The feeling of December ~ November 28, 1996

David Heiller

It really feels like December.

Certain months have certain feelings. When sap starts running, it feels like March. When frogs start peeping, it feels like April. When leaves start falling, it feels like September.

But December is different.

It’s in the light mostly. Maybe there’s a scientific explanation for where the sun is in the sky, and how it reflects off fresh snow. I don’t want to know about that. It might spoil the feeling of December, the way learning how to pilot a steam boat spoiled the Mississippi River for Mark Twain.

I felt December for the first time last Saturday, November 24. It came a week early for me, but Mother Nature doesn’t go by our calendar. Quite the contrary.

I was lying in bed at about 7:30, and I looked out the window, and there it was, that light of December. Α couple inches of fresh snow had fallen, and the sun was just coming up, and the bedroom was filled with December.

It was like God hadn’t just brought a new day, he had brought a whole new season, one that carried hope and promise.

I wanted to jump up and tear into the hope and promise, the way a person does in the spring when the weather is perfect and the garden is ready for planting.

Yet at the same time I wanted to lie in bed a few extra minutes to soak it up. 1 wished it would last forever. Every year I feel it, and every year it is good.

Ah December!
A wintry ride for Claire with Mom and Dad.

Some of it has to do with childhood memories. The first snow meant ice skating on the harbor and on the river bottoms. It meant snowmen, and snowball fights, and sliding down the big hill, across the street, and down past our house, two whole blocks of sliding if you didn’t get hit by a car, and no one ever did, because we took turns watching out.

The feeling of December back then carried thoughts of Christmas vacation, and presents, and good food, and more of the fun things like skating and sledding.

I don’t have quite those same experiences in my life now, but the feeling of December is just as good. The snow is clean and new. It seems to fall in big, feathery flakes. It belongs here, and it’s ours. People who have fled to Texas and Florida are missing it. We may envy them in March, but now it is their turn to envy us. It’s the kind of weather Robert Frost would write poems about.

The promise of a new season is here. Yes, it is winter, and yes, winter can be hard. Who will ever forget last year? No one wants to relive that. But we need change. It’s good for us. It rejuvenates us. It gives us new things to do. It brings wonder, about how everything can shut down for four months and then rejuvenate itself again.

And there’s something good about that fresh snow and those cold temperatures. There’s something good about the white blanket that’ spread over the garden. There’s something g about giving the lakes and rivers a rest, about seeing them skim over with ice.

The feeling of December brings the satisfaction of having the storm windows on and the woodpile nice and neat and the outside tools and toys put away and everything buttoned down like a snug sweater.

And then there’s the anticipation of Christmas. I know it can be a stressful time, with the pressures of giving the right gifts and going to family gatherings. But these are overshadowed by cutting the Christmas tree and smelling a kitchen full of fresh baked cookies and watching the kids in the church Christmas program and by a hundred other little pleasures of life.

That’s my sermon for today. The feeling of December. Did you catch it? It will be gone soon enough.

‘We don’t give up easy.’ ~ November 25, 1999

David Heiller

The mark of a good deer hunter isn’t always in his or her marksmanship. The Bruce and Sandy Lourey family of Moose Lake proved that on November 7.

Bruce Lourey, 53, was hunting that Sunday morning on land that his brother, Dal, owns west of Kerrick.

Bruce saw a buck early on that opening morning. He shot at it three times while it was running.

After the third shot, the deer flopped out flat, like it was dead. Bruce was confident that he had killed it. He still had a shot left, but he thought he should reload before he walked over to it.

“By the time I got two or three more bullets in there, I hadn’t even gotten them in the gun yet, he jumped up and took off running,” Bruce recalled on November 15.

Bruce watched where it went into the woods and started trailing it. “I kept thinking, he’s only going to go a hundred yards. He kept going and going and going.”

Bruce looked for the deer for about three hours. Two times he crossed the Willow River, wading in his wool pants and leather boots. But he couldn’t find it.

At about 11:30 he marked his spot, then went in for lunch. He told his two sons, Andrew, 17, and Jake, 16, about what had happened, and they went back with him.

They tracked the deer through the woods. It wasn’t easy, because the deer had stopped bleeding when it got on a trail.

They saw that the deer had run up to a log on the trail. Bruce and Andrew figured it had crossed over the log and kept going down the trail. Jake had a different hunch. He got down on his hands and knees by the log, and for about an hour he scoured the ground like Sherlock Holmes. All he lacked was a magnifying glass.

Jake finally got a break when he found a spot of blood in the other direction. He saw that the deer had reversed course at the log and walked down to the river. There Jake found a track in the sand and another drop of blood.

“It had actually run up alongside the log and went down the river. It threw us off there,” Jake explained.

Bruce and Andrew crossed the river, using a bridge, while Jake waited where he was. They saw that the deer had crossed the river there, because there was more blood on the ground. It had started bleeding again.

“It tried to go up a hill and fell back down and started bleeding,” Jake recalled.

Bruce figured it couldn’t have gone far. He started walking in a big circle around the spot.

Jake went straight ahead, up the hill to a trail and across it. The deer jumped up and took off about 10 yards in front of him. Jake shot it two times with his Remington .270, and the animal died.

The deer had an eight point rack and weighed about 200 pounds, Jake estimated.

Bruce wasn’t happy that he didn’t kill the deer cleanly in the first place. “Ι’m not very proud of it, put it that way,” he said.

“It all started when I didn’t make the very best shot. I’m getting old, I don’t shoot as good.”

But he was glad that they found it. I could tell that it wasn’t a matter of if they found a deer but when they found it.

“Ι don’t think there’s anybody else that would have found it except us,” he said without a hint of boastfulness. “We just basically hounded it until we had it. Jake really spent a long time down crawling around on his hands and knees, sorting that trail out, where did that deer go.”

“We don’t give up easy.”

I asked Bruce if he was proud of his son. It was a dumb question. Bruce answered by saying, “I’m glad he didn’t get lost anyway.” In case you don’t speak the language of males, that’s the way a guy says, “Yes, I am extremely proud of my son.”

I asked Jake if he considered himself a patient person. “I’m remotely patient,” he answered with a self-conscious laugh. “Once I’m sitting on the stand, Ι get a little edgy but I don’t have a problem with tracking deer.”

I asked him another dumb question: “Did you feel it was important that you find the deer?”

Duh!

“Yes, definitely,” was Jake’s simple answer. Jake shot a six point buck the following day.

As for our household, we did not get a deer. Noah is already planning his strategy for next year.

The first snowfall of the season ~ November 5, 1992

David Heiller

There’s something in the first snowfall of the season that brings out joy and wonder. You hear about it on the radio, and even the announcer’s voice is urgent, excited. You step outside and feel the wet, chilly air, see the low clouds, and you smile inside.

Then snow fills the air, and you know it’s going to last, and you want to curl up in a quilt, maybe grab a book and a cup of coffee, maybe grab a nap. Bears are thinking the same thing in the woods, with the first snowfall.

As snow coats the ground, the house fills up with a special light, soft and bright at the same time from all that whiteness outside reflecting in. Thoughts from childhood come back like they do every year. The excitement of snow. The anticipation of sledding, of making snowmen, of missing school, of seeing Mother Nature change her clothes before your very eyes.

You notice the dog lying in front of the woodstove, her coat thick and glossy, and with the snow falling outside, you are happy to see the dog there. She belongs in that spot.

Noah and Dan and a rousing game of Monopoly.

You break out the Monopoly game at the kitchen table, and play with the kids. Monopoly was meant to be played on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

You go outside to bring in wood for the woodstove. The wood feels good in your arms. You realize for the first time that all of the cuttίng and splitting and stacking has paid off. Oh, that white oak feels good when you carry it in! It will feel even better when it heats the house.

Outside, your senses are sharpened as snowflakes fly like sparks off a grinding wheel. You notice that the wind is from the northeast. You turn your collar against it, and hunch your shoulders. You turn your eyes to the dull skies and wonder if this storm will bring three inches or 33 inches. You never know about the first snow fall, and that makes it all the more exciting. Out in the woods, the coyotes and deer are doing the same thing, lifting their faces to the clouds, wondering at it all with animal instincts that we can’t understand except for this one.

Night falls. The cat crawls up on the couch and lies on the socks you are folding. That’s O.K. You smile, like she seems to smile, because the first snow is falling outside.

Wintery days

You go to bed and hear the creaking of the branches as they coat with snow. They scratch the house like bony fingers. The kettle of water on the woodstove boils over a drop. It hits with a hiss, and you look up at this unfamiliar sound.

In the morning, the snow is still falling. Four inches lie on the ground, heavy and wet like the first snowfall often is. The kids eat and dress and throw on their snowsuits for the first time in seven months. They rush outside, forgetting to wash their faces and brush their teeth. They quickly roll a big ball of snow, heavier than they are, and then another, and fetch their dad to lift it onto the bottom one, which he does with a groan and a smile. Those old childhood memories come back again.

THE FIRST SNOWFALL will soon pass. So will all these notions. Then the soft white light won’t be so special. The wood will feel heavy in your arms, and you’ll notice the mess it leaves around the woodbox. You’ll get used to the hissing woodstove, and won’t hear the trees outside at night. Your eyes won’t turn to the sky with the same sense of wonder, and you might even cuss a spell when the roads pile up with more wet, slippery snow.

But not yet, not until you welcome with joy the first snowfall.

Noah and his deer ~ November 13, 1997

David Heiller

The alarm clock rang at 5:30 a.m on Saturday, November 8. I was waiting for it to ring. I hadn’t slept much. First day of deer hunting will do that, even if you aren’t going hunting.

I got out of bed, dressed, went upstairs, and woke up my son, Noah, 14, who was going deer hunting for the first time.

I lit a fire in the wood stove. We ate cold cereal. Noah put on the warm clothes that he had laid out the night before in the kitchen: long johns, snow pants, T-neck, jacket, blaze orange sweatshirt, stocking cap, choppers. It was 33 degrees outside. You can never be too warm when you are hunting.

We headed out to the deer stand at 6:15. I had made the stand a few days earlier, nailing a platform between an oak tree and a basswood at the edge of the woods. It was about 12 feet high. We saw a lot of deer tracks near the stand.

Noah climbed up. I headed back to the house. It wasn’t big enough for both of us.

He came in at 9:30. He hadn’t seen anything from the stand, but he had seen a big doe as he walked through the woods. We had seen a doe there two weeks earlier. Maybe it was the same one.

That afternoon we went to the Minnesota Gopher football game with Noah’s friend, Matt, and Matt’s dad, Scott. I asked Scott if it would affect deer hunting if I went to the woods with the tractor to bring in firewood.

Noah and his deer.

“No,” he answered firmly. “In fact, my dad used to carry a rifle with him when he was on his tractor, just in case he saw a deer.”

Noah and I got up on Sunday morning at 5:45 and followed the same ritual. This time he came back at 8:00 a.m. He said he was hungry. I think he was hungry and bored. He got a snack and went back out. I walked out to meet him an hour later. No sign of a deer.

“Maybe I should hunt at Dan’s.” he said, referring to a friend who lives down the road. “He’s seen a lot of deer.” Already the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.

At noon^, on Sunday, I headed to the woods on the tractor to bring in a load of firewood. Our two dogs were with me. I saw a flash of white. A big deer was running through the woods.

I shutoff the tractor and called the dogs. The deer stopped. I walked closer. It stood still, watching me. Then it started browsing. The deer was to the west. The wind was from the west. It couldn’t smell us. It knew we were there, but it didn’t seem concerned.

I called the dogs and walked a quarter mile back to the house. Noah was watching the Viking football game.

“There’s a big doe in the woods,” I told him.

He jumped off the bed and quickly gathered up his blaze orange sweatshirt and 30.06 rifle. He put in a clip of bullets and pumped a shell into the chamber.

We walked back to the tractor, and a little beyond. The deer had moved about 20 feet. It looked up at us, and then continued browsing.

The sun was shining its thin November light. What a beautiful sight, watching that deer move slowly through the woods.

Noah walked a bit closer. He was about 20 yards from the deer. He rested the rifle against a tree.

This is it, I thought. I had never shot a deer. Never seen one die. I knew it was going to happen now. A feeling of sadness welled up inside me. I fought it back. Time stood still.

Noah fired. The deer ran off. Noah ran after it. I ran after him. After about 50 yards, the deer lay down. It picked a nice spot, against a log. It looked like it was nestling up for a nap.

We watched it from 20 feet away. It raised its head a few times, then laid it on the ground. It thrashed and kicked for a few seconds, and was still.

I cried as I watched the deer die. I can’t explain why. We had taken its life. Maybe my tears were a way of paying respect.

When we went up to the deer, I was amazed again at what a beautiful animal it was.

I looked at its ears and mouth. I petted its thick brown coat and felt the four nipples on its warm, white belly. It was a magnificent animal.

The bullet had hit right where Noah had aimed, through the lungs. It was a good shot. The deer hadn’t suffered much.

Noah and I cleaned it together. We hoisted it into the trailer. It was heavy. When we got home I took a picture of him with it.

Then I hung the deer in the garage and skinned it. The flesh was still warm. It had a lot of fat on the back. It was ready for winter. I filled the suet feeders with the fat.

Cindy fried up a piece of the liver for supper with bacon and onions. I wanted to eat part of the deer right away. Another way of saying thanks? Who knows? It tasted good.

It may sound strange, but I think Noah was meant to shoot that deer. We had seen it twice before. It liked our woods. Sunday afternoon, it almost seemed to be waiting for us. Why didn’t it run away?

Maybe I’m romanticizing the deer hunt, or trying to ease a slightly guilty conscience. I’m no psychologist.

But I’m glad Noah got his deer.