Weather Watch

During the summers of the mid-fifties, from the time I was a 6th grader until high school graduation when I had to get a job, Dad took my brother John and me on camping/ fishing expeditions into remote Canadian lakes. We never saw another fisherman. We made portages into Quetico Provincial Park’s Pickerel Lake where we kids caught monster pike and rode bareback on swimming moose.

Other than handling most of my responsibilities very well, I’m much ashamed to admit that I was a real wuss when it came to handling fish, removing hooks, filleting fish, and dealing with blood, guts, and slime in particular. I can’t begin to estimate how many toothy northern pike Dad handled for me, but he never complained. He probably should have refused, but he didn’t.

I don’t remember when I came to terms with my inane phobia, but it might have been when I clutched that first South Dakota pheasant and there was no one there to field-dress or clean it for me. I did get over it, and from that point on I could have deboned a buffalo with a butter knife. I lived for many years with memories of guilt and shame concerning my adolescent behavior, and I wondered if I could ever make it up to Dad.

My mother died in 1966, and not many years later Dad sold his Chicago area home and purchased a motorhome. He spent late fall through early spring in Florida with the remainder of the year in our home. He soon became a part of fishing-hunting activities with friends and me, and in the fall of 1977 he decided to put Florida on hold and try his hand at deer hunting. He was 66 years old.

I had already been hunting on the Corson County Schmidt ranch for eight years, and Dad had become close friends with Lewie Schmidt on a Canadian fishing trip we shared with Lew and his grandson, Stuart. I had come to favor a stretch of Grand River bottom, and I thought hard about where I wanted to put Dad on a stand. There was a spot where whitetails liked to funnel down from the north side flat to the cover on the bottom around an hour after sunrise, and I decided to position Dad in a washout where he could peek over the rim and rest his rifle on the ledge.

With Dad exactly where I wanted him, I sat against a tree near the river crossing about a quarter mile southwest of him. Conditions were exactly what I had hoped for with the slight breeze in our favor. The sweet scent of sage permeated the air as coyote yips, cooing sharptail grouse, and water rolling over weathered rocks set a mood I had longed for since my last visit to the ranch. I didn’t mind the distant rumbling of pickup trucks to the northwest as the truck hunters served to push the deer our way. These deer would cross in front of me to the north, some of them funneling by Dad.

The crack of a rifle in Dad’s direction brought a smile to my face an hour after sunrise. The absence of a second shot reassured me. I got up and ambled toward Dad’s location. From a hundred yards I could make out his orange vest beneath the bank.

“Get one?” I questioned.

“He’s up above about forty yards out. He would have come right over me.”

“Let’s go up and take a look,” I answered. My excitement rose as we shuffled toward the deer. I gripped the modest four by four by an antler and tugged it to higher ground. “Dad, this is a great deer. I’d call him a healthy two-year-old. Did he have any does with him?” “Three,” answered Dad. Then rather humbly Dad offered, “I forgot my knife.”

I don’t quite remember my first reaction to his knife admission, but it may not have been kind. Then I remembered all those fish and his skinning and cutting up my first cottontails with a Christmas shotgun 22 years earlier. I pulled my folding Buck from its sheath.

“Dad, you don’t know how proud I am of you….. a clean one-shot kill on your first deer. Hold down this hind leg while I do the field-dressing chores.”

For the next 15 years Dad got his deer, most of them in this same place. And yes, he always ”forgot” his knife.

See you next week.