The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

I sat on a bucket against an oak until dark and never saw a deer.

That night I drove home and sat in the driveway with the engine off, looking at the kitchen light. Amber came out in her slippers and her barn coat and got in the passenger side and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“He took him,” she said finally.

“He took him.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He nodded.”

She put her forehead down on the dashboard. My wife is not a crier.

She grew up the only girl in a house with three men and a father who thought tears were something you did in private, like praying. But she sat there with her forehead on the dash, and her shoulders went.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Ryan.”

“It isn’t yours to be sorry for,” I said. “Mason’s having the time of his life. That’s what counts.”

I meant that. I want to be honest about everything in this story, and that part is true.

My son was in the woods with his grandfather and his uncles, in the place they all loved, and I was glad for him. I was also sitting in my own driveway in the dark, thirty-six years old, feeling about nine.

I met Amber Hagen at a wedding dance at the Legion hall in her hometown when we were both twenty-one.

She was the one who asked me to dance, which I found out later was the only way anybody ever got anywhere with a Hagen. You had to let them decide.

I grew up in town, south of Wausau, the son of a mail carrier and a school cook. My dad did not hunt. He liked to fish for walleye on the Wisconsin River and he liked to watch the Packers, and that was the outdoors for him.

I learned to hunt on my own in my twenties, from a neighbor and from books and from a lot of cold mornings doing it wrong.

By the time I married Amber, I had shot four deer and I could field dress one without making a mess of it.

The Hagens had been going to the same camp up in the north woods since 1962. Dennis’s father built the cabin with two of his brothers out of logs they cut on the forty acres. Every November, the Friday before the gun opener, the Hagen men went up.

Opening weekend in Wisconsin is the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and in our part of the state it is closer to a holiday than Thanksgiving is.

Schools empty out. The diners open at four in the morning. Half the trucks on the highway have a blaze orange cap on the dash.

We were married in June. That first November, Amber was seven months along with Mason, and I did not even think about camp. I stayed home and painted the nursery and hunted the county forest the second weekend.

The second November I was covering Saturdays at the mill for a foreman out on surgery. The third fall, Mason was almost two.

I asked at Sunday dinner, carefully, the way you ask your boss for a raise. Dennis was at the kitchen table with his rifle broken down on a towel, running a patch through the barrel.

“I was wondering,” I said, “if there’d be room at camp for one more this year. I’d pull my weight. I can cook.”

He didn’t look up from the barrel. He ran the patch through once more and held the bore up to the window and looked through it.