A small shrub by his driveway caught fire one day. Dan Brown looked at it, thought about it and finally decided that in some way it was the Lord telling him to do good works. (Follow along here. A burning bush in Montgomery County isn't out of the question.)

Was there something he, Dan Brown, who runs the seafood counter at a SuperFresh grocery store, could do for the world--something more than he was already doing? Yes. Here is something Brown could do: He could pick up all the road-killed deer and turn them into free venison for the homeless and needy.

The burning bush was an affirmation. "Like a little flame coming from it, from the side, I'd say about this long," Brown says, holding his hands about 10 inches apart. "My nephew saw it." ("I saw where it had burned the ground," the nephew submits.)

The story unfolds like a Gary Larson cartoon you'd tape to the fridge: stealthy animals outwitted by the glare of headlights, crafty men in flannel, the Farther Side of an America that both hunts the wild and shops Home Depot. The story has dark, twisting roads on crisp and creepy nights. In the ongoing saga of Man vs. Nature, it has brief encounters with what are not exactly the Lord's smartest creatures.

Dan Brown ("You Whack 'Em, I Pack 'Em," reads his business card) is humble, tenderhearted. All of this will either give you hope in your fellow man or gross you out entirely. In the past five years or so, Brown has moved about 2,500 dead deer from the roads of Montgomery County. This has provided more than 100,000 pounds of meat to the poor.

For millennia, all a good hunter ever needed was a whiff of instinct and the ability to sit still. This is how the hunter hunts from home today: He'll need some sharpened knives and a police scanner. He'll need a surprisingly large roll of Saran Wrap. He'll need a spare freezer on the porch, and in that he'll need to rearrange the frozen pizzas, the waffles, the extra sticks of Land O' Lakes butter, so as to make room for God's gentle and dimwitted creatures. He'll seem to need just three or four hours of sleep a night.

It smells like a casserole inside the hunter's lodge, warm and salty. So, please, sit.

Brown--54, barrel-chested, with his thick, white hair a little mussed--is a fair marksman. Two of the four heads staring benignly from his living room wall were shot by him, including an 11-point buck with a blue ribbon dangling from its antlers. "They came along and I shot them," Brown says with a shrug. "It wasn't all that hard." The other two were hit by cars. Not every man will be as upfront about such facts, but, as Brown says, "road kill is road kill."

Out back, three dead deer from last night's rounds hang by their hind legs from the swing set on which the neighbor's kids once dandled. The meat needs to age a tad. They are protected from the elements by an old bed skirt draped over them. Brown skins and quarters the animals outside, and chops them into steaks and fresh ground meat in the kitchen.

Some of it will go to the Baptist church agencies and some to the Catholic churches; sometimes it goes to an apartment complex for the elderly; sometimes to a program that helps teenagers on drugs (how exactly venison helps teenagers on drugs is elusive, other than it feeds them, but there you go); some goes to the firefighters at the local stations; some goes to the next-door neighbor, a plumber with a big family to feed. "We Make Our Friends and Our Enemies," reads a framed sentiment in the kitchen, "But Only God Can Make Our Next-Door Neighbors."

While we wait for fresh kill, what's on? The news, the weather: "Maybe it's gonna snow," Elaine says, cozied up on the couch and gazing at the meteorological fronts swirling across the tube, her arms folded, kempt-looking in her blue sweat suit and house shoes, her hair white and puffy, a bit of talk about her not-so-good days with the arthritis.

Another 10 minutes. Still, the hunter waits. It's dark now, and you can almost sense something in the air, if you crack open the side door and breathe it in. They're out there. Those prancing, bouncing, troublesome Bambis of a rambling, forested suburbia. Deer caught in the headlights, cliche and too true. The horrible squealing of brakes. The phwump-bump. We wait through "Wheel of Fortune": "Something theater marquee," Elaine says, as Vanna touches the letters. "GLITTERING theater marquee . . ."

Dan the hunter retreats to his lair, to his almost exactly Dan-size bedroom. He sits alone, writing something in one of the spiral notebooks where he keeps careful records of all the deer he's ever picked up. The police scanner blares its litany of domestic disorders, suspicious persons . . . then something from the park police. "Hear that?" he says. "Was that a 30-11?" He works from instinct. The squelch of static is to this hunter the same as the snap of a twig. "Yep, a 30-11. We may have something."

He calls a police dispatcher to check the location, and then he is up and heading out into the night, pulling on a heavier sweat shirt; grabbing the good knives and a hacksaw from the kitchen counter. Down the street now in his Ford Ranger pickup. Talking hunters' talk along the way: the biggest one ever bagged, the scariest one, the one that was still alive and how Brown nearly jumped out of his own skin when that big buck sat up in front of him. How to cut their throats if they're still alive but mortally injured; how to deliver a fawn by C-section if you have to. (Sure he's had to, twice.) Where to throw the guts so kids don't find them.

"Usually it's good meat," Dan says, "and I hate to see it go to waste."

>This is all about his mother.

She said never to waste food, and she told Dan to share whatever he had with anyone who needed it. He remembers this a lot. He remembers, growing up in upstate New York, how she had the homeless into the house for lunch. The idea of all that meat going bad on the side of the road is more than he can abide.

Suddenly he shouts and throws on the brakes: "THERE GOES ONE NOW, THERE'S TWO OF THEM!" and you grip the side of the door and watch two, now four eyes, like tiny white wafers zinging near the road through the woods. "That's how fast it can happen," he says.

One night last month he went to pick up a dead deer, and on the way home, he hit another. A two-fer.