A stray bullet has a name on it. We hear about hunting accidents reliably every year. We've long since come to expect them, as if fate must ambush a certain number of us every year through some wicked yet necessary function of nature. It happens in exactly the same ways. Someone else waiting in the woods will see the gray silhouette of a hunter as a different form one morning and decide it's a deer.
Nobody hears boots when they're listening for hooves.
Hunters will drift asleep in their tree. Guns which weren't loaded become inexplicably loaded when fate arrives. Hunting accidents happen so predictably and precisely, it would seem human error were merely an accessory to the event, as if all hunters eventually might step into that terribly wrong instant if only chance decides it. In Illinois last year, seven hunters were killed in hunting accidents, all of them in these same ways. Guns snagged and hunting partners stood up at the wrong second and the sound of boots before sunrise sounded like something else.