A Profound Price Paid!

There is a profound price to be paid for living in the wild.  I sit quietly in the woods.  A full moon is on; I have hidden in the forest's shadows.  I am lethal.  I have prepared myself to kill and asked God to give me success.  My gun lays across my lap, every move is first thought about. I can be stealth, a giftedness of being human.  In every way the killed is already dead, the act is all there is left.  The forest is alive with the sounds of living creatures unaware that death sits with them.  I see a dark image, the singular darker in the dark.  I watch its shape which tells me it is my quarry.  I continue to sit and wait and think the thing is now to be done, the taking of life, of me knowing and it not.  I carefully move raising my gun to aim.  I have it.  I briefly pause, I am to kill.  Boom.  The woods become silent.  For a second I am blinded and deaf from the blast.  The dark form is knocked several feet from where it stood only moments ago.  I rise and walk to stand over it.  It is wounded but still dying.  I take no pleasure in this.  Death has come to us both.  I return to our home.  I go to bed.  My lover soothes me with words of a job that had to be done and was done.  I take no pleasure in this. I lay quietly in bed paying the price.