The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  “You got one?” Dad looked at me kind of stunned, openmouthed.

  “Yeah, I just came in to have a cup of tea.”

  “Little one,” said Dad, responding to my false calm.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “Go on,” he said, face breaking into a smile. “How good?”

  “Well, it seemed pretty heavy. Get your boots on.”

  I had been watching a couple does in the dark, listening to them chew the thick orchard grass about eighty yards from Buck One. Their jaws moved back and forth in the binoculars and I didn’t even have my rifle in my hand when the biggest buck deer I’d ever seen in Michigan stepped out of the trees. Well, shit. I was so used to watching the darkness for everything but deer I was caught flat-footed. He was looking right at me and I moved with the deliberation of a sloth as I set the binoculars down in the dirt at my feet without moving my head, picked up the rifle, and worked it up to my shoulder. It took a geologic epoch and the instant the scope got to my eye I pulled the trigger.

  The deer pronged straight up into the air, put his head down and lunged in huge leaps into the swamp, smashing into trees, and fell over dead midstride. After the shot, he had lived about five or six seconds.

  I racked in another shell and waited a few minutes as the silence began to roar. If there is such a thing as superpresentation, it was happening then. The entire mucky forest turned to face me, with the brightness turned way up. Every black root of hemlock, wobbling brown leaf of beech, chickadee and titmouse, gray tuft of morning cloud lit by new sun, every shining bit of swamp ice screamed, Here! Here I am! I had to clamp my mouth shut to keep it all from pouring right down my throat.

  I sloshed out knee-deep into the swamp and hauled the buck out onto the frosted leaves. It was heavy for a Michigan deer, maybe 180 pounds, plus it was wet. The heaviness felt good. I counted the tines by force of habit; it was an eight-point. As I dragged it, a smaller buck came out of the trees on the ridge, eyes wide like a horse in a fire, and started charging me with his horns down. He snorted and stomped and thrust at me like a fencer, trying to get me to let go of his comrade. Oh God! Their social lives are at least as complicated as ours! I kept heaving, but I have to admit I shed a few tears over that. Brave little buck, risking its life. I made no move to shoot it, of course, one deer is more than enough, but I had to stomp my feet and wave my arms. “Go on! Get out of here!” I yelled, choking on tears, and finally it wheeled and fled in huge leaps over the ridge.

  It took me a minute to get over that. I knelt in the leaves, smelling the rich, wet-dog odor of swamped buck, running my cold hands over its beautifully efficient short hair. “Thank you, deer,” I said. “Thank you for the food. And thank you for giving me a family.”

  I meant it. Deer were the reason we had this place and this place was the reason we were all still together. I probably wouldn’t even have known my Dad or my brothers as adults if it weren’t for these deer.

  I thought of the native tales of bear and deer that Gary Snyder had written about in The Practice of the Wild: the Ainu indigenous people of Japan held that the bear, the most human-friendly of animal spirits, would send a deer to the human village to see if their songs were any good and if their food was nice and if they danced and made a worthy party. If the deer spirit came back and said the people were good singers and the feast was righteous, then bear would send more deer their way. Bear and deer cared about culture. I hoped we measured up. Dad and Diane were unlikely to appreciate me blasting the music of Hüsker Dü or even Steve Earle, so it’s not like we did a lot of dancing to celebrate our deer. But I did recite the occasional verse and we had learned how to make a very fine dish of grouse and woodcock and one of Mom’s peppery venison stews, and all those things were gorgeous.

  In the cabin, I made my tea and one for Dad, too, then I rooted around in the cupboards for some cornmeal. Ottawa and Potawatomi hunters would put some cornmeal on the deer’s muzzle for sustenance in the world beyond. All I could find was popcorn, but that would do.

  We all walked back out to the swamp and Dad was walking fast, eager to see. Spenser looked at his grandpa and laughed, running along in his snow boots and ski coat, holding the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun that Dad had bought him a couple of years before. He knew something important was happening.

  “Nice eight-point,” Brett said as he knelt down next to the buck and put his hands on it instinctively, saying to the deer, “Thank you, brother. Thank you for growing here and coming to live with us.”

  “Eight,” Dad said, reaching out to shake my mucky hand. “Well, that’s a dandy.”

  “That’s the biggest one we’ve ever had around here,” said Joe. “By far.”

  Dad was very competitive about weights and antlers, and I could see this was a significant event for him. We were seeing bigger deer on our camp. An eight-point buck is very average for North America, in general, and they certainly get much bigger. The hunting magazines routinely feature genetically modified monsters grown on high-fence operations with bizarre atypical racks of twenty or more tines. But the deer on our place had always been smaller than this one. For me and especially for Brett and Joe, it was a validation of all the field work: we all figured that better nutrition was growing bigger and healthier deer.

  Spenser put his hands on the deer and was quiet. I sprinkled some popcorn on his muzzle. I thought of the bear spirit: See, we are trying to make the party as good as we can!

  I lavished the buck with praise and thanks and did it out loud so that Spenser and the whole woods could hear that the killing was done right.

  As Brett and Joe helped me wrestle the buck onto a cart to roll it back to the cabin, Brett was clearly thrilled. Dad was really happy, too. He was not impressed by many things, but this made a difference to him. He loved North American wildlife more than almost anything on earth and had spent a lot of his life watching these woods. Seeing this buck, he was like an old farmer gazing at the prize bull at a farm sale, happy just to know it exists.

  “That poacher must not be hunting on here anymore,” Dad said. “He’s been shooting all these deer for years.”

  “Well, it could be about the poacher,” Brett said. “But there’s also the chance that this extra nutrition is changing the herd.”

  We stopped again in Cabin Field to examine the turnips and purple kale, talking about the work we had done that helped grow this big whitetail.

  I field dressed the deer, and Spenser put his hands in the warm steam that escaped from the body cavity. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of sour corn and gas from its stomach and the hot iron of the blood.

  “What do you think?” I said, up to my elbows in sticky gore.

  “This isn’t my favorite part,” said Spense.

  “Nope, it’s nobody’s favorite part, buddy,” I said. “But this is what we have to do if we’re going to eat.”

  Joe was the best I’d ever seen him during this hunt. I hadn’t realized how much I had simply assumed he’d feel like shit forever. He was happy. As we hung my deer next to his, he lavished it with the hose like he loved my deer more than any deer before or since. He and Becky had been married by the mayor of Sturgis, Michigan, who was one of Becky’s childhood friends, and even though they didn’t want anyone there, Dad, Diane, Mom, Tom, Brett, Ayron, Hazel, Becky’s parents, and a couple of Becky’s best friends flooded into City Hall at the appointed hour. I forgot to bring them a wedding present. I was the worst brother ever. My life had come apart and I just didn’t have it together until I got to the cabin, when the world started to take shape again.

  Becky was there at deer camp, a new bride wearing a giant smile and one of Joe’s old hunting shirts, tall, brunette, a little intimidated, and staying out of the kitchen and out of the traffic. She laughed a lot and joined in the card games at the table at night. Joe was grinning like a man who’d snuck out of perdition. He cooked, which he hardly ever did, and he was good at it. He looked at his smokes like somebody’d filled them with ambr
osia. He stood with his arm around his wife like an ordinary human being.

  I had a lot of room inside for good feeling, so I borrowed some of Joe’s. Joe had always been the kind of guy to give it freely. I told him and Becky how happy I was for them, but it felt like the words came up from the bottom of a cold cave. I’m not sure they heard them. I was not an ordinary human being. I felt like I might just go flying off into space if it weren’t for the gravity of this camp.

  The next morning, Dad and Brett and Ayron went out and I stayed in with Spenser, and when Dad came in for lunch he went to his truck and came in with his compound hunting bow. He brought it out on the porch in the cold sun. He had sat for hundreds of hours with this bow, but he had a new one and he didn’t use it anymore.

  “You take this one,” he said to me. “If you’re going to kill deer, you should learn this way. It’s more intimate. You like to be close to the animals, to know them, and that’s what bowhunting is like. I think you’ll like it better.”

  The draw on this bow was set at fifty-five pounds and I clicked the release into the loop on the drawstring and pointed it toward the clouds and tried to draw it but couldn’t.

  “What? Come ON!” laughed Dad. His new bow was a Matthews set at sixty-five pounds, and he pulled it like drawing a piece of spaghetti out of a pot. I pulled and pulled, and he about pissed himself laughing. My arms shook. Finally I got it back after about a dozen tries.

  “Damn!” I hissed, arms trembling wildly as I held it. Even after the cam released, it was wobbling all over the place.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he chuckled. “This way you can come out earlier in the season and go up in a tree before dawn and watch the dark and bowhunt for a while and then go after birds in the afternoon. Do all the things you like to do in one trip.”

  Fourteen

  Trails End Motel

  Jeannette Armstrong, a Native American educator in British Columbia, wrote in a wonderful essay that the Okanagan word for the human body and its senses translates as “land-dreaming capacity.” I read this and cheered and it stayed with me forever. She didn’t mean dreaming like a story that is born in your mind and seems isolated to your private thoughts. She meant the kind of dream that interprets information flowing in from elsewhere, like my dream about Judy Stevens. Your body is how the land thinks itself into you, and vice versa.

  I didn’t want to turn Spenser into a hunter. He could be whatever he wanted to be. I just wanted to open this capacity as wide as a dream would go.

  With some practice, I found I could pull Dad’s old bow, and so I began to shoot it. And once I started shooting it, all I wanted to do was shoot it. I became that weirdo hunting guy at the outdoor archery range, and I started taking Spenser, too.

  We went to the range at Rancho Park in West Los Angeles, a big public park and golf course across from the Fox lot where they were busy separating people from the earth. I’d be in a line of fifteen shooters under the big eucalyptus trees and the shooters would all have sweet recurve bows, and there’d be a couple of Olympic-style folks with complex stabilizers and incredible accuracy and then at least one trad guy shooting a superheavy seventy-pound recurve with no sights and a leather quiver strapped to his back, Assassin’s Creed–style. At the end of the line there’d be me with a whole lot of camo. The bow was camo, I wore camo, it had sights and stabilizers and dampeners and looked like a whole lot of machinery and when I’d release my arrow it would be buried in the wall before most of the others’ had even left their bow. The geezers playing pétanque on the sand court next door regarded me with concern. Guys wanted to talk tech with me and asked what kinds of limbs I had on there and how I had the lighted pin sights set and how the draw was regulated and so on and I’d tell the truth and say, “I don’t really know. I just pull it back and let it fly.” It was deadly accurate and to me that meant that Dad was deadly accurate.

  On January 3, 2010, I went to the range with Spenser and my new girlfriend. The fact that my relationship with Meg had fallen apart left me wondering just how these things were supposed to work, but my girlfriend and I were having fun. She and Spenser had both already taken the bow-safety class with the well-known rangemaster Oliver Saunders, who had taught thousands of people how to handle a bow and not shoot anyone or themselves. We were all shooting and I was channeling Dad and it was a gorgeous warm blowy Sunday about eighty degrees Fahrenheit and the Maxima Hunter carbon-fiber arrows Dad had given me were singing true. With every shot I was in a tree at the cabin. I heard my phone buzzing in my bow case.

  At last there was a break and I looked at the phone, and there were messages from Brett and from Joe so I wandered off into the grass and grabbed a eucalyptus cap to sniff as the phone rang and Brett picked up.

  “How you doin’?!” I sang. “I’m on the range shooting Dad’s bow.”

  “Oh God. Did you talk to Joe?”

  “No, why, what’s up?”

  “Uh, I don’t know how to say it so I’ll just say it: Dad went out hunting earlier today up by St. Helen and they think he had a massive heart attack and … well, somewhere out there he passed away. Our dad is dead.”

  I stood there smiling. That just didn’t make any sense. Dad was six foot three and kind of a beanpole, probably 180 pounds, in pretty good shape, and made a practice of walking his two dogs, Libby and Greta, an average of two or three miles a day for exercise. He climbed up and down trees like a monkey. He climbed up and down mountains in New Mexico with elk quarters strapped to his back. He never drank, took no medications, quit smoking around the time I was born, still did everything like pitch manure by hand. Hard Way Productions. He wasn’t the fat, red-faced guy who gets an infarction dragging a deer out of the woods.

  “What?” I said.

  “Dad is dead.”

  I crumpled to the grass and laid there under a giant spreading coral tree. “No, no, no,” I said, sort of arguing with Brett. The tree was all watery and tottered around in the air. “But I’m here shooting his bow.”

  “Yeah. I love you. I need you to come home now. I need my big brother to come home.”

  I had a blurry conversation with Mom full of wailing. She and Dad had been divorced for twenty-two years, and yet she choked out, “But he was my childhood sweetheart!” I’d never thought of him being anyone’s childhood anything.

  My girlfriend saw my face was wet and laid down against me in the grass and Spenser crawled right on top of me with his head on my chest. When I was off the phone I told him what had happened and he looked stricken: “Grandma????!!”

  “No,” I smiled. “Grandpa Bruce.”

  Spense gave me a big hug, clearly relieved. It was cruel but real. “At least he died doing something he loved,” he said. How did he even know that phrase? When had he ever heard it?

  The massive coral tree spreading over this part of the park had spent a century accreting wood. As I lay under it I realized through tears that it would die, it must die, for life to work. The soil under our heads was made of it and also of the billions of plants and animals and people that came before it, and the lava flows and ocean sediments and tectonic collisions before that, and the stars that had come apart and salted us with their ragged flotsam. But if the coral tree died right then, and threw its enormous weight on me, I’d be crushed. In a quiet panic, I struggled up and moved away with my child in my arms. These land-dreaming capacities were going to live.

  I was not ready for Bruce to cease being Dad and resume being stardust. We had worked so damn hard.

  I packed up the bow in its case, his bow, suddenly an object that belonged to no one, and eucalyptus leaves were jabbering in my face in a strange tongue. Every person seemed to have a hard outline that I couldn’t penetrate and the bark chips on the ground were spreading wider and wider like I might fall through. The chain-link fence around the old range was sharp and hard to navigate and outside it were all these miles of grass and weirdly tropical clouds that flew defiant and aloof. The pétanque balls flew towa
rd my face and cracked loud enough to break bone. A dog tied to the big coral tree barked at me with a blunt sound like a hammer banging on a trash can lid. I stood and looked at it for a moment and flinched at each bang.

  The coral tree heaved and lashed as we climbed into the truck and I quickly pulled away. Spenser was talking but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The asphalt juddered loudly under the tires all the way home and drowned out the words. The world was so raw.

  I dropped Spenser at Meg’s, at the house where six months earlier we had lived together. She held me and said, “You know, I talked to Bruce a week ago and he wished me Merry Christmas and we talked about church traditions and he said he regretted now that he hadn’t come to Spenser’s baptism. He just couldn’t accept that we’d baptized him in a Catholic church, but now he realized that was wrong. He said, ‘I know now there are a lot of ways to worship.’”

  “Thank you for telling me that,” I said.

  “I’ll always be grateful for him sharing the woods with Spenser,” she said.

  Outside, the trees writhed against a pale blue sky. Ravens talked from the roof of my apartment, making low comb calls. I expected everything to fly apart before my eyes. I couldn’t believe it when the door did not come off in my hand when I opened it.

  So much depends on one person. In the airport I wondered at this. All these faces. Each one remakes the world.

  We had made a family with Dad at the deer camp. We only became a family when we included trees and sandhill cranes and sand as true relations. This field-family was held together by affection and humility. Affection was the bond and humility was the solvent that made it work. It is the only thing that will ever make it work, anywhere.

  When I was shooting with the archery nerds at Rancho Park, I felt secure wearing my ridiculous camo and shooting his ridiculous camo bow because there was at least one place on planet Earth where my land-dreaming capacity was fully grounded, where my identity was backstopped by dirt. From there, that grounding had spread. From the ground at the deer camp we had grown a strong surety of belonging, and from there it had flowed out to the entirety of the material world as all one fabric.