It was a winter tradition. Well OK, it was actually about a month before winter officially started. But in Wisconsin, the middle of November felt like winter back then.
There was often snow on the ground and freezing temperatures the weekend before Thanksgiving, as well as Thanksgiving weekend, the bookends of the Wisconsin white-tail deer season for firearms.
Every year since I could remember, I would watch my Dad pack his suitcase full of thermal underwear, wool socks and flannel shirts. He’d get out the waders and the blaze orange, quilted hunting coat with the deer tags affixed to the middle of the back.
He’d put a box of Tiparillos in the breast pocket of his shirt, even though I never saw him smoke until after I went on a deer hunting trip with him.
Dad would take the 12-guage out of the basement and make sure it was unloaded and the safety was on, telling my brothers and I never to point a gun at anyone ever, even if you knew it was unloaded and the safety was on.
Then, he’d load up whatever vehicle we happened to have at the time. My favorites were the forest green VW hatchback cause that’s the car we took when I went to go see my first Green Bay Packer game at Lambeau Field and the Mercury station wagon with fake wood cause it had FM.
After he left for someplace in central Wisconsin that was even colder than the Milwaukee suburb I grew up in, we’d spend the weekend with Mom waiting for Dad to call on Saturday and Sunday evening to tell us how his hunting party fared that day, how he just missed this big buck coming across the creek or how Joe, the group’s human bloodhound, had tracked a deer across a field (uphill both ways), under barbed wire, up a really tall fir tree and through the bog of eternal stench.
Well, after hearing the story, that’s what I imagined anyway.
Dad was good at providing all the images my little pea brain could handle.
I could almost sense the sights, sounds, smells of the hunt. Not to mention the sensation of having a frozen itchy trigger finger poised to pull when the sights lined up on a tasty hunk of venison.
Speaking of venison, when Dad came home after the season ended, we would have loads of venison to pack. We’d go to the basement and grind some up into burger, and placed it, stew meat and steak in freezer bags. The bags were then marked “some very juicy and tasty steak” or “a pound of fine deer burger” or whatever we could think of as we imagined the fine dishes our parents would concoct with the lean meat.
Then, they went into the basement freezer for safe keeping.
When I got old enough, I went along – the first time just to walk around. No firearm.
The next year, I went full force, complete with borrowed hip boots, borrowed 12-guage, borrowed blaze orange quilted coat and borrowed itchy trigger finger gloves with a flap to stick your finger out of. I had my own underwear, thank you very much.
I must admit that the whole hunting experience didn’t grip me nearly as much as it did my father or my younger brother. But, there are some very vivid memories that evoke pleasant memories of those trips I made lo so many years ago:
▪ Waking up at 4 a.m. after having played cards with my cousins until midnight. It’s amazing how little sleep you can operate on when you’re freezing half to death in a tree stand.
▪ Trying to gnaw on candy bars containing caramel in sub-freezing temperatures.
▪ Trying to get my shotgun around a small tree after waking a big buck up from his resting spot in the swamp of eternal peril while trying not to trip over fallen tree limbs and my own feet.
▪ Breaking through a layer of snow and ice while traversing the creek, hoping the water wouldn’t ride over the top of my hip boots.
▪ Watching a deer being dressed (remember, I was like a 12- or 13-year-old city kid at the time and had not been exposed to that part of it yet).
▪ Stopping in at Earl and Fern’s for a tasty bean soup lunch.
By the way, there are no restrooms in the wild.
