Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

“You don’t have to walk us in, Amy,” Dale said. “We know where they are. We put them up.”

“Grandpa always walked his hunters in,” I said. “First morning, anyway. I’d like to.”

So I went first. Along the edge of Ron Hanson’s picked cornfield, toward the oaks, with my thermos in my hand and three men behind me in single file.

Nobody used a flashlight once we got going. We didn’t need one.

We were a little late. By the time we reached the field edge, the dark had started going gray behind the oak ridge, the way it did when I was nine.

There was frost on every broken cornstalk, and it crunched under our boots.

Nobody said anything. I could hear the three of them breathing behind me and the far-off whine of a truck on Highway 37.

A great horned owl was still calling somewhere down in the creek bottom.

Wes’s stand was the farthest, up on the ridge saddle where two trails crossed. Tim’s was in the middle, overlooking the creek bottom where Grandpa always said the big ones crossed.

Dale’s was the wooden ladder stand right at the corner where the cornfield met the oaks.

We left Wes first. He nodded to me at the bottom of his ladder, loaded his rifle, and climbed up without a word. Then we walked back down to Tim’s.

Tim stood at the bottom of his stand for a long minute before he climbed.

He looked up at the seat, at the dark shape of the oaks against the gray sky. Then he looked at me.

“My uncle used to walk me in like this,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it. “I forgot. I forgot that till right now.”

I put my hand on his arm, just for a second, the way Grandpa used to put his hand on my knee.

Then Tim climbed up, and I heard the safety strap click, and he was gone into the gray.

Dale’s stand was the last, closest to the field. I unscrewed the thermos at the bottom of the ladder and poured him a cup of coffee in the cap, and he drank it standing there in the frost, steam coming off it into his beard.

“Your grandpa did right by this ground,” he said. “So are you.”

He handed me back the cup. He had one boot on the bottom rung when we both heard it.

Voices, down at the gate where the field road comes in off County H. Men’s voices, low, and car doors shutting one after another. Then footsteps coming up along the cornfield toward us.

Dale stepped back off the ladder. He didn’t say anything. He just came and stood next to me, a little in front of me, the way you would stand next to your sister.

Three men came walking up the field edge in the half dark. Kurt Fischer in front. Mike Weber and Russ Olson behind him.

All three in orange, all three with rifles slung. They had walked right past four posted signs to get there.

They stopped about twenty feet off. Kurt’s breath was coming out white. I could see him trying to make out who I was with.

“Amy,” he said. He sounded tired, not angry. “Brad said you’d cool off. He said the signs were just to make a point.”