The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

Sitting

She sat eleven of them. I went with her when my shifts let me. When I was called out on a job, her mother sat with her, wrapped in a blanket and a thermos of coffee, reading her Bible on her phone with the brightness turned all the way down.

We sat in a ladder stand on the edge of the creek bottom, looking out over the corn stubble. The mornings were cold and clear. We watched the sun come up red over the neighbor’s grain bins more times than I can count.

Some mornings she saw nothing. Some mornings a doe and two yearlings would feed across the far side of the field, way out of range, and Paisley would watch them with her chin on her knees and never once complain.

On the ninth morning a young buck came under the stand and stood there scratching his neck on a branch. She could have touched him with her bow tip. She had no buck tag. She just watched him and grinned at me without making a sound.

“You did good,” I whispered after he walked off.

“I know,” she whispered back. “I wanted to.”

The Morning

The eleventh morning was the second Saturday of November. Sunny, no wind, frost on every blade of grass. My wife had the morning off and stayed home making pancakes, so it was just Paisley and me.

At about nine thirty, when the sun was full up and I had given up on anything moving, a big doe came walking down the creek trail alone. Unhurried. Nose down.

Paisley stood up slowly, the way we had practiced. She clipped on her release. She waited until the doe passed behind a walnut trunk and then she drew.

The doe stepped out at eighteen yards and stopped. I heard the string. I heard the arrow hit. The doe jumped, kicked, and ran sixty yards into the stubble and went down within sight.

Paisley sat back down on the stand seat and put both hands over her mouth. She was shaking all over.

“Breathe,” I said. “You did it right.”

“I did it right,” she said. “Dad. I did it right.”

We waited twenty minutes like you are supposed to. Then we climbed down and walked out into the sunshine together. She knelt by that doe in the frosty stubble and put her hand on its side and closed her eyes for a minute. I didn’t ask what she said. I think I know.

She tagged it. She reported it from my phone right there in the field. I helped her field dress it, and she did most of the knife work herself, careful and slow.