we were zero for eight on this trip, eight being the number of bucks we'd seen, usually after they'd seen us. If we learned anything in those first four days, it was this: Hunting success is proportionate to the square root of time spent studying deer.
    We studied them, hard all clay, each day and each day we learned a little more. We learned where two or three bucks bedded with some regularity. We learned that you can glass a slope for an hour and not see a deer until you take your first step across that slope—then five jump up 50 yards away. We learned that approaching from the top can be more difficult than it looks. (We spent a day trying to find a route up the east side of the mountain so that we could descend on the western bowl, which held our bucks seven years ago. We were stymied by pitches inaccessible without ropes.) We learned that maybe, just maybe, you can ambush a deer up there if you know his habits better than your own. And we learned that there is never enough time.
    For two days a cloying, wet fog moved in, fog so thick that a trip to the head without a compass was a death-defying act. When the weather cleared, we made one more push up the east side in the hope of either finding a route to the top of the western bowl or of ambushing the deer that had lured me up that vertical rock.
    We rode hard that morning, gaining 1500 feet and the displeasure of the mules, who did not take kindly to arduous exercise at an early hour. Entering the eastern basin, we spotted a black bear furiously rolling rocks on the opposite slope. Either he didn't see us or didn't view us as much of a threat, for he kept at his work until we were 100 yards away. Then he looked up with disgust and loped up the hill, pausing once to peek back over his shoulder, in the hope, no doubt, that we interlopers would leave and that he could return to breakfast at the rockchuck cafe.
    We took his presence as a good sign. We tied the horses in the last clump of trees before timberline, and started climbing. By now, seven days into our hunt, we'd adjusted to the altitude, which didn't mean we could breathe any easier but that we'd learned to walk slower and stop thinking of rest as a character flaw.
    At 12,000 feet we made one of those stops. We assumed the position—head down, eyes shut, mouth open—and were trying to wring some oxygen from the air when my partner said, "Damn, look at this."
    Six inches from his foot, lying on the rocky soil, was a flaked point. He picked it up. So perfect was its execution, so uniform its shape, that for a moment I thought he'd salted it on the ground when we stopped. But his wonder was no less than mine, and I knew it was real.