No, I’m not referring to the act of smearing grease paint on your face just to kill an herbivore, then posing stone-faced like you  took out the Mujaheddin.

Not that kind of blackout.

It’s an altered-state-of-consciousness. The one where you can’t recall simple details during an episode of heightened significance, and it happened to me this past weekend.

In a dense stand of cedars, oaks, and hickories with a forest floor choked full of brambles, I sat in a treestand waiting for a deer in the cool grey of early morning. Around 7:00 am, the familiar, purposeful, progressive footfalls of a lone doe picking her way toward me grew. I reached up to turn the camera on and and grab my bow off the hanger.

The doe, now a distinct brown form wading through the weary, deep green of the late-summer foliage, was closing the 40 yard distance between us. The decision to shoot was like a line being crossed. My mind and body shifted from mere observer to active predator in an instant.

What I remember of the scenario ended with the decision to stop the walking deer. The rest is a blur. A blackout. I only remember that the draw was slightly awkward because the doe was at such a hard angle. I don’t remember settling in to the peep. I don’t remember where I held the pin. I don’t recall the building pressure leading to my back tension release.

I only remember the sound of the shot and the blur of the deer bounding off into the understory. Catch what I couldn’t remember in this video of the hunt.

Stories abound of first responders jumping into action driven only by their training with no meta-cognition during the moment. They just did what they practiced to do. In fact, had they the mental awareness to process all that was happening in the moment, it’s likely they wouldn’t have been able to perform their most important tasks.

The same seems true for shot execution in a bowhunting scenario. The times I’ve really screwed up are times when I’ve been highly aware that I was thinking about the shot, or picturing the buck already mounted and hanging above my fireplace, the proverbial “chip shot.”

There are no chip shots in bowhunting. In fact, every shooting scenario is fraught with more ways to miss than there are to successfully execute. To me, that’s the beauty of the pursuit. And maybe the ability to momentarily turn one’s brain off is what separates those with filled freezers, from those without.

The moments after a kill seem to flood the brain with meticulous detail, more than making up for the previous blackout. Shifting morning thermals float new sweet new odors from the forest floor. Shafts of fresh sunlight give way to flooding daylight from every direction, wiping away deep shadows. It’s all part of the magic and the mystery of a phenomenon I’ve nicknamed “the bowhunting blackout.”