Snapper by Brian Kimberling

even obliquely, and it would have been a sure sign that Dart was not one of them. I assume they staked out Dave’s home, but I suppose Elia must have stayed in.
    I was the next natural target. The stickers on the back of my pickup for Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund, and Charles Darwin probably didn’t do me any favors.
    It wasn’t unusual for me to encounter hunters in the forest. They made me very nervous and I made them nervous too. I couldn’t wear bright colors—in case the birds try to mate with you, said Dart. In the eyes of those hunters I was an accident waiting to happen, not to mention a fool—even when, or especially when, I explained what I did for a living. The last thing a serious hunter wants in his woods is an invisible human being. I usually told them I had seen deer in this direction or that, though I was lying to get them off my patch.
    The park rangers knew who and where I was, and they advised hunters to avoid me, too. Not everyone asked them, though.
    I was visiting a wood thrush family twenty feet up in a sugar maple when I noticed a man in full camouflage creeping along a dry creek bed thirty yards away. Luckily for me the wood thrush is a pretty mellow bird.
    Full camouflage is not recommended. It’s also not very effective compared to the mud and tree sap you accumulate studying birds. He was crouching with a gun held across his thighs. Dart or Loretta could have told me it was a shotgun, but I found that out later. He moved slowly, silently, as if he had some quarry in sight, but I couldn’t imagine what.
    Gradually it became clear that he was stalking one of my nest flags.
    Near every nest I tied an orange tape with a reference number on it—in this case AF12 for Acadian flycatcher 12. The flag was directly under the nest. The female stayed put, and the male began circling the intruder quietly.
    He turned the tape over as if he hoped to find a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES message on the other side. Then he fetched a bowie knife from his belt, cut the tape, and pocketed it.
    He had my attention.
    I was sure he was a competent woodsman adept at tracking all kinds of game. But I was adept at tracking small
birds
, which put me in a league he had never even heard of. Moreover, there wasn’t a square inch of ground in that square mile that didn’t have recent boot prints of mine; tracking me would be like chasing a mob wearing identical shoes.
    He crept around a corner of the creek bed and out of sight, which was good, in case he felt me watching him. Sixty feet over his head was a scarlet tanager I called Rory. Spend enough time out there and you start naming things. Roryflew a reliable mid-morning triangle between two red maples and an enormous tulip poplar I called the Devil’s Toothbrush. He’d land on the outside of a branch and sing a few notes, then move on. When he spied an intruder—usually me—Rory kept still at the base of a branch and watched carefully for the duration. It took me a long time to learn to sneak up on Rory, even though he’s the most conspicuous thing out there himself—a splash of neon red against the canopy green. I could see him eyeballing the camouflage man below.
    I got out of my tree and kept an eye on Rory while I moved parallel to the creek bed along a small ridge, quietly and well below the crest. Another twenty yards from where he stood he should see another nest flag—RV4, for a red-eyed vireo I called Pedro. Ten feet from that was a hollow log containing a fox den. Between five and six in the morning I sometimes watched the kits playing on top of that log, and they would let me get as close as I liked. Their mother—I never named the foxes for some reason—put them to bed at sunrise and slept lightly herself near the entrance during the day. Whenever there was a disturbance—that is, whenever I checked RV4—her face would emerge from the log tentatively, nose quivering. She never got used to me.
    I stood behind an oak; I could not see