Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller I’ll never forget the day. Jake, a friend of our son’s, came to visit and with a certain gleam in his eye, dumped a bag full of plastic dead flies on the kitchen floor. I stared in disbelief. I mean, my jaw dropped. We have approximately 1,493 REAL dead flies on our bedroom window sill upstairs on any given morning, and Jake brings in a pile of fake ones!?! Noah and Jake with a wooden lizard;  one of many in a play menagerie “Why dead plastic flies?” you may ask. I puzzled over that for quite some time too. Until Jake brought along his plastic tarantula. Hold on. This is no ordinary plastic tarantula. Not like the weak pretenders of my youth. Those were brittle, cheap pieces of Japanese junk. Jake’s tarantula is supple and subtle. Delicate and deadly. Black, with a hint of orange around the eyes, and white rings on the leg joints and the fangs. The kind of spider that crawls toward sleeping women in late-night jungle movie moonlight. It looks ...

David Heiller “Come on, kids, we’re going skiing.” I made that statement on Saturday morning, and it didn’t sit well with Noah, Malika, and Jake. They had watched th re e hours of cartoons. Their eyes were glazed over. They were hypnotized by laugh tr acks and sound effects and chocolate covered cereal commercials that are SO nutritious. Hey, that’s what the announcer said. Their grumbling didn’t last long. Off went Bugs Bunny. Out went the kids. On went the skis. And along came the old man with a collie and two oranges and a bottle of apple juice. Take it from the old man: what a day for skiing it was! Temperatu re in the twenties. Sun shining. Three inches of new snow over an old ski trail. You folks who have gone south for the winter don’t know what you are missing. You kids who are still watching cartoons don’t either. Skiing, and turning around, and talking lead to this. She doesn't seem too mind much though, does she? Jake and Noah led the way. They quickly...

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...

David Heiller People in our neck of the woods woke up Easter morning to about five inches of we t snow. It clung to pine tree branches like plaster, and coated the grassy church parking lot like lard. Folks who normally have to be pushed into going to church had to be pushed away from church, wheels a-spinning. Folks like us. Malika and Mama hauling the sap, bucket at a time. The snow came at a lucky time for our family. We had just finished boiling our last gallon of maple syrup on Saturday. That was about the time the tractor quit working too. I had hauled in the last 40 gallons of sap on Friday evening, and it quit Saturday morning, right in the mid­dle of an idle. I guess it wasn’t an idle threat. With no tractor, and with five inches of sloppy snow, I don’t know how we would have brought in the last batch of sap. We were lucky, or maybe more. Sometimes you wonder. We ended up boiling down about 360 gallons of sap for our nine gallons of syrup. That’s just right ...

David Heiller The evening grosbeaks fought for food at our feeders on Sunday. They jostled for a spot with the chickadees, nuthatches, and blue jays. So many gathered there that when someone walked around the corner of the house suddenly, they would take off with a roar that made you jump, like the sound of grouse that you scare in the woods. But they soon returned. They are bolder this time of year, because they know they have to fill up for winter. One grosbeak sat on the edge of the dog’s water dish. I walked to within five feet before it flew off. Maybe it got the idea from the blue jay that I saw on Sunday morning. It was perched on the edge of the dog food dish and calmly eating dog food. And perhaps the blue jay stole its idea from my least favorite animal. Two weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night, and headed out-side to answer nature’s call. Our dog, Ida, wanted to go outside too. I flipped on the outside light and started opening the door. At the same ...