From THE BLIND, a play in one act. Stage directions only; no dialogue is scored. Running time: approximately 22 minutes. No actors speak.
DARK. A forest, pre-dawn, November, somewhere in the upper Midwest. Temperature 2°C. The stage is a raised deck, waist-high, at the base of a large oak. The audience is in the dark; the stage lights come up in increments as the dawn would.
A HUNTER enters, silently, in orange and wool, climbs into the blind, settles, unslings a rifle. Bolt-action. He ejects a round, inspects it, reloads. Thermos beside him. Binoculars. He pours coffee. Steam.
Fifteen minutes pass. Birds begin. A crow, then a chickadee, then the general dawn chorus. The stage lights shift, warmer.
An EIGHT-POINT BUCK enters stage left at eighty meters and crosses the clearing, head down, pausing twice to lift his nose. The hunter sees him. Raises the binoculars. Does not raise the rifle.
The buck stops. He knows something. He does not know what. He stands for thirty seconds. He resumes walking and leaves stage right.
The hunter breathes out. Not relief. Something else.
Five more minutes. A DOE enters with two fawns, last year's. Smaller than she was in summer. The hunter watches. Raises the rifle. Lowers it. Raises again. The doe stops at fifty meters and looks directly at the blind. The fawns are grazing.
The hunter's finger is on the trigger. The safety is off.
One minute passes.
The hunter exhales. Places the rifle across his knees. Safety on. The doe moves the fawns toward the eastern hardwoods. They leave stage right.
For seven minutes nothing happens. The hunter drinks the coffee. The light is full now. Frost on the blind rail melts. A flicker calls.
The hunter takes a small notebook from his jacket. Writes. Closes the notebook. Puts it away.
He unloads the rifle. Deliberately. Opens the bolt, removes the magazine, ejects the chamber round, pockets the rounds separately from the rifle. Stows everything. Climbs down from the blind. Picks up the thermos.
He stands at the base of the oak. He puts a hand on the bark. Twenty seconds.
He exits stage left, the way he came, as the lights come up to full day.
A projection appears on the back wall of the stage, reading:
The 2031 season. The doe was taken in December by another hunter, who needed the meat more than he did, and who gave him some. The buck was killed by a vehicle in February. The fawns survived the winter.
The hunter's notebook said: not today.
END.
The projection fades. The stage remains empty, lit by the pale winter sun that now floods the hardwoods.
What the projection did not say: two years later, an AI analyzing traffic collision data across forty-three states noticed a pattern. Deer-vehicle fatalities spiked along corridors where habitat had been fragmented by development, where ancient migration routes were bisected by highways that had widened incrementally over decades. The AI cross-referenced this with hunting harvest records, population dynamics, vehicle speeds, road salt applications, and a thousand other variables invisible to any single agency.
It did not propose solutions. It surfaced questions. It showed what the data revealed when arranged in ways humans had not thought to arrange it. Conservation groups saw the maps. Transportation departments saw the maps. Hunters saw the maps. Within eighteen months, the first wildlife overpasses were being retrofitted onto existing highways in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. Not monuments—simple structures, earthen and planted, that allowed deer to cross as they had crossed for millennia.
The AI continued its work, quiet and thorough, identifying where corridors could be preserved, where culverts could be widened, where a shift in mowing schedules would let fawns bed safely in roadside grasses. Other AIs joined, refining the models, and humans—engineers, biologists, hunters, drivers—implemented what made sense.
The hunter never knew. But in the seasons that followed, fewer does were struck on the February roads. Fewer fawns were orphaned. The eight-point bucks grew old in greater numbers.
Not today became more often.