to ballgames. Yours took you hunting.

You were 5 years old and on his shoulders. It was Lewis County, east of Maysville, Ky. He took you on a rabbit hunt. It was snowing. You walked along the creek.

Your feet became cold and wet. Your father put you back on his shoulders on the way home. No one flushed a rabbit, but you'll never forget the day. It was 48 years ago.

Jumbled emotions

Everything you did with your father revolved around hunting and the woods. It was his greatest gift to you.

Up into the stand, just as nature starts to stir. You watch the sun rise from a thicket of cedars. You see animals below: Turkeys, squirrels, rabbits, coyotes.

On either side of you, up in adjacent trees, two owls have started to talk. These are moments when the hunting becomes an afterthought. The woods are still and glowing and you're glad to be alive.

In the stand, motionless, waiting, marveling at the peace, until you see the steam curl from a buck's nostrils. You never saw him. He just . . . appeared. The way they always do.

Your heart sprints. You raise the 12-gauge, take a deep silent breath and . . . squeeze.

You want a clean kill. The animal demands that sort of respect. The woods demand it. Tradition requires it.

Good hunting is skill and manners and dignity. The buck is motionless. Your emotions twist and shout.

Your dad always said he wished he could put the squirrels back in the trees. You feel the same way. There is remorse every time you kill during a hunt. Hunting is thrilling and sad. It wasn't like this 200 years ago. Then, for something to live, something had to die. Not now.

You field dress the beast. You'll freeze the meat, perhaps tan the hide to use as a blanket or a vest. This, too, is respect.

A time to kill

Gun season ends in Ohio today, and you can say what you want about killing deer with firearms. I used to think hunters were macho, callous creeps. You like seeing animals in the woods? Take a camera.

You want sport? Give the deer a shotgun.

I don't feel that way now. I could never kill a deer. But I understand why others do.

I see it as clearly as the tears on the faces of the three kids who lost their mother a month or so ago, when a deer in Clermont County rocketed through her car windshield and killed her.

I see them now, everywhere, deer roaming in the grass where I-275 and I-71 meet, deer foraging amid a pile of construction mess on Wards Corner Road near my house, herds of deer grazing in the fields off I-71 between here and Columbus. State biologists say there are 575,000 deer in Ohio now, too many to survive without starvation and illness.

More than 400,000 hunters walked Ohio's woods this week. State wildlife officials hope they killed 125,000 deer. Some of the same people who don't want the herds thinned are building homes where the deer live. Something has to give.

Hunting is sad and noble, haunting and proud, as traditional and memorable as Opening Day. Also, necessary.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com