The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

The camp road was frozen in two hard ruts, and my truck rode them like rails. Mason sat beside me with his rifle case across his knees and his duffel jammed between his boots, and he had not stopped talking since we left the county highway.

He was twelve years old. He had passed his hunter safety course in August with a 96, and he had read the Wisconsin regulations pamphlet so many times the staples had worked loose. He knew the shooting hours for opening day better than I did.

“Grandpa says his stand in the big white pine is the best one,” he said. “He says he shot a ten-point out of it in 1994. He says nobody’s allowed in it but him.”

“I’ve heard about that buck,” I said.

I had heard about it at fourteen Thanksgivings. I had never seen the stand.

I had never been past the steel gate at the end of that road, where the gravel turned to two ruts and the ruts ran a quarter mile back through the jack pine to the Hagen cabin.

I stopped at the gate. Through the trees I could see the cabin, the low roof gone white with frost, smoke coming straight up from the chimney in the still air. There were four trucks parked in the clearing and a lantern burning in the window.

Dennis came out on the porch in his orange coat. He was sixty-five then, broad through the shoulders, with a gray mustache he had worn since before Amber was born. He lifted a hand.

Mason was out of the truck before I had it in park. He dragged the duffel over the gate, came back for the rifle case, and stood there a second with his breath smoking, looking at me.

“You could come in for a cup of coffee, Dad,” he said. “Just for a minute.”

I looked up at the porch. Dennis had put his hand down. He was waiting, the way a man waits at a crossing for a train to finish going by.

“Not this year, bud,” I said. “Grandpa runs camp. You listen to him and you listen to Lyle, and you don’t touch that safety until you’ve got a deer in your scope. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, Dad.”

He walked up the ruts with the duffel bumping against his leg. Dennis came down the steps to meet him, put a big hand on his shoulder, and turned him toward the door.

Neither of them looked back. I don’t blame Mason for that. He was twelve and walking into a place he had heard about his whole life.

Dennis did look back, once, at the bottom of the steps. He looked straight at my truck and gave me one short nod, the same nod he gave the man at the feed mill scale when the weight came in right. Then he went inside and shut the door.

I sat there with the engine running. Inside that cabin men I had eaten Thanksgiving dinner with were laughing at something. My wife’s two brothers were in there. Lyle Bauer was in there, a man who had been to my wedding and had danced with my mother.

I backed the truck down the road to the town road, because there was no room to turn around at the gate, and I drove forty miles south to the county forest land where I had hunted alone for eleven Novembers.