Out of habit, I suppose, my feet found the quiet spots. The spots hard, bare, frozen, and/or vacant of the crisp, tattletale leaves of winter. The two-tracked trails of the Hardware River Wildlife Management Area makes such progress easy, and so I slipped relatively undetected, shotgun in tote, towards an ancient oak tree growing in the interior of the property, like I had dozens of times before after bushytails in my home county. Ali was behind me, also moving quietly, eyes