How Native Americans Made Themselves Invisible In The Woods

A man can spend three hundred dollars on a printed camouflage suit and still get picked off a hillside at a hundred yards. A fellow in a plain dull shirt with cold charcoal on his face can sit against a stump and have deer feed past him close enough to hear them chewing. Same woods, same deer. In sixty-six years camping the same hills my grandfather camped, I've come to understand that an animal never sees you at all. It sees three things — your outline, your shine, and your movement — and everything the old ones knew was built to take those three away. In this one I go through all of it. How a deer's eye is actually built and why it catches edges and motion instead of detail. Breaking up the man-shape, and why the shoulders and the head are what gives you away. Reversing the shadows with charcoal instead of blacking your whole face into an oval. The two reasons store camouflage lets people down that nobody at the counter mentions — distance, and what's in your laundry detergent. Keeping the wind honest, standing in your own woodsmoke, walking on the outside edge of your foot, using shade as free cover, and waiting the fifteen or twenty minutes it takes for the birds to forgive you and vouch for you. But the last thing is the one that matters most, and it isn't clothing and it isn't scent. It's something your body does every time you take a step, that every wild animal out there was built to catch. Stay to the end and I'll tell you what it is, why every deer alive already knows that sound, and the simple way to break it. Most of what I do with this now is watch rather than shoot, and it works just as well for a camera as it ever did for a rifle. Thank you for sitting with me. Walk easy.