Souvenir

One day, my father was out hunting in his favorite spot; there were two deer trails running beneath a huge oak tree with flawless limbs.

This made Daddy's favorite site as special as it could be because a lightning bolt had burned a huge hole through the tree.

He constantly double-checked his deer tags when doing so when he unintentionally dropped his wallet down the hole in the old tree.

There was no way on God's green earth that he would ever take down that tree because his family had been hunting from it ever since they had been alive.

The majority of what I learned about deer was right there in that tree, which served as my "learning stool" while dad was teaching me.

In that old stand, I eventually harvested my first buck on my own, with Daddy sitting next to me to steady my shaking hands.

Dad proudly told me, "I've taught you everything I know; one day, we'll bring my grandson here and teach him in this tree."

I poked him in the arm and giggled because, well, I was just a child. But Daddy always made me feel good.


We observed some decent money develop over the course of about twenty seasons, but unlike the great old Oak tree, those seasons were visible on my father.

It was my turn to grasp and steady Daddy's hands as they began to shake after he had gotten too old to hunt effectively but continued to sit with me in that stand.


Then, at the end of that hunting season, he passed away, ten years before he could witness his dream grandson using that old tree to hunt.

Opening morning of my son's first deer hunt has come, and I'm sitting next to him in "Grandpa's Tree" since we both knew that's where he would want to be.


I'd witnessed this event from both sides of that branch, and each time, the exact same thing happened: we heard one approaching, I steadied his hands, and then the old buck appeared.

I shook his hand, wiped a tear from my eye, and gazed up at the skies. He handled it perfectly; his Grandpa would have been pleased.

Then we hung his deer right there from our stand, and I snapped a Polaroid picture because I was dying to show Daddy the buck that his grandson had taken.

Then, as I was seeing the image develop in my hands, I heard a light rustling and sensed a breeze blowing by that stand.


The image was then violently torn out of my hands and swiftly transported into that tree, over the ancient deer stand, by a somewhat stronger wind gust.

My kid offered to go retrieve it, but I rebuffed him and said, "Never mind."

Let's leave that one behind and take a few more later.

'He could have searched forever, but I knew it would be in Dad's wallet, safely tucked aw

ay in the hole in the old tree.