Almost nothing happens in "In deer season," and that is why it holds your attention. Dave Bonta gives us a foggy morning, a few sounds, a few small sights, and an ending that stops just short of the event the hunters came for. The poem is about attention: what a person notices when fog takes away sight, and how the hunted turn out to be as alert as the people waiting for them.
It opens like an entry in a field notebook: "Fog until 9 a.m." The exact time makes the scene feel reported rather than imagined. Then the hunters appear, "sitting in their trees," a slightly odd picture that makes them seem like large, patient birds. The sentence breaks so that "every drip" sits alone on the last line, short and final, like a drop falling. With the view erased, hearing takes over, and the poem's language shrinks to match. Most of these words are one syllable long.
The second stanza brings in a crow, and the detail that matters is that it is "silent." Crows are usually noisy, so the quiet feels deliberate, as if the whole woods were holding still along with the hunters. The crow carries "something dangling from its beak." The poem never says what. Judging by the context, it could be a scrap of something dead, but Bonta leaves the object unnamed, so death enters the scene without being announced.
The third stanza turns away from people and animals altogether to "the coiled tendrils / of wild grapes," with water beaded on them. The beads echo the earlier drips, and "coiled" quietly suggests tension stored up, like the hunters' own waiting. It is also what a bored, watchful mind does: it drifts to small things nearby while it waits.
Then comes the sharpest moment. "Unmistakable, the sound of hooves / on wet leaves — until it stops." "Unmistakable" is the longest word in the poem so far, and it announces certainty, yet the dash cuts that certainty off. The sound halts mid-sentence, and the silence after it is part of the line. We can only guess why the animal stopped, but the poem's logic suggests it sensed something, which means the deer are listening as hard as the hunters are.
When the fog thins, sight returns and the stakes become visible. The does "stand frozen," but their tails keep moving, "raising & lowering the white / alarms." Calling the tails "alarms" is the poem's one strong metaphor. It turns a bodily detail into a warning signal, and it lands at the start of the final line because of the line break. The image holds a contradiction: the deer are motionless out of fear, yet the fear shows in the one part of them that cannot stay still. The ampersand adds a casual, jotted-down quickness that sits oddly beside such tension.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its five stanzas run four, two, three, two and four lines, an unevenness that suits the unpredictability of the woods. Sound patterning is light but present: the d's of "drip," "dangling" and "does," the soft w's of "wet" and "white," and the long vowels in "hooves" and "leaves." The present tense keeps us inside the moment, and the compression and the single clear image in each stanza have something of the haiku about them.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It does not argue for or against hunting. The hunters vanish after the first stanza, and the closing image belongs to the deer. We never learn whether a shot is fired. Instead the poem leaves us in the held breath before anything happens, and in that pause it gives the animals as much attention and dignity as the people. It is a good lesson in how much a poem can do by noticing carefully and then stopping.