One December morning about 20 years ago I got a call from my editor a few minutes after sunrise. From where I stood in a pine clearcut, the morning dew was frozen to the underbrush. Fumbling in a pocket deep within my layers of clothing, I found my cell phone and answered, still grasping the antler in my other hand and standing a few yards from where I’d parked the truck in the pre-dawn darkness.
“There was a shooting at the Country Club last night,” he told me in a tone that suggested I should have turned in the story before the news even happened.
I exhaled a plume of foggy breath and glanced down at the freshly shot deer at my feet. I wanted to say, “Yes, boss, there certainly has been a shooting. I just killed a buck!” But I didn’t. I was out of breath from dragging the deer that lay before me, and instead replied with a subservient reminder that I had requested the day off. I was an hour’s drive from the newspaper office, and by the time I could have returned, the TV news vans would have already had the scoop and on their way back to Little Rock. Yet I wasn’t bothered that my absence from the newsroom was felt — my editor could take this job and shove it…