by Dave Crehore
The .30-30 went off with a crack that sent snow cascading from
nearby cedar branches and made Grandpa’s ears ring. Obscured by
powder smoke and the falling snow, the buck seemed to disappear.
Grandpa plunged ahead a few steps, looked again, and saw that the buck had fallen in its tracks. He could hear Wally yelling off in the distance. He levered a fresh cartridge into the chamber and walked the remaining thirty yards or so, ready for a second shot.
But no more shooting was necessary. The buck lay motionless,
sprawled in the snow. Grandpa opened the action of his rifle and 111
The Butternut Buck
leaned it against a tree. Grabbing the buck by its forelegs, he dragged it a few feet, turned it belly side up, and rested its shoulders against a massive old white pine stump. He admired its eight-point rack for a moment, then drew his hunting knife from its sheath and prepared to make the initial cut.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
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M y paternal grandfather, George J. Crehore, was born in Sheffield Township, Ohio, in 1883. In 1902 he started to learn the pipefitting trade at a shipyard in Lorain, Ohio. But early in 1908 the economic depression of those years hit the shipyard, and at twenty-five
Grandpa found himself without a job. He shipped out as a deckhand on a lake freighter, but the lake trade was pretty slow as well. In midsummer, the freighter laid up for the season in Manitowoc, and
Grandpa was out of work for the second time in a year. Luckily, the Manitowoc shipyard needed a pipe fitter, and Grandpa settled into a good job that lasted until 1913, when he returned to Ohio and went into business for himself.
The Manitowoc years were eventful for Grandpa. He mastered
his trade. He got married. George and Charlie, the first of his five children, were born. He bought a house on Western Avenue. He
formed a lifetime friendship with Wally, another shipyard worker.
And he took up deer hunting.
Actually, the deer hunting was Wally’s idea. He hunted in
Ashland County, taking the old Wisconsin Central railroad from
Manitowoc to Spencer, and then north to Medford, Prentice, Park
Falls, and Butternut. At Butternut, a farmer with a wagon and team would meet Wally and his friends at the station and haul them about fifteen miles to a dilapidated pioneer log cabin in the woods. Since 112
The Butternut Buck
Grandpa was from northern Ohio, where deer were only a memory
at the time, Wally convinced him that his life would be incomplete until he went deer hunting “up north by Butternut.”
And so the late fall of 1909 found Grandpa at the deer camp with Wally. The season was twenty days long that year, from November
11th through the 30th. About 103,000 hunters bought one-dollar
licenses that allowed them to take “any one deer” in the thirty-one northern counties that were open for deer hunting; south of a line from Peshtigo to Prairie du Chien, deer were rare and the season was closed. There was no deer registration back then, so there’s no record of the total kill, but rail shipments of deer that season totaled 3,985—slim pickings.
About noon on November 12, their first day of hunting, Grandpa
and Wally caught a doe and a good-sized antlered buck in the act of creating more deer. The doe scented them and bolted into the woods.
The buck turned and glared.
“He was only about fifty yards away,” Grandpa said later, “but we were too surprised to shoot. I imagine he was good and mad at us.
And then he took off and we tracked him into the cedar swamp.”
“I shot him,” Grandpa said, “and he went down in a heap, but
just when I touched the knife to him, all hell broke loose!”
l
T he buck thrashed back and forth and struggled to its feet.
Grandpa staggered and fell backward, his knife flying off into the snow. The buck swapped ends, lowered its head, and stabbed its
antlers at Grandpa’s midsection, worrying him like a terrier with a rat. Weaponless and flat on his back, Grandpa grabbed the buck’s rack in self-defense, and was amazed to find that the deer could lift him up from the waist and slam him back down again. One of the
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The Butternut Buck
larger tines of the buck’s antlers slid into the fly of Grandpa’s woolen
“cruiser” pants and ripped it open, showering buttons.
Grandpa heard Wally yelling again, much closer, and then there
was a deafening roar as Wally’s .30-40 Krag went off at point-blank range. The buck leapt straight up and fell kicking at Grandpa’s side.
In seconds, it was dead.
It got quiet in the woods again.
“My God, George, are you all right?” Wally asked, his voice
trembling.
“My God, yourself,” said Grandpa, sitting up. “You coulda killed me!”
“George, he was going to open you up like a melon!” Wally said.
“Don’t get personal,” Grandpa said.
The two men turned the deer over. The Krag’s big bullet had hit
the deer in the brisket and had left an exit hole the size of a fist. But there was no other bullet wound.
“He went down like a ton of bricks when I shot him,” Grandpa
said. “I must have hit him somewhere!”
“George, look at this,” Wally said. He pointed to where a ragged chunk had been shot out of the buck’s left antler about an inch
above the skull. “This is fresh,” he said. “You knocked him out!”
Grandpa walked out to the edge of the swamp and looked back.
“I fired from here, and I held right behind his leg. There’s no way I could miss by two feet at this range.” And then Grandpa noticed a broken cedar branch dangling down about ten feet from where
he had been standing. With his right eye focused on the rifle’s
front sight, he hadn’t seen the branch. It had deflected his .30-30
bullet up and to the right, blasting a piece out of the buck’s antler and knocking him cold.
“Nice deer you got there, Wally,” Grandpa said.
“Hell, it’s your deer, George,” Wally said. “You put him down for a ten-count, and then you rassled with him for a while—he’s yours.”
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“OK,” Grandpa said. “And since you saved me from a fate
worse’n death, I’ll carry him the first hundred yards.”
Back at the cabin, Wally got out his Kodak and snapped a
picture of Grandpa with the Butternut Buck on his shoulders. By
that time, the other hunters in the party had hung a half-dozen deer on the buck pole, and two days later the whole gang was on the train back to Manitowoc, their deer stowed away in the unheated baggage car.
The train pulled into Manitowoc at about ten thirty at night. The deer were unloaded. The hunters checked their rifles and duffles with the stationmaster, lifted the deer to their shoulders, said their good-byes, and headed home down the dimly lighted streets. None
of them had cars; the Ford Model T had been introduced only the
previous year.
Grandpa said the dressed weight of the Butternut Buck increased
about ten pounds a block as he plodded home with it, across the
Tenth Street bridge, west on Franklin, then up Water and Clark
Streets to Western Avenue. Grandpa wasn’t much of a drinker, but he was disappointed when no one came out of the tavern at Tenth
and Franklin to admire his deer.
The only people he met were two elderly German-speaking
ladies on their way home from a sheepshead game, and they seemed to be scared of him. But as Grandpa said, how would you like to meet a 250-pound man with a six-day beard, wearing a bloody Mackinaw
and dirty woolen pants t
hat wouldn’t stay buttoned, carrying a deer down your street?
The ladies crossed the snowbank into the street to let Grandpa
pass.
“Waltrud, mein Gott, wer ist das? ” one of them said. (Waltrud, my God, who is that?)
“Ich weiss nicht, ” said the other. “Ein Jager, ein schmutziger Jager! ”
(I don’t know. A hunter, a filthy hunter!)
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When Grandpa finally got the deer onto his front porch,
Grandma met him at the door and kissed him. Someone, at last,
appreciated the Butternut Buck. He dumped the deer on the porch
floor and straightened up, groaning.
“George, for heaven’s sake, button up your pants,” Grandma
said.
“I can’t, Anna,” Grandpa said, and told her the story.
Grandma didn’t know whether to laugh or scold, so she laughed.
“You had him by the horns, and Wally shot him right on top of
you . . . heavenly days!”
She smiled at Grandpa. “I hope you thanked Wally. He did you a
real favor.”
“Yes, I thanked him,” Grandpa said. “Several times. And you’d
better thank him, too. You’re the one that wants a big family.”
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The Celebrated Water Witch
of Door County
G reat Godamighty,” Clifford said, in a tense whisper.
“Great Godamighty there’s water right under me here I can feel it dammit look at the willow rod go down!”
Dad tapped the cold ashes out of his pipe into the palm of his
hand. “You think you’ve got it this time?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” Clifford said, raptly. “Oh yeah, here it is!”
Dad turned away to hide a smile. He didn’t have much faith in
dowsing, the ancient, magical art of finding underground water with a willow stick. But he did appreciate peculiarity, and on this quiet Door County morning in the summer of 1956, his friend Clifford
was exhibiting peculiarity unusual even for him. Dad figured it
wouldn’t do to break the spell.
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The Celebrated Water Witch of Door County
Clifford stood bolt upright, rigid and trembling with a wide-eyed smile on his face. Clearly he believed he was having a mystical experience of some kind, and sure enough, his Y-shaped, willow dowsing rod was trembling and pointing down.
Suddenly he relaxed. The connection with the infinite had ap-
parently been broken. Clifford turned to Dad with a delighted grin.
“By God Dave this dowsing stick works just like Old Lady Grun
said it would—have faith and you can find water anywhere she said and dammit there it is.” With the heel of his boot, he kicked a hole in the sand to mark the spot. Water began obligingly to well up in the hole.
“Hot damn Dave look at that I know a good deal when I see
one this rod was the best five bucks I ever spent doggone it I didn’t even hafta dig boy you got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool me I’ll tell you by God I really think I’m born to this dowsing business dammit the feeling comes right up that stick and into my arms,” Clifford said.
Dad sat down on an old oil drum that was part of the flotsam
on Clifford’s narrow strip of Door County shoreline and refilled his pipe. He struck a match on the drum, lit the pipe, and gently tamped the tobacco with the end of his pocketknife.
Dad had never met Old Lady Grun, but he knew her by reputa-
tion. She was Manitowoc’s “cat lady,” a faded crone of seventy or so who lived alone in a small house on the south side. She made a meager living selling cats, of which there were always a couple of dozen around the place, and an assortment of literature ranging from Mein Kampf to Sunshine and Health, the forbidden Swedish nudist magazine. She also dabbled in horoscopes and magical items like marked poker decks and homemade dowsing rods. Kids in her neighborhood crossed the street before passing her house.
And now, in the hands of a true believer, Old Lady Grun’s dowsing 118
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rod had found water on a level beach ten feet from the shoreline of Green Bay, where a child with a tin spade and bucket could have
found it with much less trouble. Dad reviewed some sarcastic re-
marks and rejected them, because, in a way, Clifford’s Door County venture was his fault.
Clifford was a welder at the shipyard where Dad worked as a
marine engineer. Wiry, nervous, a confirmed bachelor, and a breathless, nonstop talker, Clifford reminded Dad of a fox terrier—a busy, bristly, likeable little man who would grab a new idea, chew on it for a while, and then bury it and sniff around for another. Earlier in the ’50s, Clifford had fought the Red Menace with “Tail-Gunner
Joe” McCarthy, but when the junior senator from Wisconsin went
into a tailspin, Clifford swore off politics and became a devotee of vegetarianism—until he tired of sauerkraut and canned green beans, the principal vegetables served by the diners where he ate most of his meals.
Then someone told him that the smart money was being in-
vested in Door County real estate, and that passion preoccupied him until he bought the dowsing rod. During a lunch break at the shipyard a couple of weeks earlier, when Clifford was still shopping for Door County land, Dad had given him an ad torn from the Mani-
towoc Herald-Times.
“You’re always talking about buying some land in Door County,
Cliff,” Dad said. “Well, here you go—‘Irregular parcel with 200 feet of Green Bay shoreline, highway access, $1,000 or best offer, contact Sligh Realty, Sturgeon Bay.’”
“Jeez thanks Dave,” Clifford said. “That’s just what I’ve been
looking for and it’s really cheap too just five bucks a front foot dammit I’ll go up there Saturday and look it over.”
The parcel was irregular, all right—200 feet long but only 20 feet from front to back, bounded by the Green Bay shore on one side
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The Celebrated Water Witch of Door County
and a county highway on the other, and covered with stones, sand, little trees, and old gull nests. It didn’t take long for the real estate agent to realize that Clifford was about as irregular as the parcel. The following weekend Clifford signed the papers and became a Door
County land baron.
“Dammit Dave,” Clifford said, as he stuck the dowsing rod in the back pocket of his overalls, “buying this land was just like haggling over an old Ford. Sligh he started out at a thousand and I shook my head and walked away so he came down to nine hundred but I kept
walking away and he kept coming down till we finally settled on
seven hundred I think I could have got him down to six-fifty but there was only so far I could walk ’cause we drove up there in his car.”
“Well,” Dad said, “there’s water, I guess, but there isn’t room to build anything here, y’ know—you’ve only got about a tenth of an acre. Looks like you paid seven hundred bucks for a gull sanctuary.”
“I suppose so Dave but dammit the way to get rich up here is to
bide your time, so I’ll just hang on to this and we’ll see what happens,” Clifford said.
Dad tamped his pipe again. Like most men his age, he had been
tried in the furnace of the Great Depression, which taught him to spend his money on things he had to have right now. If a few dollars were left at the end of the month they were parked in an insured savings account at the First National, where he could get his hands on them, and that was that. In Dad’s experience, investment was a confidence game in which people who wore suits took money from
people who didn’t. He hated to see a friend get involved, especially one as naive as Clifford.
But a mor
e immediate problem awaited Dad later that day when
he got home from Door County. The stench that billowed out of the house when he opened the back door told him all he needed to
know. Pipe smoking had taken the fine edge off Dad’s sense of smell, 120
The Celebrated Water Witch of Door County
but the odor of a backed-up septic tank was unmistakable. And right behind the odor came an eruption of profanity. Mom was down in
the basement, battling the stink and swearing.
Dad was astounded. In fifteen years of married life he had heard her swear only once before, when she woke up on their first morning in Manitowoc and found a bat clinging to the bedroom wall. But
this was a different sort of swearing altogether, continuous, biting, and fluent. He had no idea any woman could swear as well as Mom
was swearing now, with a fine rhythm and in complete sentences.
Dad kicked off his shoes, put on a pair of five-buckle galoshes, grabbed a mop, and joined her in the basement.
Two hours later, when the worst of the sewage had been bailed
out and the windows were open to ventilate the house, Mom ex-
plained what had happened.
The fine summer day had fired her with domestic energy. She did
two big loads of laundry in the Maytag wringer washer, discharging about a hundred gallons of soapy water down the drain. She waited for the water heater to recover from the strain, did a sinkful of dishes, and washed her hair. She waited again and took a relaxing bath. And then, overwhelmed by all that water in one day, the septic tank backed up, filling the basement to a depth of two or three
inches. Feeling a need to do something about the smell, she tried to neutralize it with a full quart of Lysol, creating a sweet-sour bouquet that soaked into the basement floor and lasted for years.
“Charlotte, we have to put in a new septic tank and we might
as well replace the well while we’re at it,” Dad said. “We can’t put up with this any longer. We’ll just have to take the money out of savings.”
The well was in a pit out in the yard. It sucked water from the
glacial clay that underlay our property to a depth of about a hundred feet. It produced very hard water very slowly, but at least we knew 121
The Celebrated Water Witch of Door County
where it was. The septic tank was a mystery. We believed it to be somewhere northeast of the house, but that was just a guess.