Free The Failed Coward by Chris Philbrook

still smelled horrid. In case you were wondering.
    Realizing that the bodies were putting off a wretched odor, I checked for the windage, and made sure I went upwind and far from the pile of half burnt bodies. I knew the deer would be scared away from the smell, and wanted to minimize the chance I’d be sitting in a dead spot with that scent on the air.
    I put a solid mile down into the woods before I noticed animal tracks in the snow. I’d never been out to this area of the campus, and was kind of surprised to find a small stream heading north-south. I’m not sure how deep it is normally, but with the thaw we’ve had mixed with the few day’s rain, it was definitely too deep for a zombie to cross. Finding that little gift was a pretty pleasant surprise. I don’t know if you remember Mr. Journal, but I was pretty desperate to wall off this back side of campus long ago, and knowing that stream is there makes me less antsy about it. It might also explain why we haven’t had any undead wandering through the woods to get onto campus in this direction.
    I am however a little weirded out that there’s a fair chance a zombie got swept away in the stream’s current, and is now trapped underneath the lake ice, bobbing around, waiting for spring to make its escape. That might keep me up a night or two. It'll have to get in line with the other shit that keeps me up at night though.
    Anyway, moving up to the stream in a few places I noticed several sets of tracks. I’m not positive, but there were at least three or four sets of deer tracks in the same thirty or forty foot area. That’s a great sign, as it means there are more deer right in our backyard should we want to hunt more. I don’t want to overhunt them though. At least not this winter. Next winter after they’ve had an uninterrupted breeding season, we can hunt more, but for now, I want to give them a chance to repopulate.
    I found a downed tree that had a nice elbow in a thick branch, and set myself up with a good field of view of the stream, and the woods. I made myself comfortable, relaxed, and waited for something to come by.
    I came to the realization while sitting there in the woods that I miss my family. I miss hunting trips with dear old weird dad, and my odd brothers. We hunted a fair amount growing up, and dad was very much an outdoorsman. Sitting there on a cold March morning sipping on my thermos of hot soup, all I could think about was being fifteen and waiting for my first buck to walk by. I had been reminiscing for a few hours when the deer I took down crept up on the stream for a drink.
    Without moving too much, I lifted the Savage and let it dip its head into the stream to get a drink. Mid swallow I clicked the safety, which froze the deer like a painting. A fifty yard shot later and I was hoofing it to make sure it was dead. The shot hadn’t killed it immediately, and it had put about twenty yards of real estate behind it from where I’d shot it. It was dead in the snow when I found it.
    Using my uncle’s old hunting knife I gutted it, and started the hour long process of dragging it back to campus to preserve. I radioed to the girls and Gilbert that I’d gotten a deer and a cheer came back. I tell you what, fresh meat and hide goes a long way towards cheering folks up. Gilbert met me at the ass end of campus with his truck and we drove to the maintenance building I’d converted into a smokehouse. He helped me dress it and make all the right cuts. I tell you what, he’s done that before. Even though this deer was smaller than the one I’d gotten last, he salvaged the same amount of meat off of it.
    We didn’t have enough salt to brine any meat this time, so we relied on smoking it. We also set aside a few steaks to enjoy for dinner, and I assure you Mr. Journal, if this journal had taste-o-vision, you’d be in hog heaven. It was beyond phenomenal. While Gilbert was getting the fire going for the venison smoking I snagged a small two gallon