Instinct or Selfishness?

That is what I have been trying to figuring out since Saturday, replaying the events of that morning's hunt over and over in my mind. Let me get you up to speed. I had the opportunity to hunt with my brother-in-law out near his home on opening day of the general firearms deer season this past Saturday. After a few hours of being on the outskirts of the hunt, we found ourselves in midst of the action as the dog drivers turned loose a fresh set of beagles in a nearby cutover. He and I were at the bottom of a piece of cutover next to a creek, listening to the dogs begin to hit a fresh trail. Not much time had passed when a deer came toward us, but we couldn't see much of anything looking into the glare of sunshine and melting frost, and the deer either saw us or smelled us and quickly vanished back into the cutover. No sooner had that deer gone out of hearing, than I heard splashing in the creek to my left.
I turned to see an extremely nice buck easing down the creek, apparently trying to sneak out of the hunt area. I whispered to my brother-in-law that a buck was coming down the creek, several times actually, but when his rifle did not go off, I quickly shouldered my shotgun and dropped the buck in the creek bed. I almost instantly felt sick, unable to enjoy having harvested a beautiful buck, because I kept thinking, "He was probably getting ready to shoot, so why didn't you just wait." Well, I don't know why, and that is why I can't figure out if it was hunting instinct that took over with a big buck in sight, or if it was a strain of selfishness. As those two seconds transpired between seeing the buck and shooting, I remember thinking, "Can he see the deer", "does he have a shot", "why hasn't he shot yet", "how long before he has a shot", "what if this deer sees us and spooks, what will he think if I don't shoot" - so, I shot, and in an instant, the deer was down with no way to change the outcome, no way to rewind, no 'undo' button to 'fix' it. I expressed my remorse to him so many times after that, telling him that I wish it had been him that shot, that he probably got tired of me saying it. And he did not seem to care one bit who had shot the deer, just glad that one of us had been able to harvest the animal. But there is a part of me that keeps thinking that that deer was meant for him, and that I managed to mess up a 'divine' situation. It's one of those scenarios that you ask yourself 'what would I do' and that you answer 10 out of 10 times 'I would let the other person do this or that', but when this scenario became reality, the situation ended differently.

On one hand, you can say that it is just a deer - stop stressing, stop beating yourself up and move on. On the other hand, if it was selfishness, then I may have un-earthed something in me that I thought I had moved past as a sportsman and a Christian. Maybe this is something that the Lord wanted me to discover in order to deal with it effectively.

Any of you reading ever have something happen that 'rocked' you liked this situation did to me, glimpsing something within yourself that you couldn't quite explain, or something that you thought had been replaced with a different demeanor, something that you felt compromised your integrity or your identity? - GE