The Bait Shop on the First Day of Deer Season

Four O’Clock

Pete drove me out at a quarter to four Saturday morning. He’d sit his stand on the Hovland place at five-thirty, like every other man in the county, and he wanted to see us open first.

Jake already had the lights on and the pump unlocked. Tori had both coffee makers going, the big silver one from his work and Grandpa’s dented old one, and the whole shop smelled like coffee and doughnuts and cold wet wool.

I flipped the cardboard clock on the door to Open at four o’clock exactly.

The Petersen brothers came in at sixteen minutes after. Two old bachelors in their seventies, in orange coats so faded they were almost pink, who had hunted the same ridge north of the lake their whole lives.

The older one stopped inside the door and looked around the shop and then at me, standing behind the counter in Grandpa’s spot.

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be.”

“Coffee’s on,” I said.

“Where’s Gus?”

“Rehab. Broken hip. He’s doing his laps.”

The younger one shook his head. “We drove by Tuesday and saw that sign and figured that was the end of it. We had a whole conversation about where we’d get our coffee.” He put two dollars on the counter for two cups and wouldn’t take change.

In the next hour and a half we had maybe forty people through the door. Hunters who’d come up from the Cities and Milwaukee and stopped for gas because Gus’s pump was the last one before the lake road. Locals in orange who’d always come. A lot of them stopped and stood just inside the door for a second, looking at the shelves, before they came on up.

Pete kissed me on the cheek at five-fifteen, took a cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut, and went out to his truck. “Don’t sell out of hand warmers before I get back,” he said. He was teasing. He had no idea.

First Light

The sun comes up late that far north in November. It was getting on toward half past six before the sky over the trees across the highway went from black to a cold, pale gray and then a thin pink, and the frost on the front window started to glow.

That’s when the second wave came.

Some of them were men who’d been on their stands since before six and were too cold already. Some were wives and sons who hadn’t gone out at all and came for coffee and doughnuts. Some were old men who don’t hunt anymore but have stopped at Gus’s on opening morning for fifty years and weren’t about to quit just because their knees had.

And a lot of them, I found out later, came because the Petersen brothers had told everybody at the café in town at six-thirty that Gus’s was open.

By seven the line ran from my counter all the way to the door. Blaze orange coats and orange caps, shoulder to shoulder, between the minnow tanks and the racks of tackle. The window behind them was white with frost, with the early daylight coming through it soft and gold.

Jake ran Grandpa’s old register, punching the keys with two fingers and slapping the drawer shut with the heel of his hand exactly the way Grandpa did. He had on a blaze orange hat off the shelf with the tag still hanging from it. He hadn’t had time to pull it off.

I bagged. Hand warmers, toe warmers, a box of shells, a drag rope, a knife, a stocking cap. I’d fold the top of the paper bag down twice, hand it across the counter, and say, “Good luck out there,” and the next man would already be holding out his money.

Tori kept the coffee going and the doughnuts coming out of the boxes. When the maple long johns ran out, a man about Grandpa’s age leaned over the counter and said, “Those were Gus’s. He’d have eaten the last one himself.”

Every single one of them asked how Gus was.

Not once or twice. Every one. “How’s Gus doing?” “How’s the old man?” “Is Gus coming back?” “Tell Gus I said hi.” I must have said “rehab, broken hip, he’s doing his laps” a hundred times by eight o’clock.