In Rut

     It is deer hunting season, a time when the males are flooded with testosterone and begin pawing, snorting and spoiling for a fight; apparently something similar happens to buck deer.  Does find this behavior conducive to mating, it has the opposite effect on me.  I grew up in Montana but am not from a hunting family.  My husband, on the other hand, had grown up hunting.  When we were newly married, we lived in Helena where lots of hunting is available but Reed was not.  He was in school full time and working full time and we didn't have a vehicle capable of getting both into and out of the woods, so he did very little hunting there.  After two years we moved to Denver where hunting in a big city is frowned upon.  So hunting wasn't a significant part of our married lives until we moved to Kalispell.  That is where I learned about going into rut.
     As the fall progressed, my husband would begin to get restless.  Throughout the year Reed regarded airplanes being broken at work or repairs needed at home as a routine part of life, but during hunting season they were deliberate acts of sabotage bent on ruining his life.  He became convinced that the only reason I married him was to separate him from everything he enjoyed.  How did he figure it out when I had tried to carefully hide that during our previous seven years of marriage?
     Through the years of my husband and sons hunting I learned how to disguise and eventually tolerate the taste of venison, to pray for my hunters' success instead of just safety, and the importance of taking pictures of the proud hunters and their upside down, tongue lolling trophies. There is no disconnect in the male psyche between admiring the beauty of an animal one moment and blowing its brains out the next.  Despite the baldness that indicates the abundance of testosterone still coursing through my husband, rut isn't as bad as it used to be.  He may still believe I am trying to eliminate all happiness from his life, but accepts that I am apparently in no hurry.  Frankly, I would rather live with a man who goes in rut occasionally than one who lives in a rut perpetually.