It was a big one. It went eleven minutes. Dad came in from the barn in the middle of it, stamping the cold off his boots, and he saw what was happening and simply sat down on the floor beside the boot bench with his bad hip, right in the doorway, and waited with me.
The kitchen clock said six ten when Mason stopped rocking.
Shooting light was six thirty five. Sunrise was five after seven. Every other hunter in Wood County had been sitting in the dark for half an hour already. By any hunter’s clock in Wisconsin, we were late.
Mason stood up. He wiped his face on his sleeve. He put on his blaze orange coat and then his blaze orange cap, in that order, and pulled the cap down over his ears with both hands.
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“Till noon,” he said.
“Till noon,” Dad said.
I put on my brown work coat, and the blaze orange vest over it, and the knit hat I keep in the glove box. Dad put on his orange coat. He carried the rifle, empty, with the bolt open and the shells in his pocket, because that is how Ervin taught all of us to walk a field in the dark.
We went out the back door into the cold.
The sky was going gray when we started across the yard, and pink by the time we reached the end of the lane. It was clear and still and so cold the inside of my nose stuck together. Frost lay on every blade of grass like somebody had sifted sugar over the whole county.
We walked the farm line single file. Dad first, then Mason, then me. The cornfield was cut, stubble in long rows to our right, every stalk white with frost and crunching under our boots no matter how carefully we stepped. On our left the hardwoods stood bare and gray, oak and maple and a few big basswoods Ervin used to call his landmarks.
Shots were already rolling across the countryside. Mason flinched at the first one and then not at the others. Ervin had told him about that too. Opening morning sounds like the Fourth of July, he said, and none of it is yours, so let it go by.
It is a little under half a mile from the barn to the corner. It took us fourteen minutes. I know because Mason counted out loud in a whisper, under his breath, the whole way. Counting is another thing that does not hurt him.
The stand looked smaller than I remembered. The ladder rails had gone silver with weather, and the rungs Ervin replaced in 2009 had gone silver too. The bench seat sat about fourteen feet up, against a big white oak, looking out over the corner where the woods and the corn come together.
The sun broke over the tree line to the east just as we got there. All at once the frost on the stubble caught it and the whole field lit up gold. The light came through the bare branches in long bars and lay across the ladder rungs.