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Hunting alone in the autumn woods heightens your sense of awareness.

You hear the old wind returning far in the distance. It rustles through the trees before passing above, below and all around you.

You smell a cedar swamp you can't see on that wind and feel yesterday's rain rising from damp earth. You see the flick of a tail or the twitch of an ear from a deer that has not yet and never will see you. For a short time you become a small part of the natural world.

Each hunter has a favourite place in the woods. Mine is in a cedar tree. I hunt from the same tree every year, deep in the woods far from the camp. When I bring someone there for the first time I point to it and say, "This too is my home."

I've been deer hunting for more than 20 years. Our camp is near Kaladar in eastern Ontario. Each November, eight of us return there to bond and reminisce and hunt for two short but long-awaited weeks.

I used to think I came to the hunting camp and the woods and the tree to hide. When people asked me, "What are you hiding from back there?" I responded by saying, "Everything."

And by that I didn't mean wild animals. I meant life and its rules and routines and responsibilities.

When you spend hours in the woods waiting and watching from a tree you become aware of your own thoughts. It was in the tree that I first realized I wasn't hiding at all. I was searching for something.

Not for pleasure or happiness, which is what most people are looking for most of the time, including me.

I was spending my time in the tree searching inside myself to find the simple truth about why I hunt.

It was in the tree that I realized when people ask, "Why do you hunt?" they really mean, "Why do you kill deer?"

I have pondered that question for endless hours while hunting, trying to understand why.

I wanted an answer that was as simple as the question. I kept trying to find the words. I remember the day I finally heard them. They were spoken by that familiar voice inside my head. The voice I hear when I talk to myself in the wild. Seven words strung together.

The first time I spoke them out loud was at the camp while standing and watching a game of euchre after supper.

As the other members of my hunting camp sat around the table playing cards, I asked no one in particular but everyone at once, "Do you know why we kill deer?"

No one looked up. They just kept playing and watching their cards. Someone at the table answered, "No, why do we kill them?"

"We kill them because we love them," I said.

The game stopped immediately. Now everyone looked up.

"What the hell does that mean?" someone asked.

We don't kill them because we hate them. And if we were indifferent to them why would we bother?

We pay attention to the things we love. We find out and want to know everything about them. We respect and even honour them.

We wish we could be like them, especially in the woods. In the woods, the deer are smarter and faster and better able to survive than we are. They eat the woods, so we eat them. We look for them everywhere and we see them in our dreams.

They have broken our hearts but we will love them until we die. We love them because their wild blood runs in our veins and their spirit has touched ours. Most of all we love them because we are hunters.

Being in the tree started out as one thing and became another. It hid me and gave me shelter. I learned patience and how to look not just at the world around me, but inward.

What I have seen from the tree has given me wisdom and understanding and enlightenment. I am the tree.

Eventually, it struck me that the tree was a natural place to want to be. I had found a home there because it's where my journey began.

It happened a long time ago when an ape climbed down to the ground and stood up, hungry and afraid, as it walked across a grassy plain and left its tree behind.

L.W. Oakley lives in Kingston and is the author of Inside the Wild.

Illustration by Louise Delorme .