Showers of Blessing

 

Were it possible, you could not order up out of a catalogue a worse week, weather-wise, to hold a muzzleloading deer season than the one just ended on October 30. Hot, hot, hot. Swarms of mosquitoes, fat, sassy, and full of my blood.

No rain. Not a shower. Hunters all over this state are desperate for rain.

The only deer Brian Loveland and I were seeing were a half hour before dark in the middle of green fields, materializing mysteriously, and seemingly just standing up and feeding as if they had been bedded where they stood, in the middle of the fields all day waiting for dark in order to feed. Then, I think, they laid down again about five in the morning to get ready for yet another long, hot day.

Brian and I talked about it one evening in camp around dinner, one out of cans and zip-locs, no fire, before turning in.

“So, what do you think?” I asked, fishing as cold a diet coke as I could find out of the ice chest, “What’s our chances?”

“I don’t know. It’s too hot for deer hunting, I know that. We oughta’ be up on the lake fishing for sand bass I’m thinkin’.”

“You know,” I said continuing the train of thought, “there was a full moon ‘bout two this morning when I stepped outside.”

“I saw it, too. ‘Bout three. The books all say they move at noon the following day on a full moon. I’m gonna’ give it a shot at least though noon before I come in.”

“Go ahead. I’m sleeping in.”

Brian brought his deer, a nice, fat five-point, into camp about one-fifteen the next day. He “pinwheeled” it right behind the shoulder, a heart shot, just past high noon as it nosed the trail of three does that passed his stand at eleven-thirty. The medicine? A hundred grains of Pyrodex; a 200 grain saboted bullet; all out of the end of a Thompson Centerfire rifle, scoped. So much for Daniel Boone.

There was a good feeling in camp that night; a deer hanging in the bodark just east of the tent; smiles all about our cold dinner; “Keep the ‘Sabot’ holy”, Brian said; and then a cool heavy fog settling in on the meadow surrounding our cattle corral camp by the creek. Oh, yes, perfect (maybe) for me the following morning on my river bottom stand. Heavy fog would mean a late sunrise. The deer would move to their beds later than they had been. I would be ready.

Sure, I was. Maybe eight-fifteen, fog sifting in all around trees standing ghost-like, a doe somewhat less than a hundred pounds in weight, came nose-sniffing right down the trail I had walked down to my stand. She was ground-scenting me, no question about it, bird dogging me right to my tree seat at ground level. If I allowed it, she’d come, nose to the ground, right up to my knees.

I didn’t.

Later, in camp, I was careful to zip-loc her fresh, cleansed heart and put it in the cooler. It’s a choice piece of meat any way you fix it. I like it charcoaled. Doc Ned Morris over at St. Francis, my cardiologist, likes them, too. He’d get this one, the first of the year. He earned it. I’m still alive.

The world is full of irony. Would an enterologist enjoy them as much?

At home that afternoon, showered and shaved, there was a knock on my door. It was my grandson, Lane Webster. He had been hunting that morning with his uncle Mike, and was here now, still camoed up, to pick up his book bag full of weekend homework. Good boy.

“Papa! Look!”

Standing there in the doorway, Lane was pointing at the cowboy dinner triangle Pam and I use to call the grandkids up out of the woods at dinnertime. There, flush against the triangle’s base, resting with its legs tucked up tightly beneath its body to keep in its own body heat, was as pretty a grey tree frog as I have ever seen.

I had been hearing them in the trees all around my driveway for a month into the fall the minute the sun was down, as is their summertime habit out here on The Branch. It’s not summer. You have to study that to know it is true.

You seldom see a tree frog, even if you climb trees looking for them where they live, so perfectly camouflaged and small they be. Occasionally, just before the fall’s first frost, I will see them on the outside of the kitchen window next to where I sit inside, drawn there by the bugs in a like manner drawn to the light over the kitchen table. Anytime I see one, I count it a treat.

This, I counted a blessing: In a little more than twelve hours, there was a buck hanging outside my tent door; a doe on the ground; and a tree frog at my door.

It was something to think about. “Showers of blessing, showers of blessing we need. Mercy drops ‘round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”

Were it possible, you could not order up such a thing out of a catalog.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen