Next Monday, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians will head into the woods, camouflaged, armed with rifles, and some of them still a little drunk from the night before. Despite the seemingly mindlessness of it all, hunters do provide a service.

With no natural predators but automobiles, deer would become a costly nuisance if left alone. If I had filed a claim, the deer I hit last January would have totaled my ’95 Contour. I would have been out $750, and I know the deer suffered. I watched it lay and heave in a ditch until it hobbled away. The sight of that will bother any decent person. With earnest consideration for the deer’s feelings, hunters shoot to kill.

I was thirteen when I shot my first deer. Russell, my stepfather, had built me a tree stand in the branches of a hemlock growing on our property. Just after dawn the first day of the season, I shot at a buck that was following a doe down the embankment the stand overlooked. Both deer had stopped right in front of me. When I took aim and pulled the trigger, the safety was on. When I took aim again, they were back in full stride. The bullet split a branch hanging in front of the stand, and I watched both white tails bounce through the brush.

I missed another deer later in the day and went home frustrated. Surprising since I didn’t take an interest in hunting when I turned 12, but my father scheduled me for a hunter’s safety course in the spring without telling me about it. After the instructors let us shoot guns all day, and gave us the answers to the test, I scored a 100 percent.

One kid failed. I had stood behind him during the clay-pigeon shoot section of the course. He was at the ready for the pigeon to be launched when he turned to face us because one of his friends said his name.

“Good God, son, put that gun down,” the burly redheaded instructor said. The kid was made to stand by himself away from the group. He kicked in the mud with his plastic snow-boots until we went to the next demonstration: A middle aged man shooting heads of cabbage with a muzzleloader.

“See kids, a cabbage is about the same density as a human head,” he said, lowering his rifle. “As you can see, this muzzleloader will explode another man’s skull. So you want to be careful.”

We also learned deer are colorblind; it’s illegal to shoot a deer in water; a beaver will chew off its own leg to escape a trap, and that a beaver chewing off its own leg to escape a trap is not funny. It’s serious.

I paid close attention. The instructors were interested in teaching us how to handle a firearm. After all, we would be going into the same forests as they would. No one wants to get shot. They returned my exam with an orange safety badge for me to iron onto my orange vest. At this point, I was anxious to kill things, but I had to wait until the fall.

I walked into the dark woods alone the Saturday after my disappointing first try. It was cool and raining, and a strong wind blew. As the woods paled with the morning sun, the weather calmed. I listened closely for any signs of movement. My head jerked quickly at the sound of leaves rustling. The patient hunter waits in hyperaware state of consciousness. Focused only on his surroundings, self-awareness vanishes, and he enters a tranquility designed for response. Deer never break branches, not even when they sprint. But they do rustle leaves in a distinct way. And a hunter can sometimes smell deer before he sees them.

Without a layer of snow on the ground, deer can be all but invisible. From my tree-stand, I watched what I thought to be the movement of birds in the leaves. But as the tan hide broke against the gray bark of a tree, the two does came into focus. Nervously, I tried to sight them, but they were too close for the sighting of my scope. My first shot missed and they ran. I unloaded the clip, throwing the bolt open and shut at hip level, until one of the deer lay bleeding in the grass, its head up.

I had time to sight the mercy shot. My junior license permitted me to shoot a doe on Saturdays in buck season. When Russell and I field dressed the doe and dragged it back to the barn, I was happy. I felt masculine. This is not a shameful or immoral sensation. It’s a natural one. The act of hunting helps to keep deer populations in equilibrium. In the forests this fall, humans, hunters are acting as nature requires.