Hunters stalk a massive buck through dense forest for hours, carefully tracking it across streams and hilltops until they spot it just twenty feet away, the closest sighting possible. Though presented with a perfect shot, the narrator is unable to pull the trigger due to being overwhelmed by the experience, later referring to it as "buck fever", an inability to shoot caused by the intensity of the moment.

1. Buck Fever
Buck Fever

2. Since early dawn, through manzanita brush,
across rush streams and shallows, working up
to toplands where the giant redwoods crush
their green lips to the new moon’s spilling cup;

3. since dawn we mark his tracks and trailed him down
far grooves and clearings, fields and vales until,
breasting a summit, we beheld his crown
Lifted a moment on a neighbor hill.

4. Stealthy then, our hearts aflame,
we made our way across to him, silent as death,
On hands and knees and stomachs-half afraid
to let out or draw in a single breath;

5. and then we saw him all, thrice twenty feet
Away-no more!-like something in a dream,
one hoofed upraised, his satin flanks abeat,
from out his nostrils brief, white clouds of steam.

6. My gun was up, I had a perfect sight,
my finger wrapped the trigger as if wired ...
“a lifetime’s chance,” they said in camp that night:
but I say no man living could have fired!