The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  It was wrong to call it Turtle Island, when clearly it should have been Muskrat Island! I already felt bad about killing that one muskrat and not eating it, but after I read this story I was done being a trapper.

  I kept quiet about it, though. My gigantic white Christian family had no sense of humor about creation lore from the Ojibway or anybody else. It was Genesis or nothing. More important, I didn’t want Bruce to think I was done with hunting or fishing because I figured that was how I was going to spend the rest of my life.

  Dad got an apartment in the town of Oshtemo, just west of Kalamazoo. It was a ramshackle mock-Tudor place with white shag carpet and fake half-timbers. There were two bedrooms: one for Dad and one for his office, with a drafting table and flat files and such. There was no bed for us, because we weren’t going to be staying there. Or if we did, we had to throw some sleeping bags on the couch or the carpeted floor.

  Every place we’d ever lived, Mom and Dad had furnished for us as a family, so it took us a minute to understand that this new apartment wasn’t for us. What he’d created here was a pussy palace. He had a real component stereo, with detachable wood cabinet speakers for that preternaturally intimate sound, and his stack of fifty or so sexy R&B, Motown, and lady singer records. I was practicing to be a drummer in school, and I would put on George Benson’s Good King Bad to listen to Steve Gadd and Andy Newmark play drums, imagining the different parts of the drum kit with my head against the cabinets like a speaker freak. Dad had a queen-sized bed in his room under a giant macramé wall-hanging, and a bottle of Riunite white dawdling in the fridge. There were notes in women’s handwriting on the counter. Brett and Joe found Playboys stashed in the end table and I saw his shaving kit was full of condoms. I was happy there wouldn’t be any half siblings, but it did make me worry. I was obsessed with sex myself, and I was confronted with the evidence that my Dad was doing it, in this apartment, probably every night, deploying technologies like condoms and macramé. If someone moved in with him, where would we go? What happened if he married someone else and just moved away?

  I never met any of his lady friends, but Joe did once, when Dad took him ice skating at WMU’s Lawson Ice Arena and one of his dates came along. Joe was about six or seven and he told us, “Oh, she was real nice.”

  During the winter, Dad built me a room in the basement of the house by Crooked Lake, so that Brett and Joe could each have their own room upstairs. My room was behind the furnace and with only a tiny little casement window I’d never fit through. He said, “Well, there’s no way you’re getting out of here in a fire, so you better sleep light,” which I took seriously. For Christmas I got a blue plastic Sears record player for listening to my first album, Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic, and one day I ran down into the basement and heard music from my room, so I crept up and Mom was in there, dancing all by herself to my forty-five of Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs.” I split without saying anything.

  As promised, Dad delivered a shotgun for my twelfth birthday, a Montgomery Ward Western Field Model single-shot youth twenty-gauge, which he bought from Vern. It was already about twenty-five years old, and it was exactly what I needed. The price, I found out a couple of months later, was I had to paint the house. So I spent most of that summer up on a ladder, scraping and painting the wood trim and overhangs, listening to WKMI and WLS with the dog, Brandy, sitting by and panting in the shade.

  Dad did make a point of running the dog that summer, and luckily Brandy needed almost no training, because Dad lacked the patience to properly train a dog. He figured out the basic commands to tell her to hunt freely, hold point, flush the bird, or fetch it up, but she mostly knew what to do. Dad would yell and gesticulate in frustration. Somebody had told him that when you wanted the dog to come, you said “here,” but you screamed it at the top of your lungs as a distorted, two-syllable “HEEE-YAAH!” She’d work the field back and forth but then get too far out in front of us and he’d be screaming, “HEEE-YAAH, Brandy, HEEE-YAAH!” She’d amble back and fix him with a withering look. When she put up a bird, she snapped at its tail feathers as it took flight, and when she got on a rabbit she was hilarious, running full blast and leaping high above the tall grass to track the dodging bunny, sproing-ing through the fields like a gazelle, and Bruce would break form and shout, “Leap, rabbit dog, leeeeeeeeaaap!” and we’d all bust out laughing. The rabbits always got away.

  I took my state-mandated hunter’s safety course that summer, which was taught according to a curriculum designed by the National Rifle Association, and Bruce told me resolutely that I would not be joining that organization. He was a conservative person, but early in his life he mostly didn’t vote and shunned activism of any kind because people took ideologies as excuses for bad behavior. He explained to me that joining the NRA sometimes meant giving sanction to those people who abused their rights and became slob hunters. Hunting was hugely popular and not threatened by legislation in any way, but gun enthusiasts made a show of hunting using guns meant for killing people—for instance, going “full auto,” using a machine gun to hunt deer or bear—in order to make a statement. Bruce told me those people had crossed a line. Politics had turned them into slobs. Slobs made animals suffer and turned the public against hunting. Being a slob showed a lack of expertise and restraint, and it was the worst insult he could bestow on anyone.

  Of course, Dad’s sex life was totally slobby. But about hunting and fishing and trapping he was a purist.

  On the first day of my first-ever small game season, we stepped into a farmer’s fallow hayfield, and Brandy instantly flushed a quail out of the fencerow right in front of me, and as it hammered away like a leaf-colored heartbeat I put up my gun and dropped it. It was my first shot at anything. “Good shot,” said Dad. “Go help the dog find it.” That was it, and I wasn’t expecting anything more. He just assumed I’d hit it, I guess, since he and my uncles always did. Dad joined us for dinner that night and the four birds we’d bagged that day made us a family again for an hour or two.

  The oaks beyond the backyard fence were the color of dried blood as Dad stood in the kitchen at the house and announced with a grand flourish that he had found a new place for us! That pulled me up short. I thought he meant that we were all going to get a new house together, and I didn’t want him and Mom to be married anymore. Joe was kind of excited about it because he really missed Dad being in the house, but Brett looked absolutely panic-stricken. Mom seemed shocked, too.

  “I found a great place for us to hunt,” Dad continued, and then told us that his customer Bernard Card, a steel building contractor up in Rose City, had invited us to his deer camp.

  “Right by the Rifle River area, and just thick with deer,” Dad said, triumphant. “If this turns out good, it could change everything for us.”

  I got excited about this, even if I didn’t really quite get it. Hunting at Card’s wouldn’t have anything to do with his relationship to Mom, which we thought was the most important thing to change. But that was the way Dad’s mind worked: a new river or a new piece of land held the promise of a new way of being, even a new way of thinking. He was going to take his boys to this new hunting camp and prove to Mom and everyone that he was a great dad, that he could be saved by works, that the world was going to give him another chance.

  Old Bernie Card knew what was going on at home; he bought a fair number of steel buildings from Dad and knew he was out on his ass and maybe he even knew some of the other women. Bernard was the father of four boys around Dad’s age and their wives and kids hunted, too, and he told Dad to bring me up to his 120-acre camp to see how it all worked. Whatever Bernard knew or didn’t know about Dad, he doted on me. Bernard treated me like he and I were in on something that my father didn’t need to be part of.

  As his white Cadillac Eldorado squeaked and rolled along the sandy two-tracks through his hunting property, he’d stop to point out game trails and places where big deer had been seen recently and the cabin of an “old bastard” he wa
s having a shooting feud with, and I could see Dad inscribing this stuff furiously on his brain. He’d only been deer hunting a couple of times and he wanted to do it right. About halfway to the back of the long, narrow parcel, Bernard parked next to a corn crib and told me he wanted to show me something. He opened the trunk and pulled out a lever-action .30-30 saddle gun and showed me how to load it. I was too young to hunt deer, the legal age was fourteen then, and I could see from the look on Dad’s face they had not discussed this, but it was his first year there, too, so he deferred to the older man.

  And Bernard’s face shone. With his big twinkly grin, ample belly, and red hunting outfit, he looked a little like Santa, if Santa were to wear a gray, freshly mown flatop, and a little like Sorrell Booke as Boss Hogg because of the Caddy. He was clearly enjoying himself.

  He told me to grab a tin lid from an old Masonite grain barrel and set it up against a stump about sixty yards off and then gave me the gun. I peered through the iron sights and hit it dead center and tried to act nonchalant about the fact that it had just about knocked my dick in the dirt.

  “Well, that’s damn well good enough to hunt in my camp,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Bruce, you have him carry that gun. He’ll probably shoot one before you do.”

  The next morning we were at the gates to Bernard’s camp just before five A.M., and the black was smeared with cold stars. There were ten or eleven hunters, and we all loaded quickly into Bernie’s son Jim’s pickup in thick winter hunting suits and rabbit-lined trapper hats and ski gloves and scarfs, sitting on the edge of the truck bed with our guns between our knees. Almost everyone wore red with blaze orange vests and hats—even Dad suddenly had a red-and-black Buffalo plaid hunting outfit. I had on my ski gear. We squeaked and rolled through the camp, ducking overhanging branches, watching the headlights play over funny wooden signs Bernard had put up like does a bear shit in the woods? and bernard’s dream. Warm breath streamed out behind us.

  Jim stopped at each blind and hunters stepped off and said “Good luck” as they disappeared in the red of the tail lights. When our turn came, Bruce whispered to the others in a voice you could barely hear, then the truck creaked on down the line. Dad told me to pee before we got into our box. We sat in the gorgeous and nourishing dark for more than an hour before the light started coming up, and as soon as we could see we both sat forward in our chairs. We perched there on the edge of our plastic seats, crouched all day over the little propane heater that we’d turn on once in a while, seeing dozens of deer eating, lingering, sprinting past, both of us hardly moving. My quads were twitching badly from only sitting on about four inches of the hard plastic; I didn’t want to sit back because that would mean sliding up and making noise if I needed to put the gun up. Dad said the same three words to me all day, in a half whisper: “There’s a deer.”

  When full darkness finally came around again, he slid back in his chair and exhaled fully. I felt his body sag. I was totally exhausted and relieved, and in my exhaustion I saw something else: I felt better in the dark. I loved being out in the blind, but I had been worried all day I was messing up Dad’s hunt. We had gathered ourselves for the light, screwed ourselves down like tight coils with the sunrise, loaded, forcibly projecting ourselves outward toward the deer in a kind of mental casting that took immense focus. I had worked hard to maintain that focus all day, and I hadn’t been able to shake the idea that I was doing it wrong. But the dark was more forgiving. Dad acted like I was okay in the dark. When the light drained away, Dad had receded and whatever was out there came toward me. I was surrounded by a kind of wholeness. Oh, I thought, I am enough. It accepts me. We had been watching the habitat all day, and sitting in a box had made it perfectly clear the forest was watching us, too; but in the dark I had the sense that I had my own relationship with the place, and it knew me. Bruce tolerated the dark as a cover from which we could spring out into the light and surprise our prey, but I felt like the light was where we were most hidden. The cold night was when I could be who I was in the woods.

  We ducked out of our blind, stretched, and started walking down the dirt two-track toward the gate, talking about what we’d seen. The night was for talking, and we shared details for a while before Jim’s truck came around and picked us up. In the bed of the truck, the vibe was completely different, everyone laughing and chatting loudly. The night was for celebrating. I definitely wanted to eat a deer, since that was the point, and we couldn’t shoot one in the dark, but nighttime after an unsuccessful hunt wasn’t full of disappointment. The habitat had filled everyone with humility and peace. Everyone seemed very satisfied to be riding home in that cold truck after a day in the field. Bruce was smiling and goofy and rode part of the way with his eyes closed. Hardly the guy who’d been on the edge of his chair all day.

  Bernard didn’t have a cabin then, so we went back to his house in town and Dad could barely stay awake. It was cold as death outside, and Bernard announced that he and I were going on an errand.

  “Bruce, I’m taking your boy to go see a friend,” Mr. Card said. “We’ll be back in little while.”

  Dad didn’t want to go; he smiled and told us he was going to bed. It was just Bernie and me in the lead-bottomed Eldorado, rocketing down the dirt roads toward the hunting grounds, chatting away. He slowed as we approached the farm gate to his hunting camp, but then drove on just a little farther to a grand, western-style log ranch gate with a name overhead: Grousehaven.

  Grousehaven was a legendary hunting camp, three thousand acres abutting the wild Rifle River State Recreation Area and owned by Harold R. “Bill” Boyer, a former General Motors VP who bought the place in 1926. For decades, he turned it over every fall to the progenitor of modern bowhunting, Fred Bear, and select hunters and guests of Bear Archery. When Bernard and I bounced through the gate I found that Grousehaven shares a fence—and the swamp Dad and I had been watching all day—with Mr. Card’s parcel, and it was just as raw and undeveloped. The leaf springs of the Cadillac squinched and oomphed over a series of two-tracks winding through a forest of oak and beech and jack pine, with a grass landing strip for aircraft and a tiny old farmhouse, which Boyer had turned into a kind of lodge.

  Like on Bernard’s place, the trees were hung with handmade wooden signs, most of them trail markers with names I would only understand later, like Arthur Godfrey Drive or Hoyt Vandenberg Circle. Boyer was a titan of American motor transport, the head of GM’s Cadillac Cleveland Tank Division and the organizer of its Air Transport Division during World War II, when he was in charge of aircraft for the U.S. War Production Board. He oversaw all aircraft production during the Korean War and supervised tests on experimental vehicles later used by GM to build lunar rovers for Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17.

  The Grousehaven crew included at various times Fred Bear; the TV personality Godfrey; General Vandenberg (after whom Vandenberg Air Force Base is named); Larry Bell of Bell Aircraft; Harley Earl, GM’s chief stylist who designed so many of its cars, including precursors to the Cadillac we were in; and loads of other military figures such as General Curtis LeMay, former head of Strategic Air Command and U.S. chief of staff, and inspiration for the character General Buck Turgidson in the film Dr. Strangelove.

  The farmhouse glowed with low lights and was wreathed with hanging smoke from a fieldstone fireplace. As we stepped out into the lung-burning cold, I loved the place immediately because it was just an old pineboard house, small and unimproved. From what I was told, Boyer could afford to build a forest palace for his friends but he didn’t, and I loved that. I liked cabins that were old and piney. There were some other outlying buildings with more bedrooms and a garage with some cars and a tractor in the open bays, but none of it was fancy. This was the Michigan that emerged in the wake of the first wave of lumbermen, when the sawdust returned to earth and the rivers were restored by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Michigan for me of the Nick Adams stories and the poetry of Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane’s The Sporting Life. I under
stood from what Bernard was telling me that Boyer was an important man, but out here it felt like we were all equals, all watchers taking our place in the dark.

  People were talking inside and we let ourselves in. Fred Bear was standing silhouetted in the light and was deep in conversation. It was rifle season and his crew had already been there for much of October for bow season. I was introduced all around, and many of the guests lit up at the introduction of a twelve-year-old hunter. We all immediately fell to mapping the deer movements across the two properties.

  I relayed what I had seen moving in and out of the swamp, and I was peppered with questions about deer numbers, size, sex, direction of travel, distinguishing characteristics. I was astonished and thrilled; these grown men and women wanted to know about everything I had seen, every snowy owl flapping slowly through the understory, every black squirrel that Mr. Card treasured, every turkey raking at the leaf litter. They wanted to know about a bent sheaf of reeds where the whitetails were passing in and out of a thumb of swamp to cross the fence, where I imagined they were bedding down, which trails they used most heavily, and any scrapes and rubs. All of them regarded my information as valuable intelligence.