My Dad's Deer

There was a time not long ago when the men of the family taught their sons how to shoot and hunt.

Dad called my sister and me into the living room one fall afternoon. I knew it was going to be something big because living room conferences were never trivial. And it was bigger than I could have dreamed—he was going hunting. But not just bird or small game hunting. Deer hunting. 

There was a huge problem, though. Dad was a well-known and much-loved veterinarian in our little suburban town and didn't want his clients to find out he was going hunting. Killing Bambi wouldn’t go over well with them. And most of the kids I went to school with were his client’s kids, so I was forbidden to say one word about it. I solemnly swore myself to secrecy. But everybody at school knew by lunchtime the next day, including most of the teachers. Dad had to know by the way my eyes lit up when he dropped the news on us that there was no way to keep me quiet, and I was only nine after all. As it turned out, he got no negative feedback and I got huge cafeteria cred, so it was a win-win.

Dad hadn’t hunted much since he left his boyhood home in New Hampshire, and had never hunted since I was born. I knew he used to hunt because there were black-and-white pictures on the wall of him as a boy, holding various game animals, and an old shotgun that his dad passed down to him, and eventually, he passed down to me. He had started a small animal practice a few years prior to this hunting trip, so building the business and providing for a young family pushed most leisure pursuits except the occasional round of golf to the periphery. What prompted this trip was anyone’s guess. Maybe it was a reward for five hard years of effort or an attempt to rebalance his life before he worked it completely away, or before something else took it away.

Uncle Walt’s farm

Dad had arranged with my mother’s Uncle Walter to hunt the woods surrounding his farm.

Uncle Walter was larger than life to me. A confirmed bachelor, he lived by himself on the farm where he was born in a small, rural town about forty miles north of Keene, New Hampshire. His parents bought it when they emigrated from Lithuania. At 160 or so acres, it was big enough to supply the family’s needs, and they often managed to make a few bucks off the surplus. He was in his early fifties, built compact and thickly muscled, with a gray flat-top crew cut he covered with a tattered ball cap, fur fedora, or Russian troopers hat with long ear flaps, depending on the season. He had laser-intense blue eyes set deep in a weathered, sharp-featured face softened by the beginning of a gin-blossom nose. He spoke in a gruff and gravelly staccato with a unique blend of New Hampshire and New York accents that made him sound like he was dressing you down even when he wasn’t. He lived in old olive drab Dickies pants and long-sleeve plaid shirts with layers of long johns underneath as needed. The back pockets of all his pants were permanently stretched from the bottle of Carling Black label or Pabst Blue Ribbon beer he tucked into them. 

Most years Walt kept a small herd of cattle, a dozen or so pigs, and a huge garden. They say you should never name your livestock because you run the risk of them becoming a pet. But Walt named his, and it didn’t stop him from sending them off to slaughter when the time came. Nor did it stop him from keeping enough of the meat for his own needs. His garden was prolific thanks to the quality of the soil and his skillful and creative augmentation, probably learned out of necessity during the lean times of the Great Depression, and there was always plenty of extra produce for him to sell at his roadside stand. 

The farm lay on both sides of the state road with the house and the barn facing each other like amiable neighbors. The barn sagged low in the middle like an old horse’s back. It remained standing well into my adulthood, but it became unsafe and he finally let the volunteer fire department set it ablaze to practice their trade so he wouldn’t have to pay to have it taken down. Its ghostly footprint remains, as do my memories of the hours and days that I spent in it, doing what young kids do in old barns. 

The old farmhouse sagged in the middle too, but not nearly as bad. It was built around 1900, plus or minus, and still had period furniture throughout including an antique wood stove in every room for heat. Keeping the stoves fed in the winter was a time- and sweat-consuming chore. The hand-hewn, wide board hardwood floors undulated like ocean waves as you walked from one room to the next. Random narrow doors opened into what my young imagination dreamed were secret passages. They were probably shafts for a long-defunct dumbwaiter. 

The bathroom had a large freestanding clawfoot tub, but no showerhead. If you wanted a hot bath, you heated water on the big Glenwood cookstove in the kitchen in multiple pots and tea kettles. If you were lucky, the water was still a little warm by the time you finished filling the tub and got in. Walt generally didn’t bother with all that except maybe once or twice a year. Instead, he’d bathe in the Ashuelot River in the summer or washcloth himself in the sink in the winter. It didn’t matter. He always smelled of wood smoke. 

The kitchen was straight out of the 1950s except for the woodstove. Mom tried to make dinner on it one night but she had long ago forgotten the finer points of cooking in cast iron cookware on a wood stove, so the liver and onions became just liver. Uncle Walt never let her live that down. “You should be a magician, you made the onions disappear!” And she wasn’t shy about throwing a verbal counterpunch back at him, being a feisty little Lithuanian herself. She and Walter bickered often, which Dad didn’t always find endearing. They would stop sparring when Dad finally said something, but they shared a clandestine wink and a smile after he turned his back. Mom was in her late thirties and still carried herself like a woman ten years younger. She kept her hair above shoulder length with a soft perm and wore Coke bottle glasses in 1960s-style black frames. Mom shared the solid and powerful build of her family, and she had no trouble strong-arming misbehaving children. 

The back door to the kitchen was the swinging wood frame screen door variety that you would expect to find on every old farmhouse, and yes, it banged shut if you let it go and Walt would holler like you had slammed it on his finger if you did. It opened onto the back step and then onto the back forty, which was either a rolling green grassy meadow or an unblemished white blanket of snow all the way back to the treeline, depending on the time of year. The backyard was my playground and my best friend. There were enough adventures to be had out there that it never occurred to me I was alone. And I made enough trips through the kitchen and out that screen door that even today I never let a door bang shut without wincing. 

Walt didn’t own a tractor. He had a Doodlebug. I always thought it was just his nickname for it, but it turns out it was a real thing that lots of rural folks had or built during the Second World War, when tractors were in short supply but ingenuity was not. They started life as a 1920s or ’30s-era Ford, but then were stripped to bare essentials and modified for farm use. They proved almost as capable as a conventional tractor. His was pretty tired by the time I came along. The engine cover was long gone, with one headlight still clinging to the radiator frame. The driver’s seat was down to bare metal with old blankets piled on it to protect Walt’s butt from the springs. The only body panel left was the cowl, and there was only a fleck or two of chrome on the headlight bezel. It still had the old Model A spoke front wheels but had been adapted to more modern steel wheels in the back with large lug snow tires and tire chains for traction. It had a muffler he must have found on the side of the road somewhere that he slipped over the pipe coming off the engine and secured with a nail, but it did little to quiet the old flathead four-cylinder. It had an electric start instead of a hand crank, though, which made it more of a deluxe model. I always watched, fascinated, as he twisted his foot at what seemed an impossible angle, heel out, toes in, to be able to mash the floor-mounted starter button and the throttle at the same time in order to get it cranking over. While that was going on, he was busily fiddling with the spark advance lever, choke, and other things on the dashboard—I still have no idea what they were—all the while listening for the particular sounds that told him the engine was about to catch. It always cranked over very slowly, but it always caught, one cylinder at a time, until Walt got all the levers adjusted just so, at which point the engine stopped fighting him and smoothed out.

He had a rickety old utility trailer adorned with an orange warning triangle askew on the tailgate hitched behind the Doodlebug for firewood, dirt, stone, hay—or for my sister and me. Sometimes we rode with the other stuff if he hadn’t cleaned it out. After the starting ritual, my dad would climb on the passenger side, where Walt placed a wooden crate to serve as a seat. Dad was tall, with a basketball player’s lanky build, so his knees jutted up to almost shoulder height when he settled onto the crate. Mom wanted no part of this so she would stay at the farmhouse and watch with an expression of grave concern. 

Uncle Walt would find first gear somehow, let the clutch out, and the machine would start down the back field toward the woods line. He and Dad would talk as we bumped along, but I couldn’t hear them clearly over the Doodlebug’s popping exhaust, so I never knew about what. I spent my time looking between their heads, over the dashboard and cowl, past the radiator fan, whirring away like an airplane propeller, up the rutted trail and into the past, present, and future. No road trip, vacation, or other experience affected me like those odysseys around Uncle Walt’s farm behind the Doodlebug. I sometimes wish I had talked him into selling it to me, but I don’t think the Doodlebug or the farm would have been the same without each other.

The Doodlebug ran until it didn’t, and it sat where it stopped. That was Walt’s way. It didn’t matter if it had monetary or sentimental value. If it was too expensive to fix, there it sat and he never gave it another thought. He never told me what was wrong with it, but it was done, and that was that. 

The hunt

"Dad hadn't hunted much since he left his boyhood home in New Hampshire ..."

Dad didn’t own a rifle at the time, other than an old Remington bolt-action .22 he’d bought new when he was seven, so he borrowed a deer rifle from his half brother, Russell. It was an iron-sighted .44-40 lever action—the biggest, most powerful rifle I had ever seen. The rifle and his hunting clothes transformed Dad from a Ward Cleaver suburbanite into a rugged frontiersman. He wore the new persona like an old suit of clothes. He didn’t look at all out of place or character, and I was proud to see that side of him. The black stubble he had allowed to form on his face was uncharacteristic, but it enhanced the effect. 

We arrived late in the day. Walt came stiffly out the front door to greet us wearing as much of a smile as he was capable of. We went through the usual ritual of Mom bringing in a huge cooler full of food she had prepared for him because his “Fridgidaire,” as he called all refrigerators, was always near empty. A disgusted Walter asked her over and over why she always brought so much food, he didn't have enough room for all that stuff, and “Whatsa matta, you don’t think I can feed myself? Whatsis, lasagna?”—all the while packing it away like bricks of gold at Fort Knox. Mom held up her end of the argument admirably. “Every time I come here there’s no food in the fridge, and I know you’re too damn lazy to drive to Keene or Brattleboro, you’d rather starve! And yes, that’s lasagna, and this is chili, all you have to do is heat it up, okay? Here’s some cheese and coffee. Geez, you’re a pain in the ass!” On it went until the cooler was emptied. He would return the favor when we left, refilling the cooler with vegetables, potatoes, berries, homemade wine, and fish he’d caught.

We got settled and fell into easy company after catching up for a bit. Dad decided to take a walk down by the woods line since there was still an hour or so of daylight, so he slipped on his black-and-red checkered wool hunting jacket, put on his orange vest and hat, grabbed the rifle, dropped a few shells in his pocket, and headed down the back field toward the woods, calling to Mom over his shoulder that he wouldn’t be long and not to worry. 

It was almost dark when Walt finally said, “I wonder where the hell Stanley is?” Mom looked worried enough to make me worry too, and Walt’s list of possible calamities didn’t help. When it finally turned pitch dark, Walt called his brother Jerry who lived half a mile up the road to see if he could come help look for Dad. Jerry sent his sons Kim and Zip over because he wasn’t up for it, having had a few too many already. Along with another cousin who was up from western Massachusetts to bow hunt, they piled into Walt's 1940-something Willys Jeep pickup that was parked behind the house. It was almost as bad as the Doodlebug, but it hadn’t stopped running permanently yet, so off it went. We watched the headlight beams bounce down the field until they got to the woods, and went back in the house to wait.

Walt broke out his homemade wine when we got back in the kitchen to calm Mom’s nerves. He made wine from blackberries, raspberries, elderberries, and any other berry that grew on the farm. He called it “Sneaky Pete” because it went down smooth and was quite tasty, but if you weren’t careful you’d soon be wondering why you suddenly couldn’t speak clearly or stand without swaying. He would open bottles of several varieties and mix them together like a chemist. Following this, he would give it a taste test like a seasoned connoisseur, swishing it in his mouth, looking like he was lost in deep thought. When he was satisfied he would hand the glass to his guest and raise his glass in a Lithuanian toast. 

They both had the better part of two glasses when Walt noticed the Jeep coming back up the field toward the house. Dad wasn’t in it.

“Did you find him?” Walt hollered. 

It was the third cousin, Bobby, who answered. “Yeah. He got a deer.” 

Walt’s eyes went wide with shock. “You fulla shit!?!!” he challenged. 

Bobby laughed, “No, really, he got a nice doe. He didn’t bring anything to drag it out with so we gotta go back and bring him a rope. He was trying to use his belt but he kept losin’ his pants.” They had left Kim with Dad and the deer in the dark with no flashlight. Kim told me later he hunkered down on top of a beaver dam with his .45 pistol drawn and the safety off. Lots of things go bump in the night in the woods, it turns out, and Kim was ready for all of them. 

"Mom gave him a big smooch, a bigger smile, and a huge hug." 

I bounced off the walls with excitement while we waited, driving Walt nuts with my stream of questions. Another hour went by. This time dad was in the Jeep, looking none the worse for wear, with his pants on and secure. The truck had barely stopped before Walt was behind it, flashlight trained into the bed, and me sticking to him like an excited pup. A combination of morbid curiosity and pride in my Dad had me jockeying for position with the men behind the Jeep. I had never seen a deer, live or dead, so I was motivated to say the least. Dad fielded questions like a politician at a press conference while I burned the image of the doe into my retinas. Finally, he got around to Mom, who gave him a scolding about scaring her that way, but he sidestepped her faux indignance with his trademark wit and she gave him a big smooch, a bigger smile, and a huge hug. 

Dad had already dressed out the doe, so all that was left was to hang it on the front porch to finish draining the blood. Someone mentioned the idea of hanging the deer in front of our house in the suburbs instead, which brought a round of laughter from my rural relatives. The excitement finally wound down and we said our goodnights. 

Life lessons

I could not take my eyes off that deer in the days that followed. I studied it from every angle. I stroked its coat and poked at it, wondering why it was hard as a rock. Occasionally I would break away and take a walk around the barn with my BB gun in search of rats and other things to shoot at, but inevitably my thoughts returned to the deer. My Dad’s deer. The thought made my chest puff out.

Dad took me bird hunting one afternoon since he still had time left on his hunting license. I managed to slip off a rock and fall into a frigid stream early on, so the rest of the afternoon was wet and uncomfortably cold. The woods seemed completely devoid of life compared to the abundance of songbirds and squirrels around the farm. Just when I was convinced that there was truly nothing alive except us in those woods, a grouse exploded from cover right beside us. If you’ve never seen that happen, “exploded” is an accurate description. Before I could process what was going on, Dad had pivoted, released the safety, shouldered the shotgun, and shot a hole in the underbrush a whisker behind the fleeing bird, all in one smooth but lightning-fast motion. I never knew Dad could move that fast, a fact I stored away to deter me from future bad behavior. I was disappointed that he missed, but I’m glad I was there to see him in action.

The day before we were due to head home, Walt and Dad went out to the porch right to skin the doe. There was a little disagreement on the rate and method, being that dad was a surgeon and Walt was not. But at last the skin was removed down to the head, revealing the full musculature. I did some heavy-duty staring, horrified and fascinated. The head, skin, and lower legs were removed and tossed into the back of the jeep to be brought to the compost heap down back, but Dad cut off the tail and gave it to me on the sly. It found its way to school with me one day as proof positive that my Dad was a successful hunter. Again there were no repercussions. Lucky me.

Walt gave me my first driving lesson in that old Jeep when it was time to bring the deer parts down back. I didn’t think it went all that bad, even though Walt insisted loudly on driving back to the house. Mom had a funny smirk on her face when we got there. She told me later that she could hear him cussing me out all the way to the compost pile. I must have been too excited to be driving a real pickup truck to hear him. 

The cousins showed up for the butchering, and the kitchen was set up for the task. Two sawhorses with a sheet of plywood across them served as a workbench. Huge stainless steel bowls were set out for trimmings for hamburger and stew. A saw hung from a nail over the sink for cutting bones where needed for chops and steaks. A roll of paper wrap and boxes of plastic bags were put within easy reach, and a little white transistor radio was tuned to a rock station. Walt didn’t say anything, but I saw him give the radio and the cousins the stink-eye a few times. I guess he figured that was the price he had to pay for them coming to help. I wanted to help, too, so I was trained on the electric meat grinder well enough so that none of my own flesh would be added to the hamburger, and thus was made to feel like one of the guys and that I was helping.

Usually, running the grinder was a task relegated to the women along with wrapping the meat, but I didn’t know that until years later. I didn’t care either, because even if we had a grinder there’s no way my mother would have ever let me run it. Maybe I wasn’t ready at that age to wield a knife, but game butchering (along with a lot of other man-skills Dad never taught me, mostly because he never had the chance) I learned on my own a lot later in life. 

We packed the car and got ready to leave the next morning. That was always a melancholy time for me, but this one more than usual because of the magnitude of what had happened that week. As it turns out, it was more special than any of us realized. We had no way of knowing, but this was the last time Dad would ever hunt and the last deer he would ever harvest. Cancer took him a few years later. I didn’t get to be in the woods with him when the big moment happened, but I’m glad I was old enough to be there, to appreciate the moment, and to remember it vividly for the rest of my life. 

I knew we’d be back in the winter for ice fishing and back again for berry picking in the summer, but I still hated leaving. I felt like I belonged there, like it was home. I don’t think Walt liked to see us go either, as it always looked like he had a tear in his eye as we drove off. It might have been the shots of cognac he had for breakfast most mornings that made his eyes glassy, but I prefer to think he was sorry to see us go. 

This story is written by Scott Travis, my cousin—the son of my dad’s brother, my Uncle Stan. Scott was raised in Massachusetts, but now lives (and works too hard!) in Florida. ~ Mark

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