I spent most of Thursday at a country place, 28 miles from Baltimore's Inner Harbor, out near the Prettyboy watershed. The farm was covered with about six inches of cottony snow, and little curds of it balanced on the thinnest branches of trees and bushes. Ten black turkey vultures gathered on the high, naked limbs of tall oaks across the road -- like enrobed judges in a balcony at a grand opera. And then, every once in a while, two or three of them would drop off, spread their wide wings and glide across the blue sky, the breezes holding them aloft as they circled over the old farm.

I walked to my car to leave the place about 4:30, just a few minutes before sunset, and first one, then two deer appeared -- almost in full silhouette at that hour - against a snow-covered hill between woods about 150 yards away. Then a third came out of the trees, then a fourth, a fifth-sixth together, a seventh and an eighth and a ninth. Just like that. A Supreme Court of deer walked across snow as I walked to my car at dusk. They looked as though they had spent the day in hiding; they must have been relieved to see that I wasn't holding a rifle. The rules of the Maryland deer season stipulate specific killing time -- one half hour before sunrise to one half hour after sunset. So, at the moment I saw these deer, they were still very much at risk. They moved into the next patch of woods and out of sight. I headed home -- driving into rush-hour traffic and its own kind of risk -- and, as you can see, I lived to tell about it.