The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

Mason came up with me on the third weekend. He had not said much about any of it.

When we pulled through the gate he got out and stood looking at the cabin, and then at me, and I could see he was trying to figure out what to feel.

“Grandpa said you could?” he asked.

“Grandpa gave me the key.”

He thought about that. “That’s kind of like yes,” he said.

“That’s what I figured too.”

He showed me the trail to his grandpa’s stand. Half a mile, exactly like the surgeon said, down off the ridge and across a creek on a split-log bridge with no rail, then up through a cedar swamp where the ground sucked at your boots.

Walking it, I understood why Kurt and Tony had called it off.

But there was an old two-track that went around the long way, along the property line on the high ground.

It was grown up with popple saplings and blocked with a couple of deadfalls, and Dennis had not used it in years. It came out a hundred yards from his stand on the far side of the clearing.

Mason and I cleared it that afternoon, me with the saw and him dragging brush. By dark you could drive a side-by-side down it, slow.

The stand itself was a wooden ladder stand Dennis had built in 1988, twelve feet up in a big white pine at the edge of a clearing, with a two-man seat and a shooting rail.

The ladder was what worried me. It was straight up and down, two-by-four rungs, no rail, and the bottom two rungs were soft.

I tore the ladder off and built a new one at a slant, with wide steps instead of rungs and a two-by-four handrail on both sides, the way you would build steps into a hayloft for an old man.

I lag-bolted it to the tree and to the platform. Then I climbed it ten times with my left leg held stiff, pretending my knee did not bend.

Lyle Bauer stopped by our place the next week. Lyle is seventy, a retired dairy farmer who drives a school bus now.

He stood in our driveway in his seed cap with his hands in his coat pockets.

“Heard you’re opening camp,” he said.

“Word gets around.”

“Your boy told my grandson on the bus.” He looked off at the road. “You know your father-in-law can’t get back to his stand.”

“There’s an old two-track on the high side,” I said. “I cleared it. If I had a side-by-side, I could get him within a hundred yards. I rebuilt his ladder with a rail.”

Lyle looked at me then, a long look, the same kind Dennis gives you. Then he nodded.

“My Ranger’s got a full tank,” he said. “I’ll trailer it up the Wednesday before. Dark green one. You’ll know it.” He started to turn and then didn’t. “You calling the guys?”

“I was going to.”

“Call them,” Lyle said. “Every one of them. Some of them have been waiting a long time for somebody to do something about that camp.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I found out later.

I made the calls that weekend from the kitchen table, with the list Amber wrote out from memory. Cousins, second cousins, two of Dennis’s old friends from the co-op, Lyle’s son.

Most of them I had met at funerals and graduations. I said who I was and what I was doing, and I braced for a strange silence every time.