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 ...