I grew up south of Huron, on a quarter section my dad rented and never owned. He worked days at the elevator and farmed nights and weekends, and from the first Saturday of pheasant season until Thanksgiving he hunted every road ditch in three townships.
He took me along when I was nine. My mother did not like it. He bought me a hunter safety course at the Legion hall and a blaze orange cap two sizes too big, and he made me walk behind him without a gun for one whole season before he let me carry one.
“You learn the birds first,” he told me. “Then the gun. Then the dog. And the dog teaches you more than the other two put together.”
We had a liver-colored springer named Vic when I was little, and then a yellow Lab named Sadie through my high school years. Sadie could find a dead rooster in a slough a grown man could not walk through. Dad said she was the best thing he ever bought with a check.
He gave me his old gun when I turned sixteen. It was a Stevens 20 gauge side-by-side, older than he was, with a stock gone dark from the oil on his hands. He bought himself a pump gun from the hardware store and never looked back.
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“Side-by-side makes you pick your shot,” he said. “Two chances. That’s all anybody gets.”
He hunted with me every fall until I moved to Georgia for school, and then whenever I came home. The last fall he was alive we walked the ditch along the Kuehl place together, him moving slow, me pretending not to notice. Sadie was long gone by then, and he never got another dog.
He died in March, four years ago, at sixty-one. His heart. He was carrying a pail of water to the hogs and he set it down in the yard and sat down next to it, and that is where my mom found him.
At the funeral lunch in the church basement, my mom pressed the gun case into my hands. “He’d want it walking a field,” she said. “Not leaning in my closet.”
So it leaned in my closet instead. Four years. I took it out sometimes and oiled it and put it back. I did not know where I would walk it. Tanner hunted with his family. His family’s opener was Duane’s opener. And Duane’s opener had a rule.
I want to be fair to Tanner here, because people who hear this story always ask where my husband was for nine years.
The second October we were married, Tanner did stand up. He went to his dad in the shop the night before the opener and said Kelsey grew up hunting and she would like to walk with us. I was not there. Tanner told me about it after.
Duane did not get angry. Duane never got angry. He just said, “My land, my opener, my rules,” and went back to greasing the sickle bar on the old swather. And that was that.
Tanner wanted to push. I told him to let it go. I meant it. Duane had farmed that ground for forty years and his father before him. Every bird on it, he fed. Every acre of grass he kept in the Conservation Reserve instead of planting it, he paid for in beans he did not grow.
It was his land and his opener. I was not going to stand in his yard and argue with him in front of his sons. I had married into that family, and I wanted to stay married into it, and you do not win a man like Duane with words.