A boy's first hunt.

I made another trip back to the farm in northwestern Minnesota. This time an ex-employer turned friend and his son came up from Rochester, Minnesota. It was the 2nd weekend of the firearms deer season.

I met Mike and his son Josh in a small town about a half hour from the farm, around 9pm. They then followed me the rest of the way so as not to get lost.

We were up until well after midnight talking and playing a dice game called "farkle". Josh kicked our butts! But Mike and I kept trying to beat him, figuring that eventually the kid's lucky streak would come to an end. Ya, right...

Mike had been deer hunting for years and had taken quite a few bucks in his life. But Josh, well, this would be his first deer hunt. So Mike and I were both going to do what ever we could to make his hunt not only successful, but fun too.

The alarm clock went off at 5:20am Friday morning. We all got up and hurried to get ready to go. Since we had arrived at the farm after dark on Thursday, I walked with them out to the western 40 acres of CRP and got them up on one of the rock piles. Overlooking an area where two deer were taken the weekend before. Then, since I wasn't going to be hunting, I went back to the house and went back to bed!

I guess it was around 9:30am, or so when I woke up to the sound of them coming into the house. They had gotten pretty cold sitting out there. The temp. was in the low 20's. So they put on another layer of clothes and since they hadn't seen anything, they headed out to a box blind on the south end of the farm.

I spent the rest of the morning getting more firewood moved into the house and kind of arranging all our stuff so we could move around the house easier. Mike and Josh came back a little before noon. Again saying that they'd seen nothing.

Mike looked like he was thinking "well, that's deer hunting". But Josh had a less patient attitude going on. It was obvious that he was excited to be out there with his brand new 30-30, and that he wanted to shoot a deer. Now!

As we ate lunch all conversation centered around where the deer might be. Where they would be going, and when they would be going there. Also, where Mike and Josh should be sitting when the deer did start moving. It was easily decided that Mike and Josh would split up for the afternoon hunt. With Mike in my brother's stand, out in the middle of the big eastern field, between to small islands of trees. Josh would sit in an elevated stand in the corner of a smaller field about 500 yards west of Mike.

Like I said, Josh was excited to be deer hunting and didn't want to miss out on one minute of hunting time. So he headed out to his stand as soon as he was done with his lunch, about 12:45pm. Mike wasn't quite as quick, he got going about 1:00pm.

I cleaned up from lunch and went out to look at the farm equipment that is in a small clearing just south of the house. It's the equipment that I had used during the 2+ months that I stayed at the farm back in 1986. As I was poking around, having one flashback to that summer after another, there was a loud BANG! I knew by where the shot came from and how loud it was, that Josh had shot at something.

I went back to the house and started reading a book off the bookshelf, waiting to get some kind of news from Josh. A few minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Mike, he was with Josh and yes, Josh had shot a deer. So I jumped on the three wheeler, with a trailer attached to it, and headed out to Josh's stand. When I got there Josh had a grin on his face. Not really a super happy grin, or your normal "shit-eat'n-grin", but more of a "I've done what I came here to do" type grin. And laying on the ground about 25 yards from the stand was Josh's buck. It had dropped where it stood. No following a long blood trail for this one.

Since there was still a lot of daylight left, Mike wanted to get back out to his stand. Knowing that I really didn't have anything better to do, and that I was quite happy for Josh, Mike asked if I'd teach Josh how to gut the deer so he could get back to hunting. I was honored to do that. To be able to pass on to a first time hunter skills that are necessary to hunting. The same way that my father had passed them on to me.

So that's what we did. Josh got to gut his first buck, on the first day, of his first deer hunt. Sure, it was obvious that he really didn't enjoy the gutting process. Nobody does. But once he set his mind to the fact that he was going to have to just dig in and get bloody, he did it. I could see a very real change happen inside him. His attitude changed from that of a young teenager to one of an adult. I'm positive that Josh did some serious growing up, right there before my eyes. I know that it's something I'll never forget. My only regret is that Mike wasn't there to see it too. Although I'm also sure that both Mike and his wife will notice that he has changed. Their "little boy", isn't anymore.

The rest of Friday and all of Saturday went by without anymore shots being fired on the farm. Mike and Josh hunted together because party hunting is legal in Minnesota. I read and bummed around the house and yard. With a 3 hour visit to one of the neighbor's that I've known since I was a kid. The only thing that got my heart pumping fast was Josh's ability to continue to whip Mike and I at "farkle". I still can't figure out how he did that.

Sunday Mike and Josh hit the road at 6:00am. It's an 8 hour drive for them back to Rochester, and Mike wanted to get it over with before the roads got crowded with other deer hunters heading home. I slept in again. Then cleaned the place and closed it up for the winter.

It was hard though. To drive away from a place that I'd really rather stay. A place with so many good memories. Memories that go all the way back as far as I can remember.
And as I drove out the driveway I thought: "definitely pushed the reset button good this weekend".

An unforgettable weekend...

I went with my brother over to a farm in northwest Minnesota. The farm is where our father grew up, and is now owned by our sister and her husband. However, they now live in Australia. So my younger brother has been taking care of the house at the farm, and our sister has told us to use the farm any time we want. I hadn't been to the farm in almost 18 years, so along with the sense of being out in the woods I also had old memories popping into my mind almost every time I turned around.

The flashbacks started right after we turned into the driveway. It's just two tire tracks that run North for a half mile before turning into the woods. At the same time, I was remembering times I'd ridden down that driveway while my dad talked about the things we were there to do, and also noticing the way the woods that used to line both sides of the driveway had changed over the years. The woods on the west side of the driveway are gone. Most of that land is now in CRP, so it's tall prairie grasses left to grow wild. There is one patch (about 40 acres) that is being used for crops, but last time I was there it was still woods. So it was strange to see the cut crops instead of trees and brush.

When we made the turn into the yard I could see that the house was in much better shape than I had expected. After all, 18 years of the harsh winter weather that northern Minnesota has will have an effect on everything.

Before we even went into the house my flashbacks were happening fast and furious. Most were from when I was young, up there with my dad and brother. We'd always spend the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve at the farm. Dad had bought 2 Artic Cat Panther snowmobiles so we'd spend all day driving around on them. A lot of that time was spent on a lake in the area and the river that flows into it, although we also went into the "swamp" north of the farm. The swamp is a huge area of wilderness with no roads or homes.

Walking into the house caused a flurry of flashbacks too. But these all centered around my oldest sister and her husband. When they bought the farm from my dad, they moved up there and did a ton of work on the house. It had originally been built as a grain shed by my grandfather. Grandpa lived in that shed off and on over a few years before he died, and my dad used it as a "hunting shack" after that. But my sister and her husband made it into a house. It's a fairly small one level house, but it is a house now. Or should I say, it's a "home" now. And with all the work my brother has done, it still is a home.

I also had the real pleasure of living in that home for over 2 months back in 1986. My sister and her husband had shared their little piece of heaven with me without restrictions. They even showed me enough respect to trust me to do some of the field work. So as you can imagine, I've got zillions of really cool memories from that summer.

Ok, back to my story... The first of my brother's friends showed up around 1:00pm. The 3 of us went for a short walk to check the condition of the fields. The next day was the start of the firearms deer season in Minnesota. I wouldn't be hunting, so I went for a long walk around the property before there were a whole bunch of guys with guns out there.

My walk took me along the southern edge of the 200+ acres. Noticing the way the willows are taking back ground that my father and I had plowed under back in the early 1970's. A couple different times an eagle flew over looking for it's lunch. I enjoyed seeing the remnants of an old tree stand that my brother had built, in almost the exact same spot as one that my father had hunted from years before. I didn't see any major changes but it was the little things, things that take years to happen, that were so much fun to discover.

I worked my way up to the northern boundary of the farm. A ditch grade that I've walked so many times that I couldn't begin to count. It felt familiar, yet new, to walk along "the grade". Many of the old poppel trees that I used to use as distance markers are gone, and have long ago rotted into the ground. But there are new trees in their place.

At one point I stopped and was looking into a small grassy area south of the grade. A good sized buck came walking out of the trees and began eating the grass. I couldn't see for sure if it had 6 or 7 points on the antlers, but what I could see was that the rack was big. I'd guess that the tines must have been close to 10 inches tall. The buck worked it's way across the grassy area and back into the woods over the next 15 minutes. It was never more than 30 yards away from me, and it had looked at me a few times. It was cool to know that the buck just didn't care that I was there. It felt no danger, something that would change a half hour before sunrise the next day.

As I continued west on the grade, I was pleasantly supprised to see how many heavily used deer trails there are running north/south. I'm not talking about small trails, I'm talking about what I call "highways". These trails are at least two feet wide and so well traveled that there is a depression in the middle of it. Seeing that many highways means that the deer population in the area has got to be very high. My brother had told me that only a few years ago the wolf population was so high that there weren't very many deer around. I don't know what happened to the wolves, but I really don't care. The farm is a place where there's always been a lot of deer. I'd hate to think of it any other way.

On the far west end of the farm there is a 40 acre plot of CRP with bolder piles. So when I hit the end of the woods, on the east side of that 40 acres of CRP, I turned south and followed the woodline. As it was with the fields on the east end of the property, I was supprised at how much standing water there was. They had had a LOT of rain over the summer in that area. Which never had the chance to dry up. There were quite a few times when the water was higher than the top of my boots.

The rest of the weekend went well, with all four of the guys that were hunting getting their deer. And me, I was able to soak up the peace and solitude of the north woods. Between the gunshots that is.

Everyone left for home after sunset on Sunday. But Mother Nature gave us one last treat before we left. I had gone out to the far east field to help my brother drag back the 8 point buck he'd shot. The sun had gone down but it was still pretty light outside when my brother said"look up". There was a sound in his voice that I hadn't heard before, so I looked up. What I saw was way beyond anything that can be described adequately using any human language. Although I will try...

Keep in mind that where we were is not very far south of the Canadian border. So if you've never been that far north, you probably have no idea of what it's like to see this. You may have seen pictures in books or on TV, but that's nothing like being there when it happens.

What I saw when I looked up, looked like Heaven it's self was opening up. There were two lines of what looked like light green colored clouds rolling away from each other. But there were no real clouds anywhere in the sky. What we were looking at was the Northern Lights.

The two lines of "clouds" continued to roll and change color. Going from the light green to purple, to red, to a light blue and then back to light green again. Then the shape of the "clouds" changed. They continued to tumble and roll as they slowly morphed into an arrowhead shape pointing south. It was at about that point when we noticed that there were two ribbons beginning to form, one going east from the arrowhead and one going west. From our view point the ribbons appeared to be very thin, but also very tall. They seemed to stretch up to the heavens and then fade away.

The ribbons continued to grow in length until they went beyond the horizon. They too were changing colors. But instead of tumbling and rolling, they looked like they were blowing in the wind. Then other ribbons began to form all over the sky. Some were long, some were short. But they all seemed to radiate outward from the arrowhead that was directly above us. Eventually the arrowhead changed again, resembling something closer to a circle.

We stood out there in that field for what must have been at least twenty minutes. Straining our necks looking up and all around us at the light show. Until the lights faded almost to nothing. They slowly became only a glow on the northern horizon.

We got the deer back to the house, loaded it in the truck and then headed for my brother's place. It was about a two hour drive, but I kept my eyes on the sky. Watching for the lights, in case they came back. I wasn't the only one waiting either. We passed many, many cars and trucks along the way that were pulled off on the side of the road. Their passengers sitting along side them in lawn chairs. All looking up at the sky.

When we were about one mile north of my brother's place, the sky again began to glow red. The lights grew again toward the south, and when we stopped and got out of the truck it appeared as if there was an angel made of lights directly above us. The dancing ribbons came back again too. Although this time they were much wider than they had been earlier. Again we stood watching them, with my brother's wife and daughter, for fifteen minutes or so.

Again, the reset button had been pushed. In a major way!