What it Takes to Push Through Adversity

 

You’ve got to have “what it takes,” is what they say, to push through adversity. Nobody knows that better than this season’s deer hunters, both archery and muzzleloaders.

Weather? It’s got to line up for you. Hot, hot, hot; dry, dry, dry, is not going to line up for you. Persistence, only, will beat it. You’ve got to want to succeed more than the weather wants to defeat you. You might win. You might lose. If you think about losing, you will.

That’s my take on it.

Lane Webster, 14, of Sand Springs, showed up at my house the other day with a monster buck hauled into my yard in the back of his father’s pickup. His father? That would be Adam Webster, also of Sand Springs, who first hauled things into my yard along with his best “bud”, Clay McKinney, also of Sand Springs when they were teens. It seems like yesterday, but it wasn’t.

There’s a continuity to small town life that even a knucklehead, like me, with only half the sense God gave a goose, can see and appreciate. We live for it, and the stories that attend it, that being only one of the reasons we have not yet moved to NYC.

Give me the little things, which, strung together make a beautiful life at the end, ‘Reilley. If as the wag said there are only six degrees of separation, around here there is only one.

 Lane and his dad had been fighting the weather hard. The weather was winning, punching them hard, in the mouth, almost everyday they went out.

Lane had killed several deer in his young life, but not any with a bow, that which many of us consider the ultimate challenge in the sport of deer hunting. So many ways to foul up, and throw in bad weather to boot? Challenging times ten. Lets start hitting ourselves in the head with a hammer, because it feels so good when you stop.

On the piece of property Lane and Adam hunt near Heyburn Lake in Creek County, Adam had several trail camera pics of two or three different bucks with nice racks, but nobody was seeing them during shooting hours, albeit one of the pics showed a monster ten point at high noon. One time.

Adam placed his son, for no apparent reason, overlooking the “hot” buck site. Do, or die.

One time. The hottest time of the day during a current hot weather spell defying all known seasonal records. One time. Everything else was after dark. When he saw the trail cam pic, Lane determined that the ten point, and nothing else, would be his first bow killed deer.

It began to look four weeks into the season that the “nothing” was going to be what he ate for dinner. There were a couple of does and one weak sister, spindly-antlered fork horn in four weeks that he could have shot under twenty yards to end his agony. Would you have done it? At fourteen?

I would have.

Yesterday, at about 8:50, another doe, followed by a forkhorn came into his stand, milled around a bit offering innumerable shots, and then began to wander back towards the depths of the woods. Just to play with it, Lane used his grunt tube to see if he could entice the young buck back into the area.

The minute he hit the tube, the young buck took off on a dead run, exit right, out of the area. Just as quickly, Lane heard another animal (wild hog?) approaching through the woods on his left. It was the big ten point.

That fast arrival on the scene was probably the best thing that could’ve occurred for Lane: He didn’t have time to think about the size of the deer. He drew back, under twenty yards, on his Mathews Mission Craze bow set at 58 pounds of pull, settled the sight smack in the middle of the buck’s shoulder, and let fly an 85 grain Beeman fixed head, G5 Montec broadhead.

Pinwheeled ‘im, as bowhunters like to say. Lane knew that watching the deer crash back into the dark woods. He called his dad, only 200 yards away in his own stand, on his cell to let him know of the hit.

When Dad arrived, they immediately set out on the trail; which, there was none. Oh, no. All that time, perseverance, and dedication to a goal, and now? Had he missed after all?

They continued in the direction described by Lane as the deer’s exit trail. No blood anywhere. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Maybe twenty yards down the trail, wow! Adam looked down and found a broken half of the arrow shaft, covered in blood. Great news. There was a bloody smear on a tree trunk there, and then, again, nothing that they could see in any direction, and they searched in widening circles for over an hour.

Finally, both with sinking feelings in their stomachs, Adam said, “You go that way, I’ll go this,” and they split up. Maybe a hundred yards from the deer stand, maybe a hundred and fifty, the ground topped a low rise and fell into a deep, rock-ribbed creek canyon. Adam has been finding mortally wounded deer near water, all types of water, for years. Could it be?

Yes, it could. Walking up to the deepest hole of water in that stretch, Adam saw one side of the deer’s antlers sticking above the surface. Only that. Nothing more.

He waded out into the water, grabbed ahold, and marched to shore tugging a huge deer along with him, a big grin plastered to Dad’s face when he hit the creek bank.

“Hey, Lane! Over here! Quick!”

And he came “a runnin’ “ as some of us used to say. “ Happy, happy, happy,” as Phil Robertson would say.

So, there you have it: Just another small town story about small town people and an overwhelmingly huge event in their small lives, almost as big as the day they were washed in the blood of The Lamb.

I’ve known the Dad since he was in my class, and before. I know what he has become.

The boy? Certainly I’ve known him since he became my grandson, and, I will argue, even before that.

All that adversity? All that determination, and goal setting? He will be more than just a deer hunter I think.

I’m just sayin’.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen