I'm not sure when it happened. I've become a morning person, arising somewhere between four and five a.m., long before the sun has awoken.

I become impatient, waiting for it to get light enough for me to tie on my running shoes, leggings or shorts (depending on how chilled the air is), and a sweatshirt. My iPod is sine qua non. I can run without my iPod, but I don't think I run as far or as fast if I don't have the backbeats from my most recent playlist favorites.

I suppose there's a story to be told about going running under a waning marshmallow moon, fading Jupiter, and running toward a lightening pink sky, all while doing laps around the graveyard in the dark, but damn if I can think of it right now.

I run in the graveyard right now because it is both turkey and deer season. Despite running while wearing a fluorescent vest, I still fear the errant bullet or shot from the rifles and shotguns whose reports reverberate in the woods and ridges near here.

You only have to be five hundred feet from a house to fire your weapon while hunting deer. Someone has erected a deer stand within view of my kitchen window, and I wonder, briefly, if we need to be wearing vests in our kitchen to stay safe.

A few days ago, I ran during the full moon. I wrote: the full moonset this morning was amazing. Egg-yolk moon resting in a nest of clouds, huge on the horizon.

I think while I run. Sometimes, about writing, trying to take notes in my head about what I'm seeing. Sometimes, thinking about what I'm teaching in the afternoon. Today, I'm showing a movie, Jarhead, because it is the last day of classes before Thanksgiving, the students are turning in their first drafts of their 20-page papers, and expecting anything from them would border on the cruel.

Is it cruel when the deer get hit by the shot? Do they feel pain before they die, or, is it as quick as I hope it is?

What does it feel like to point a gun at a creature and shoot it?

Who am I to criticize when I continue to eat meat, despite my best intentions?

It's 6:30 now. The sun is still not breaking the horizon, so I must continue to wait. But soon, the crunch of dead leaves will add to the music in my head, and I will keep my head down, leaving the hunters to hunt.

Last night, a perfect quarter waning moon hung in the sky. It has long since gone to bed.

The hunters are out there. In the shadows. Awaiting their prey. I have to trust that it isn' t me.