Father's Day memories

I’ve missed mentioning some holidays over the last couple of years, sometimes because I had more “important” things to talk about, and sometimes because I just forgot. This time, I’m going to get an early jump on the upcoming Father’s Day weekend.

Andy Couch mentioned in this week’s column about how his father got him and all his brothers interested in fishing at an early age. That triggered several memories I had about hunting and fishing with my father. I’ll mention a couple.

When I was maybe five or six, I remember my dad taking my oldest sister (three years older than me) and I fishing off a cement pier in Lake Michigan on a bright, sunny day. We were using cane poles and worms, I think, for bait. My dad got the two of us set up with baited hooks and bobbers and the fishing commenced. As I recall, my dad never got a chance to fish because he was busy unhooking the bluegills my sister and I were hauling in on a steady basis and rebaiting the hooks.

I don’t remember how long we spent catching the fish, but I do remember that, between the two of us siblings, we filled a five-gallon bucket with those tasty bluegills. My dad finally called a halt to the activity when the bucket was full. We headed home and my father spent the rest of the day cleaning fish. In those days, my parents had a growing family and not a lot of money. I think my father had planned this trip hoping my sister and I would catch a bunch of fish to offset the grocery bill. It worked!

When I was around eight years old, my dad took me deer hunting close to home with him on the last weekend of the season. That was the first year Michigan had a doe season. They had been bucks only forever before that.

We were driving down a back road when several deer ran across the road. My dad went about a quarter mile past where the deer crossed and dropped me off, telling me to walk in a specific direction (I had a compass pinned on my coat). He knew a two-track road was only a few hundred yards through the woods and paralleled the road we were on. He was going to drive down and get on the two-track and wait for me to push the deer out to him – a one-man deer drive.

I checked my compass and started out. After going a ways, I figured I should be seeing the two-track, but only forest was in front of me. I checked my compass and saw that I was walking ninety-degrees from the proper direction. I knew I hadn’t turned, so the compass must be wrong. After a time, with no two-track in sight, I figured I was lost and began preparing to build a fire and wait for my dad to find me.

Just as I was ready to strike the match, I heard my dad call my name. I started walking toward his call and found I was less than a hundred yards from where he was standing. I learned to trust a compass and not my faulty sense of direction that day!

We walked down the two-track and found a spot to sit and watch. My father was ready to call it a day when I saw a doe running right at us across the road. I pointed out the deer to my dad and he stepped out on the two-track. He figured the doe would turn and parallel the road and finally leap across and continue running. It did just that.

My dad was an excellent running deer shot and he fired as the doe was in mid-leap over the road, about one-hundred yards from where we were. I joined him and we walked to the spot. There was blood everywhere. My dad knew he had hit the animal, but he let me go through the motions of finding the blood, checking for freshness, and following the blood-soaked trail into the woods. The deer had died in mid-leap maybe twenty yards into the trees. I learned a serious respect for firearms that day because the deer was as big as I was.

On the drive home, I told my dad that, if he was drinking man, I would buy him a drink. We stopped at a diner and had hot chocolate. He bought it!