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I feel more alive in the woods, even if it's not that remote. As long as everything that shouldn't be there is out of sight. Just breathing feels fantastic. Listening to the wind through the tops of the trees and letting my focus soften so I can see all of the motion of the branches and leaves around me. It's not necessarily a peaceful feeling, but a very raw and real feeling, that just being in the wilderness has some importance. I feel like I'm vibrating, like I am where I should be.
If I died the riverbeds and rotting leaves would smell the same, the wind would sound the same, and that's good. I don't think that I was meant to be around people as much as I am. I don't think that the human animal was meant to have as much free time as we do nowadays. Few of us are truly at home there, in the woods, how can we be, we're aliens from our modern world, and our brains know it.
That anxiety is just straight up fear of the unknown. The first time I heard a fox scream in the middle of the woods, I thought that someone was being murdered, I was jacked up, my heart was pounding. It sounded like it was coming from all around me. Do we know everything that's out there? I don't know. I don't even know for sure that it *was* a fox, but I know it was real. I know that in that moment I was alive.
An hour later a deer walked up. That tense moment when you *know* that it wasn't just the wind in the leaves, that there is something moving out there, a couple steps at a time. Deer are always scared, female deer especially. I was about 50 yards away in a permanent blind with a double layer of screen and just lifting my rifle that half foot up, painstakingly slow, and she bolted. I wasn't trying to take a shot at that deer, since it was out of season, but I still got that feeling. That quiet steely focus I get when I'm hunting. It's why I love it really. That unnerving feeling of being watched is like that, it's an ancient feeling.
