The little button buck was wandering in my direction, and although I had no intention of doing him any harm, I stood and got my longbow in hand. While I was really quite exhausted -- and remaining seated sounded a whole lot better at the moment -- I sighed inaudibly and got ready.

I took this Nebraska 5x5 on a quick hunt after work in November. An easy-to-access stand I'd placed especially for short-duration hunts proved to do the trick.

I've always tried not to let my career as a schoolteacher deter me from reaching important goals, bowhunting and otherwise. However, even I had to admit that my current routine was starting to wear me down, physically and mentally.

It was Friday afternoon, and the early Nebraska archery season was melting away. For the fifth day of this work week, I had made a beeline for the exit after school, jumped into my strategically parked rig, and begun a careful yet hurried drive 20 miles to my hunting spot.

Upon arrival, I threw a layer of camouflage over my teaching duds, all of which had been carefully washed in unscented soap. I then grabbed my bow and CatQuiver, briskly marched to the woods, and climbed into my closest stand for a hunt that would last 90 minutes or less.

Daylight hours were getting shorter, of course, and the return to Standard Time had shortened my hunting day even more. The extra effort required to glean a hunt out of the workday was taking its toll. But I'm not willing to gamble the best part of the season away, watching the sun set from my living room window Monday through Friday, while hoping for weather and fate to serve me well on the weekend. And I can't shift teachers' summer vacation to fall.

Even after losing nearly two weeks of the early season to kidney stones, I had already logged 41 hunts in the 35 days since my return to the field. I was paying a price, and it was starting to show.

While it was early November, I'd not seen a single buck in the previous four days I'd drop the string on. My futility was compounded by a group of overexuberant waterfowlers on the same property.

They seemed to spend more time operating a Bobcat tractor and shoring up their makeshift pond out near the center pivot -- or driving the perimeter of the property -- than they did hunkered down and scanning the horizon. The racket had largely turned the deer nocturnal, despite the best efforts of my hunting partner and me to create the illusion that the boogeyman wasn't there.

On stand, I wondered if this was how gambling addicts view the lottery -- impossibly long odds but with the insistence that you can't win if you don't play the game. Perhaps there was something to my wife's assertion that I was as addicted to hunting.

My stand sat in a finger of timber that ran to the west and eventually gave way to a picked cornfield. Walking in, I had bumped a trio of does, but they moved off without snorting.

The next hour was uneventful, and I was already deep into plans for tomorrow's morning hunt and not far from getting my things together for a quick exit when that button buck meandered my way. As I looked him over, a grunt snapped me out of my scheming.

There, not 15 yards away, a nice 5x5 stood precisely over my entry trail and directly in a shooting lane I'd trimmed only as an afterthought. Silently cursing my poor hearing, I felt fortunate for having laid down a little scent the last few yards of my entry path. Maybe it would hold him for a few seconds.