My Last Deer Hunt
by Rapparee, Age 7

After a night spent in friend Niles' new machine shop, we awakened around 5 a.m. and put the coffee on the wood stove and set breakfast cooking. Nile showed up about 5:45 and brother Ted about 6. It was a nice, autumn day in Illinois: cool enough for frost on the cornstalks and promising to be clear and sunny. We ate breakfast, did our morning duties, all the while discussing the best sites for "setting up" for deer. I guess it was long about 10 a.m. when one of the kids (20+) stuck his head in and said, "Joe's shot a deer." My brother Tony replied, "Well, you know what to do with it." Ralph shot a deer about an hour later, same routine. After field dressing the deer would be taken home, butchered, wrapped, and frozen -- the entrails were left for the coyotes and other scavengers. Two deer, that was all that day. We must have drunk two or three gallons of coffee, though. Some of Niles' calves got loose right after lunch, so we chased them back into the pasture and repaired the electric fence. The shotguns were unloaded, checked by someone else, cased, and stowed away to await cleaning. The muzzleloaders were emptied, checked, and stowed. The six kids and the four old fogies agreed it had been a good hunt -- meat for the freezer, some for the food bank, and off we went to brag and lie about it.

As time has gone on, that hunt seems to have produced at least 20 deer, all of them bucks with antlers that rivaled an old-growth forest. It was conducted in a blizzard with the wind at 70+ miles per hour. Each shot, instead of being at no more than the 25 yards or so you'd expect with that sort of weaponry done at a mile or more. Oh, yes -- some 1500 head of cattle got loose and we rebuilt three miles of barbed wire fence. I'm not saying that hunters spread the truth sometimes, but....