For many Wisconsin families, the annual gun deer season is a tradition as sacrosanct as Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas Eve, Easter Sunday and a Fourth of July picnic.
This season will be my 54th in the hills of southwestern Wisconsin. Our little hunting group started out as just my dad, my two older brothers, and me. When the brothers went their own way in the world, it was just me and Dad for 21 of those years.
Dad was 84 years old in 2002. He was slowing down, but not enough to stay home. He told me the evening before opening day that he would come out, but not until after breakfast time and full light.
By the time I got up to our parking spot, Dad was out of the car and working to slip on his orange coveralls. We got him bundled up, grabbed his gun and shells and a thermos of coffee, and shuffled down the brushy fence row for maybe 50 yards.
“This’ll do,” Dad said, and I set up his lawn chair right there.
I sat down and we visited a long while. Then he said, “You go back and hunt, Tommy, I’ll be fine. I’ll see you at lunchtime.”
About ten minutes after I had hiked back down the hill and settled back into my stand, I heard a shot that could only have been from him. Back I hiked up the hill. At the place where Dad should have been sitting came into view, my heartbeat quickened: He wasn’t there. Was he okay?
Fairly trotting up to his empty lawn chair, I spotted him maybe 75 yards away, behind a rise in the hayfield. His head was to the ground and he was looking for something.
I walked over and surprised his concentration. “Lookin’ for blood?” I asked.
“Oh, the deer is lying right over there,” he pointed matter-of-factly. “I dropped my glove somewhere. Help me find it.”
Such was my father. The whitetail, a fat little young-of-the-year buck, would be just right for him and Mom to eat.
So ended Charles E. Carpenter’s deer hunting career. Mom got sick later that winter, Dad didn’t want to leave her the next year for deer hunting, and she passed away the following spring.
Sooner or later, the wind quits billowing the hayfield and blowing our sails. We don’t always know when we are drifting into port. That’s why you love and live what you have while you have it.
