Part I
Finkel Road springs from the rocky shores of Lake Huron and runs east to west through Harbor Beach, Michigan. At section 24, the gravel lane passes Earl Braun’s red-brick farmhouse. Earl came into the world 82 years ago, the son of immigrant German farmers. Each morning he sees the sun refract off of the great lake and cast its amber rays over the same stretch of dirt. On a clear night you could from Earl's front steps see a candle placed on the porch of the house where he was born. He toiled for the better part of a century in the loamy sand that his father worked with horses and that Earl and his sons have worked with tractors to provide food and shelter for three generations of Brauns. The acres are blessed with abundant corn, sugar beets, and whitetail deer.
Earl doesn’t own a gun. Never has. He doesn’t object to them. A shotgun or a .22 rifle are common tools of this trade. But Earl didn’t need them to keep the farm going. That’s all. His sons are different. They have pump twelve-gauges with slug barrels. Larry, Warren, and Dennis are deer hunters. Like all brothers they compete in a friendly way. Each has a big buck on the wall. But Warren seems to have an edge.
One frigid November day more than a decade ago, Warren was rolling in his Ford truck to bowling league in Harbor Beach. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon during gun deer season. Dusk was setting in the west. Warren noticed a dark spot that stood out against the snow in a sugar beet field far from the road. He eased in the clutch and pushed the stick shift to neutral. The Ford crunched to a stop on the gravel.
Warren didn’t need binoculars to see that it was a deer. A big doe was digging beets. He slid a Remington Wingmaster from behind the seat and let the brown vinyl case drop to the floor. The truck idled on the road while Warren stole across the ditch. The doe scraped the frozen dirt with her front hoof and turned toward the road. He slipped two slugs into the magazine and pressed the latch in front of the trigger guard. His left hand gripped the forend.
Snick, snick.
Warren took the safety off as he raised the worn walnut stock to his cheek. The doe lifted her head and flicked an ear. No stomping or snorting. She was way too far away to be that concerned. He covered the deer’s chest with the front sight. The doe lifted her head and chewed. Warren raised the sight blade until it was directly between the doe’s ears, then raised it another two feet. He exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The bark of the twelve- gauge fragmented the freezing air, spitting a three-foot flame. Warren felt the sharp punch of recoil on his shoulder. When he lifted his head the doe was in a heap.
Warren looked at his watch.
Shit, I’ll be late for league.
He walked back to the Ford and cased the gun. From the bowling alley he dialed Larry.
Hey, I shot a big doe in the beet field just west of Dad’s house. Didn’t have time to drag it out. Can you do me a favor?
When Larry reached the doe he looked for the fatal gunshot. It took him a few seconds to see that the slug went in the deer’s nose and out the back of its skull. He paced the distance back to Warren’s boot marks—175 yards easy.
Part II
Warren’s long-distance strike on the way to bowling league is one of many stories that are told and retold in Earl Braun’s machine shed after a family deer hunt. There is a cavernous wood stove, fed with three-foot rounds of ash and oak from the grove north of the barn. Enough heat radiates from the glowing coals to keep an armada of heavy equipment from freezing on subzero nights. A cube of Coors light beer sits on a workbench near the door of the shed. The first hunter in from the woods cracks the case and nips lukewarm brew. Depending on how deer are moving, he might throw two empties in the bin before the next hunter bustles in. Eventually a half-dozen Brauns gather in front of the crackling fire. Broad shoulders in Carhartt bibs lean on a red Case International combine.
Larry saw a forkhorn at first light. Dennis passed on a six and a spike. Warren took a poke at a monster, lots of brush, dammit. Everyone saw a herd of does.
Three years after marrying Larry's daughter I was on the Braun deer hunt for the first time. I sat in the corner of the shed. My second beer was chasing away the cold in my bones after 11 hours in an oak tree.
Shooting the bull about deer hunting is old hat to me. I grew up in rural Wisconsin. Farm plots, gang drives, squads of men from church were the main event each November. Everybody was out to fill the freezer. Our strategy was simple. A few hunters would stand in a line at one end of a patch of cover. Others walked in from the other side to drive out the deer. There was a lot of whistling and shouting. Best know where everyone is so you can get your gun up if a branch snaps in the other direction.
The action always started quick. Slugs aimed at bobbing white tails went airborne at a liberal clip. If nothing else, the noise would let standers know that deer were moving. Usually someone was victorious. Shotgun cradled in the crook of an arm, steam rising from a blaze orange stocking cap and a big smile. Knife out ready to gut and drag. Deer stretched on the snow, tongue hanging from a slack jaw. Sometimes it would be an eight or ten-pointer. Huge by the standards of farm groves and public forest. There was no deer management or special crops that grow antlers. Usually it was a forkhorn or a doe. Nobody held out for a Booner.
If it’s brown, it’s down
That was the rule. Not just for deer either. More than once my dad blew a grouse’s head off with a twenty-gauge slug while slogging through pines on a drive. The hunters in our group wouldn't starve without a deer. But we didn’t buy many beef steaks at the grocery store either. If you wanted a tenderloin grilled medium rare on a Saturday night, it cost sixteen dollars for the license, fifty cents for a Federal slug, and the electric bill for running the chest freezer until you ate.
We’d stand around a truck after each drive and compare notes. Somebody announced where the deer jumped. Somebody else was pretty sure they saw a huge buck sneak out the back of a bean field before we walked in. Often, the dialogue was all-business. Two men negotiating who would keep a deer that both shot at and each believed he killed. Others calling dibs on a stand for the next drive. A safety-minded deacon admonishing a teen for pointing his loaded gun astray. Sometimes there was gossip about a church member who went into a bar. Or a teenager that was caught in flagrante delicto with another kid from the church.
I was tired of gang drives by the middle of high school. Too much whistling and yelling. Too much time in the car going to the next spot. Deer always running, breathing hard, slugs coming toward you. I wanted to sit still. There isn’t as much action. But it’s effective. Especially if you go in before light and stay until dark. Grey fox, pheasants, fishers, black squirrels, and trespassers. Even with blaze orange clothing, it’s uncanny how much you see when you keep still for a long time.
So, when Larry Braun invited me to join his family’s hunt, I was happy to learn that they hunt from stands. On a mid-November Thursday after work, I loaded my warm coveralls, a single-shot twelve gauge, a pink suitcase, and my seven-year-old daughter Ella into the truck. We drove through the night from Minneapolis, around the south side of Lake Michigan, through the lights of Chicago, smelled the paper-mill pungency of Indiana, then north along Lake Huron, and a half-mile past Earl Braun’s farm to Larry’s house. We arrived around sunrise. Larry was in the kitchen. He fried fresh eggs and a venison tenderloin for our breakfast. After that I had time for a two-hour nap before heading out to check the deer stands.
Part III
The first order of business was to fix a box blind that the wind screaming over Michigan’s thumb had toppled sometime in the summer. The blind is a ten-foot square shack on stilts, made from old barn wood. It overlooks a ravine a half mile south of Finkel road by the Fillion intersection. The perch is outfitted with a metal folding chair—the kind you see in the basement of Our Lady of Lake Huron Catholic Church in Harbor Beach. If that chair ever did time seating the faithful at Easter potluck dinners, the penance is over. Now it provides back support for man’s dominion over the animals. South of the blind you can see over a 20-acre fallow field, bounded by a row of mature pine trees. East there’s a swamp, the far end of which would be a tough shot for a Navy Seal with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. North are thick trees with patchy views of the ravine. On the way out, three white tails popped up and waved through the trees.
That night, sometime after cheesy potatoes and before bourbon, I learned that I would sit in Schubring’s ravine in the morning. My brother-in-law has a ladder stand there. Brian gave me his best spot with grace that, to a deer hunter, rivals Christ washing the disciple’s feet. Just before midnight I went outside to hang my coveralls on a clothesline in the barnyard. The moon was up. Across the road I could see three deer feeding. A few minutes later I drifted off to sleep imagining that one of them was a ten-pointer walking past my stand.
I didn’t need an alarm. Larry’s muffled movement through the dark house woke me at four. He headed out across the yard to reload the corn dryer. In the icy night air he shimmied up a metal ladder to the top of the galvanized steel cylinder, moonlight reflecting from the convex top. Larry scooped corn into a plastic jug and climbed down. I saw his flashlight on the silver dial that he used to test the moisture level in the kernels. Must have been okay because he fired up the John Deer 5093 parked next to the dryer and eased the throttle open. Around 3,500 RPM the power takeoff shaft started spinning and Larry hunched down into brown Carhartt coveralls in the dark tractor cab. It took about fifteen minutes for the auger to move the corn from the dryer to a grain bin. It would be there until Braun Acre’s contract required delivery to the elevator in the spring. Larry jumped down and pushed a conveyor. In the thick shadows it looked like a slender prehistoric giraffe. When the snout lined up with the dryer, he pulled open the gate of a grain truck. Corn started falling onto the conveyor. Larry throttled up the tractor again. A chain carried a stream of kernels upward until they went over the top of the conveyor shaft into the dryer. Another fifteen minutes and the dryer was full. He turned on a massive propane heater which would drive moisture from the corn. Larry does this every three hours for a month straight during the harvest.
A half-hour before daybreak I was high in Brian’s tree. Before light the twigs were snapping. Timber ghosts moved through the trees. When I could see, a deer appeared every five minutes. They were thicker than squirrels. By noon I passed up three bucks. A fork and two little six pointers. Near dusk I almost took a monster doe that ambled up the ridge behind me. It stood broadside, forty yards away. I centered the crosshairs behind her shoulder, eased the hammer back and started letting out my breath. Before my trigger finger tightened I had a sudden thought.
Wait until tomorrow so Ella can see.
A half hour later I sat on the yellow four-wheeler in Earl's shed finishing my third Coors. I told everybody about the little bucks. Passed around my camera with photos of the one that bedded underneath me.
Larry told me that tomorrow I would be in the box blind over by Finkel and Fillion.
Part IV
It was pitch black out when Larry let in a blast of arctic on his way to fill the corn dryer. I forced myself off the couch and shuffled to the room where Ella hibernated under a mound of blankets. A sliver of light from the bulb in the hallway shone on her blonde locks. Rapunzel was sleeping harder than Snow White.
Ella.
Eleanor!
Mmph.
Time to go hunting.
Yawn.
This happened four times before the wake-up stuck. When Ella finally emerged, she was wearing a bright green turtleneck and pink leggings. Her hair was in a knot.
Where’s my breakfast?
I looked at her and contemplated what would be necessary to achieve basic scent control. It would be impossible. As far as deer were concerned, she was a bubblegum aromatherapy candle. I decided to adjust my expectations and make sure she stayed warm.
Twenty minutes later I parked the truck on a field road across from Earl’s house. It was around 5:30. His is kitchen lights were on. Retirement for a Harbor Beach farmer is different than in Marco Island. I grabbed a sleeping bag from the truck and told Ella to follow me. We crept through a fallow field toward the shadow of the blind. Five minutes later she was tucked in a sleeping bag up to her chin.
Do you see all the stars sweetie?
She nodded silently. I leaned against the blind and dropped a slug into the barrel of the 12 gauge. When the Eastern sky turned pink I looked at Ella. She was sound asleep.
Dawn broke clear as frozen vodka. No snapping twigs. No does. Not a forkhorn to be seen. The sun was an hour into its westward ascent. I looked down the treeline in front of me. A buck’s head and neck was peeking out. Sun gleamed off of white bone. Four points on each side. Steam rose from his nostrils.
Moment of truth. Tick tock, Tick tock. Lord I want that deer.
I was holding my shotgun the way I do when I hunt pheasants. Center balanced waist high. I couldn’t, didn’t look the deer in the eyes. Buck in my peripheral vision, slow, painfully slow, shoulders tense, heart thumping, raising the gun, for ever and ever, still not there, waiting to hear a snort and the deer is gone, buck standing, hammer back, stock almost to my shoulder.
He jumped. If the buck had gone North back into the trees that would have been that. But he went South, not running, not bounding. Breaking into a deliberate trot. Shots at running deer on Wisconsin drives came home to roost. I don’t remember where the cross-hairs were when the gun went off. I was swinging right to left and the recoil bit me and the deer was down. I broke the barrel and dropped in another slug. I could see tall grass swaying.
Dad, did you get it?
The shotgun blast catapulted sleeping beauty into the world of the living. Her eyes were like half-dollars, peeking out from the sleeping bag.
Do you see the grass moving over there?
Yes.
Keep watching.
Through the scope I saw an antler then a nose and an ear in the grass. I moved the cosshairs back and down a foot. When they found a patch of brown hair a squeezed of another shot.
Ella was scrambling out of the sleeping bag, blue eyes dancing with excitement.
Let’s go get it!
The buck was a healthy two year-old. Slender, symmetrical antlers inside the ears. When we were close I could see that the deer’s eyes were still bright.
Ella, this deer is alive. I need to shoot it again. Cover your ears, okay?
She looked at me.
Can I shoot it?
Ella has perforated countless beer cans with a .22 rifle. 12 gauge, very different thing.
Okay sweetie.
I dropped in another slug and stood beside her.
Don’t put your eye up to the scope. Just point.
I handed her the gun and knelt by her left side. Then I cocked the hammer and put my right hand in the middle of her back. My left hand slid between her shoulder and the stock to blunt the recoil.
You okay?
She nodded in anticipation.
Okay, squeeze the trigger when you’re ready.
She concentrated for a few seconds. Whump! She had a big smile. Steam rose from behind the deer’s shoulder. Its eyes faded to a glassy grey.
Halfway through field dressing Ella piped up.
Good thing I was here, Dad. Otherwise that deer would have jumped up and ran away.
You’re right sweetie. Thank you.
By the time we dragged the deer to the truck she had advanced her theory.
Dad.
Yes, sweetie.
Are you sure you even hit it?
