The frost on the Ruud family field road was thick enough that my tires crunched over it like cereal, and I could smell the cabin smoke before I could see the cabin.
It was a quarter after six on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, opening morning of the Wisconsin gun deer season.
In the eleven years my daughter had been married to Chad, I had never once driven out to his family’s camp.
The camp sits on forty acres of popple and balsam north of Tomahawk, at the end of a county road the plow gets to last.
The cabin is small and wooden, built by Chad’s grandpa in 1971, with a woodstove, six bunks, and a calendar on the wall nobody ever changes.
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Two men in blaze orange sat on logs at the fire ring out front. One was Corey, Chad’s younger brother.
The other was Uncle Dale, their late father’s brother, who has run that camp since the boys were in grade school.
Chad was at his pickup, pulling his blaze orange cap down over his ears.
He had on the camouflage jacket Amber gave him two Christmases ago. When my headlights swung across him, he stopped moving altogether.
I am sixty-three years old. I cooked lunch at the elementary school in town for thirty-one years, tater tot hotdish and all.
I am not a woman who drives out to deer camp in the dark, and I want that understood before I tell the rest.
I parked beside his truck and got out slowly, the way the new hip still makes me, one hand on the door frame.
I had on my blaze orange knit hat, because nobody with sense walks around the woods on opening morning without it, and my tan barn coat.
Uncle Dale stood up. “Sheila? Everything all right? Amber and the kids okay?”
He had already started toward me, the way a man does when a woman shows up at camp before light and he thinks somebody has died.
“Everybody’s fine, Dale,” I said. “I just need a minute with Chad.” He looked at me, then at his nephew, and then he did a decent thing.
He went back to the fire, sat down with his eyes on the flames, and nudged Corey to do the same.
Chad came around the tailgate. His breath smoked in the cold. “Mom,” he said, very quietly.
He has called me Mom since the wedding. “Shooting light’s at ten to seven. Can this please wait until tonight?”
“It’s waited a week, Chad. You said you’d come by before the opener.”
I held my hand out, palm up, the way I used to hold it out to a third grader with a squirt gun in the lunch line. “I came for my rifle.”