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1 how much is enough? The door of the one-room schoolhouse burst open with a bang, quieting in an instant the normal before-class chatter. Goosebumps rose on the flesh of the students , in part because of the icy blade of cold air that knifed through the room. More than that, though, it was the look on the face of their classmate. Eyes wide, hair askew from ripping off his cap, out of breath from running through the snow, he was stammering, the words running together like water droplets over a falls. Charlie May was one of the students who turned to see what the stir was about. Only minutes before, he had settled into his seat after hanging his coat on a peg by the door. It was just before Christmas 1931 and there were several inches of snow on the ground. That hadn’t kept May from walking to school, of course. It was only a few miles from home, and he was all but a man anyway. Fifteen and in eighth grade, his last year of school, he’d soon be leaving books behind to join the rest of the men in Gowan City, Schuylkill County, in working for the Reading Coal Company. His relative maturity left him immune to some of the crises that occasionally sent his younger classmates into a frenzy. This was to be something different, though. “Hey! Hey everybody! You’ll never guess what I just saw!” yelled the excited youngster at the door behind him. “I saw a deer track!” It took a second for this to sink in, and then the room was on fire with excitement . Just imagine, a white-tailed deer track, and in the snow on the same road the children walked to school every day! It was almost unthinkable. Even the teacher—whose first instinct must have been to put down the sudden disturbance before it led to general mayhem—got caught up in the pandemonium. “Get your coats on, everyone,” the teacher said. “We’re going to go see it.” “It seems funny now, but my dad said the whole class walked about a mile in the snow just to see that track—it wasn’t even a deer, just a track—because it was unheard of,” said Charlie May, the same-named son of that Schuylkill County teenager. “I remember my dad telling me that was one of the few times he ever saw a deer track as a kid, and he was in the woods a lot, more than most. There just weren’t many deer back in those days.” I was thinking of that story as I pulled the minivan over to the edge of the road. It was an August evening, seven decades removed from Charlie May’s last year of school, and the air was just beginning to cool. My wife, Mandy, and I had weathered the afternoon heat by swimming with our sons, Derek and Tyler, in the lake at Laurel Hill State Park, in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Laurel Mountains. When we left, an hour or so before dark, we decided that rather than head straight home, we would detour on some side roads to look for deer. Now we were parked on the edge of the two-lane blacktop, the driver’s-side tires in the gravel, watching a six-point buck. It was the sixth or seventh deer we’d seen so far, but the first with antlers. It had crossed the road in front of us from right to left, inexplicably leaving the security of Forbes State Forest for a forty-yard strip of greenery that stood between us and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a cross-state, four-lane superhighway. It was just inside the tree line, peering back at us over its shoulder. Derek, then age nine, and Tyler, then age six, craned their necks to get a better look. “Can we unbuckle?” Tyler asked, frustrated by his inability to get closer to the window on the deer’s side because of the restrictions of his seat belt. We saw a truck coming toward us and tried to catch the driver’s eye, hoping to alert him to the buck’s presence. I’m not sure he knew what we were trying to tell him—he slowed only a little—but fortunately the buck never moved. We stayed another minute, then left when it seemed we might be the reason he was staying so still, so...

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