The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

I did it the right way, though. That much I can say.

I went over to Dennis’s place the next Saturday morning and found him in the machine shed, sitting on an upturned bucket next to the Farmall with a cup of coffee, because he was not supposed to be in there and he did not care.

“I’d like to open camp this year,” I said. “If you’ll let me. I’ll get it ready. I’ll call the guys. You can come up and sit in the cabin or not, whatever you want.”

He looked at me for a long time over the coffee cup.

“Camp is for family,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve heard it twelve times. I’m not asking to be family. I’m asking to keep your camp from missing a year. Somebody’s got to cut the wood.”

He didn’t answer. He drank his coffee. After a while he reached in his shirt pocket and took out a ring of keys and worked one off the ring with his thick fingers, and he held it out without looking at me.

“Pump leathers are shot,” he said. “There’s a kit in the coffee can on the shelf above the sink. Don’t let the mice into the flour.”

That was all. It was not yes. It was not anything. But it was a key.

The first Saturday in October I drove up with my chainsaw, a gas can, a box of contractor bags and a sack of groceries, and I opened the gate at the end of that road for the first time in my life.

I drove the quarter mile back through the jack pine slow, like I was trespassing.

The cabin was smaller than I had pictured. One long room of dark logs with a wood stove at one end and a plank table down the middle, and a back room with six bunks, three high on each wall.

There was a hand pump at the sink and an outhouse out back, and that was it. No power.

There was a board nailed over the door inside, a long piece of white pine with names burned into it with a wood-burning tool. Hagen, Hagen, Hagen, down the whole left side.

Dennis’s father, his uncles, Dennis, his brother, Kurt, Tony, the cousins. Lyle Bauer, alone, on the right. And at the bottom, fresh and pale, Mason Kowalczyk.

I stood and looked at that board a while. Then I got to work.

Mice had gotten into every mattress. I dragged all six out to the fire ring and burned them, and I wrote down the size so I could buy new ones.

I swept out a coffee can’s worth of mouse droppings and washed the table and the shelves with bleach water.

I found the pump kit right where he said, in a coffee can above the sink, with the new leathers wrapped in wax paper and a note in Jean’s handwriting that said Pump, 2019.

I rebuilt the pump with the instructions on the back of the card. It took me two hours and I skinned three knuckles. When the water finally came up cold and clear, I said thank you out loud to nobody.

The next weekend I cut wood. The cabin woodpile was down to a few rows of punky birch, and I knew from Amber that the camp burned about two cords over opening weekend if it was cold.

I took down three standing dead oaks along the ridge and bucked them and split them by hand.