The brothers dropped me off at the stand, armed with their old rifle and a five-round magazine, bristling with cartridges that looked large enough to take down a small aircraft. Jason sent me off with a thermos of coffee, black.
And with that the brothers tore off to their respective stands.
Before I go any further I should probably clarify what “deer stand” means in Minnesota. Where I’m from, in upstate New York, a deer stand is basically a couple of planks nailed to a tree at a haphazard angle, most likely constructed under the influence of alcohol. Six people died of hunting mishaps in New York State during the 2017 deer season. Just one involved a gun. The rest involved tumbles from tree stands.
A deer stand in northwest Minnesota, by contrast, is more properly understood as a small dwelling. Nearly all the stands on Coenen’s property that year, for instance, were free-standing structures. I helped the Brumwells set up a new stand there prior to the start of the season. It towered above the ground on a base of four-by-four pressure-treated timber posts. It had four square walls and a sloped roof, precision-engineered by Dick back at the workshop at the campground. From each wall, a sliding Plexiglas bus window provided a commanding view of the surrounding terrain. The interiors of the walls were covered with foam insulation board, to keep the chill out, while the exterior was clad in vinyl siding. Two large northern Minnesota men could sit comfortably in the cabin side by side. The flooring extended several feet beyond one of the walls to provide a sort of patio.
But the Brumwells’ stands were downright spartan compared to some of the other options locals spring for. There are companies that sell luxurious molded plastic or fiberglass structures with upward of eight sides to ensure an optimal shooting angle no matter which way the deer approach from. They resemble nothing more than World War II pillboxes on stilts. Russ himself had one of these, erected at the top of a hill with sight lanes cut through the forest at every angle for maximum visibility.
As the new man in the group I was afforded none of these luxuries, although my stand was still a palace by upstate New York standards. It was at least a decade old and accessed via a rickety hatch in the floor. When I stationed myself within it, perched on a folding chair, each of the four walls was just inches from my body. It was insulated with scraps of foamboard presumably left over from more lavish projects, but most of them were falling off the walls, gnawed for years by whatever rodents I heard skittering about the structure as I settled myself in for the morning. The windows were aluminum-framed rejects from one of the campground buses and most of them appeared to be wedged shut. I managed to open one just a crack, producing a screeching sound that was certain to scare off any mammals within a three-hundred-yard radius. Due to the cramped quarters I had difficulty finding an angle to lean my rifle that didn’t end up pointing the muzzle toward my face. The Brumwells had lent me a portable propane heater, which, they assured me, was safe to use in close quarters and presented no danger of asphyxiation by carbon monoxide. I was nervous about using it, but even with the unseasonable warmth that day—it was about 30 degrees—eventually the chill became so intense that I had little choice. Orange waves of sublimating propane radiated across the surface of the heater. I was terrified to move, lest I accidentally catch a bit of cloth on it and send the entire structure up in flames.
Still, after some time I began to relax, watching the inky black sky turn purple and eventually a deep navy blue. Around the time the birds began to wake, the silence started to be punctuated by distant rifle shots, rich and booming, like fireworks heard from a distance. The hunt was on.
Judging by the thunderous reports coming in it sounded as if hunters were picking off deer in every direction. But as the sky continued to lighten I still hadn’t seen a single one. I fidgeted in my seat, craning my neck toward all four windows. Not so much as a squirrel rustling in the underbrush. Suddenly I heard an unidentifiable noise. It sounded like something big. I froze, felt my muscles tense, reached for my rifle. I held it close and continued to listen. There it was again! It was a moo. A fucking moo. The cows at the nearby farm were waking up. I sank back into my seat.
By this point I had to take a leak something fierce. Figured I may as well make my way down to ground level and stretch my legs. Problem: it was so cramped in the stand that I couldn’t figure out how to open the hatch beneath me, which took up almost the entire floor, without somehow wedging myself between the walls and dangling above it, Spider-Man style. After spending twenty minutes repeatedly shifting myself, the heater, the chair, and the gun around in the stand, like one of those awful sliding tile puzzles with only one free space, I gave up on trying to climb down and instead decided I’d straddle the hatch, wedge it open as best I could, and simply take a whizz through it. That way, I reasoned, I wouldn’t have to deal with repeating the whole process in reverse once I was done.
I finished up, closed the hatch, and just managed to get myself settled again when I heard the four-wheeler rumbling down the trail. Jason and Ryan were coming to pick me up. After a good deal of fumbling I managed to worm my way down through the hatch. As I descended toward the ground I was puzzled to find that the ladder rungs were wet. Then I realized that I had peed on them.
Jason and Ryan regaled me with tales of the giant bucks they’d seen but decided not to fire on.
“Saw about thirty doe and an eight-pointer but he looked scrawny,” Jason said.
“Little six-pointer came by and rubbed his antlers on the base of my stand,” Ryan said. “No point in wasting my tag on him.”
“I didn’t see shit,” I said.
“That’s because you slept in too late,” Jason said.
We went back to the farmhouse, where Russ and the rest of the crew were dismembering the deer one of them had shot. For Russ, the hunt wasn’t so much about bagging deer as it was about making venison sausage. He had an enormous smoker set up in his barn. As the deer came in he and an old friend would process the meat, running it through a massive grinder alongside a generous portion of pork and some spices. They’d run the mixture through casing, tie it off, and hang it in the smoker for hours. While he waited for the deer to come in, Russ fretted with the smoker, ensuring that the moist wood chips at the bottom were putting off just the optimal amount of smoke at the precise temperature. When the season’s sausage making was done he would vacuum-pack them and distribute them to members of the party and stockpile mountains of the stuff for himself.
Dick loves the hunt. He remarked several times that day that “hunting would be a lot more fun if it weren’t for the damn deer.” He loves the hunt, just not necessarily the gory bits involving the shooting and the cleaning and whatnot. But he likes being outdoors, alone in a stand, just him and his thoughts and the wild prairie around him.
People living in cities pay thousands of dollars to psychiatrists, spiritual healers, and meditation gurus to learn how to cleanse their minds and achieve just a few moments of inner peace. Dick does it every year for a week in November for no more than the cost of a Minnesota deer license. If he happens to bag a deer, well, that’s just something to piss and moan about to his buddies at the end of the day.
“All right,” Russ announced after about an hour of BS’ing with the group in the barn, “time to walk the woods.”
“What are we doing now?” I whispered to Jason as everyone trudged out of the barn and toward the fleet of ATVs and farm vehicles idling nearby. Nobody had bothered briefing me on what a full day of deer hunting actually looked like.
“We’re walking,” Jason said, “through the woods. Is there something about that that’s confusing?”
“So like, just walking through the woods looking for deer? Like, all of us?”
“This is deer hunting you signed up for, so yes.”
“And so like what, if we see a deer we shoot it?”
“Yes, that’s what the goddamn gun is for or haven’t you been paying attention? Did they not cover this in your junior hunter’s certification class?”
The vehicles reconvened atop a slight rise, where Russ had a big tract of open field bordered by a shallow wood. All of us lined up at the edge of the wood, spaced twenty or so yards apart. As I walked over I let the muzzle end of my rifle dip too low for Dick’s liking. “Point that goddamn thing somewhere else!” he snapped.
“It’s not loaded!” I protested.
“Every gun’s loaded,” he snapped. Fair enough.
“So when they say ‘go,’” Jason explained, “we all walk forward through the woods. Stay parallel with the guys on either side of you. Don’t get too far ahead or behind, or you’ll get shot if a deer jumps out in front of you.”
I adjusted my orange cap so it was sticking up as high as possible. “That seems dange—”
“GO!” someone yelled. Everyone crashed forward directly through the underbrush. There were no trails; we waded through thickets of scrub and felled trees. “Hey, deer!” people yelled, hoping to scare up some game. “Ho, deer!”
I was falling behind, stumbling through the brush, unable to find my footing. Branches snapped at my face, vines grabbed at my boots. I looked up and couldn’t see anyone to either side but it seemed the rustling of leaves and crackling of branches were everywhere. A gunshot rang out somewhere ahead of me.
“Shit!” I yelled.
I heard Ryan a few yards ahead. “Get up here, Ingraham.” I careened forward and suddenly I was out in the open again, blinking in the cold morning sun.
“Jesse saw a deer running along the tree line on the opposite side of the field,” Jason explained. “Took a shot but no luck. If you had kept up you would have known this.”
“I’d be happy never doing that again,” I said.
“Good, we’ve got about five more woods to walk today.”
And we did. As the sun reached higher and the air got hotter our motley caravan crisscrossed Russ’s land, hitting every major tract of woods on it. We trundled down into little valleys carved by streams and hiked across recently tilled fields through clumps of rich black dirt as big as your boot. At one point the group split up: one contingent would walk through a chunk of woods, and the rest of us would take up posts outside it, ready to fire on any deer they rustled up. “If you shoot, shoot north,” Dick said. “Don’t need anybody shooting at me today.”
“Where do you want me to post?” I asked.
“You’re gonna need to post on the eastern edge of the field, by the neighbor lady’s house.”
“The one who doesn’t like hunting?”
“Yep.”
Russ had evidently had some sort of hunting-related altercation with the neighbor some years earlier, and as a result they weren’t on the best of terms. To reach my assigned spot, I would basically have to walk half the perimeter of her property, in full view of her house the entire time.
I made my walk with my head held high and my rifle leaning responsibly across the shoulder, just an upstanding young hunter doing his part to control the deer population and certainly not looking to aggravate any nonhunters by dint of my presence or behavior. As I walked by the section of fence closest to the neighbor’s house a door opened, and I saw a woman standing in the doorway, arms folded. I gave a big wave and smiled my best smile, trying to appear as nonthreatening as a strange man with a long gun can appear. She shook her head and went back in the house. I finally reached my post. I saw that the other guys had already flushed out their woods and hadn’t found anything. Everyone was already heading on to the next section. I turned around and walked all the way back the way I came.
Regrouping back at the barn, the party enjoyed a late lunch of ground venison chili cooked by Russ’s wife, Inez. I know I’ve spent a considerable amount of this book complaining about Minnesota food but this chili was phenomenal. Easily among the best I’ve ever had. One reason? The chili’s chief ingredients—the tomatoes, onions, carrots, and peppers from Inez’s garden, and the deer from Russ’s woods—had all been harvested directly from the very land we were sitting on.
After lunch it was time to hit the stands again to catch the evening movement of the deer. Since a few guys had already gotten their bucks there was some shuffling of stands going on, with the net result that I got to sit in a different stand that was less of a piece of shit than the one I’d had in the morning. The stand overlooked a food plot of soybeans, which the Brumwells assured me would be Grand Central for deer once the sun started sinking. The stand was a little bigger so I could maneuver around in it more easily, and the windows actually worked so I could crack them open and practice poking the barrel of my rifle out of them in quick succession. I looked at birds through my scope and practiced loading and unloading the chamber of the rifle, and attaching and detaching the five-round magazine. Still, no deer showed up. I considered trying to vaporize a sparrow to practice my aim but decided against it, realizing that the Brumwell brothers would hear the shot and give me hell for wasting their ammunition on a bird. So I continued waiting, until darkness, when their four-wheeler pulled up to bring me home. Still no deer.
“Well,” Jason said as we got back into his car. “Same time tomorrow?”
I thought about this. That night the clocks would turn back, meaning that Ryan would need to show up at my house at 4 a.m., which meant that I’d need to be up by at least three thirty to avoid another late start.
There was no way I’d be able to do it and I told them as much. Way too goddamn early, I said, to sit shivering in a box and wait for some hypothetical deer to show up. They howled and gave me hell all the way home. The only thing worse than being late for the hunting party, apparently, was deciding to bow out of it the next day. I stood firm. I wasn’t about to leave Briana home with the twins for another full day, I said. I’d wait until the following weekend. I’d come out for one afternoon. I’d sit in the stand in the evening but no way in hell would I be doing another round of woods walking. I stood firm. If I didn’t get a deer then, well, it wasn’t meant to be.
Fine, they said. Get out of here. We’re gonna bag the biggest goddamn bucks anyone’s ever seen tomorrow and you’ll hear all about it.
Thus ended my first day of deer hunting.
That year, 2016, was a mild autumn in northwest Minnesota. The colors changed, a chill crept up the river valleys, and the tempo of life sped up a little for the harvest. Trucks barreled down dirt roads carrying hauls of wheat, corn, and soybeans. Combines and tractors worked the fields at all hours of the day and night, lights shining and engines rumbling under the clear moon.
But autumn is fleeting here, too. In 2017 there was a thick blanket of snow on the ground by Halloween, and the landscape wasn’t completely clear of snow again until the following May. In 2018 we got our first snow in late September, less than one week after the last official day of summer.
That first fall I realized, with some chagrin, that I’d have to deal with leaf maintenance and removal in a much more serious way than I’d ever had to before. We’ve got a number of huge oak trees on our property and in September they dump prodigious amounts of brown leafy biomass on the grass below. I did some research and found out that in some cases you could simply mulch up the leaves with your lawn mower and leave them there until spring.
Perfect, I thought. I’ll just run the mower across the lawn a couple of times in the fall and that’ll be it. No raking, no bagging, no hauling off to the dump. Christopher Ingraham’s momma didn’t raise no fool.
In early October, when about half the oak leaves had fallen, I took the mower out and made a pass through the leaves. In my mind’s eye, the leaves would disintegrate into brown specks that settled on the dirt around the blades of grass, creating a nutrient-rich mulch that would nurture them the following spring. But when I looked back at the path of destruction behind me, I realized that my lawn was now simply covered in ragged chunks of leaf material rather than whole leaves. In another couple of weeks the leaves would bury the property completely, and if I left them there the grass would be dead come spring.
So I sat and thought. Well, I reasoned, the chief hassle of removing leaves is the bagging. Perhaps I can skip that step by simply raking all the leaves toward the garden and piling them up in there. They’ll decay by spring, leaving behind a nutrient-rich mulch that would nurture the garden the following year.
The next weekend I got out my rake and began the laborious work of gathering all the leaf litter toward the garden on the edge of the property. Our neighbor John, who owns approximately six thousand pieces of heavy equipment, each tailored to any specific task that might need to be done at home or on the farm, was happily trucking around his lawn on his ride-on mower with an oversize vacuum attachment that hoovered up the leaves and deposited them into three pre-bagged bins on the back.
Hah, I thought to myself as I heaved piles of leaves over the garden fence. No need for me to spend hundreds of dollars on a lawn mower accessory I’ll use once a year.
John drove the mower over by where I was working.
“Whatcha doin’ there?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I’m gonna put all the leaves in the garden and let them decompose over winter, and then use them as mulch in the spring.”
John narrowed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Those leaves ain’t gonna break down.”
“Sure they will,” I said.
“You know how cold it gets here in the winter? You think anything’s gonna break down when it’s below zero for three months straight? You’d have better luck sticking them in your freezer.”
I hadn’t considered this. The truth of what he was saying became obvious to me immediately. But half the leaves were in the garden already. I couldn’t stop now.
“Well. We’ll see I guess!” I said, not wanting to admit the fatal flaw in my brilliant plan.
“You sure?” he said. “You can borrow my mower when I’m done if you want. Pull up all the leaves nice and easy.”
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Page 14